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Child Development - A Thematic Approach
, Fifth Edition
Danuta Bukatko - College of the Holy Cross
Marvin W. Daehler - University of Massachusetts, Amherst
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| | Chapter Outline
Chapter 7:
Language
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The course of language acquisition
Language is multifaceted, consisting of complex verbal and nonverbal skills
that are learned in a relatively short period of time. The newborn infant
must first learn the phonology of his or her language--the rules for combining the fundamental sound units of the language. The
child also must learn semantics, or the meanings of words. To learn to combine words correctly or grammatically,
the child must understand the principles of syntax. The child's language also becomes more mature when the child learns pragmatics, the social rules for using language effectively and appropriately.-
Phonology
The first task of the newborn infant is to establish phonological skills in order
to receive and produce messages. Newborns show a distinct preference for
human voices over other sounds. Very young infants can discriminate among
different phonemes categorically and are sensitive to the prosody of the language, or its patterns of intonation, stress, and rhythm that communicate
meaning. From an early age, infants can detect differences in language. By
six to eight weeks, the child begins to produce cooing sounds, vowel-like utterances occasionally accompanied by consonants. At about three
to six months of age, the child produces consonant-vowel combinations (babbling), and shortly thereafter vocalizations feature canonical babbling, which sounds almost like the child is trying to say words. From a phonological perspective, the infant's ability to make different sounds is somewhat restricted. The discovery of cultural differences in babbling and differences in the
preverbal utterances of deaf and normal-hearing infants suggests that prelinguistic utterances are influenced by environmental
as well as biological factors. Gestures used to call an adult's attention to an object (protodeclarative communication) or to get an adult to perform an action (protoimperative communication) develop along with verbal skills in infancy, but eventually drop out by
the second year.
Atypical Development: Language-Impaired Children
Many children display speech and language problems, including dyslexia, or
difficulty in reading. One reason for dyslexia may be difficulty in discriminating phonemes.
When a child is given training to help identify auditory sounds, language
development has been found to improve substantially. |
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Semantics
Children begin to speak one word at a time at twelve to twenty months. Children's first words are mostly nominals, labels for objects, people, or events. At about eighteen months, most children
show a vocabulary spurt. Many of the child's first words are bound to a specific context; that is, the child applies
a word to a narrower class of objects than the word signifies. This type
of error is called underextension. Another type of error, called overextension, occurs when the child applies a word to a broader category than the word
signifies. Children's comprehension of language, or receptive language, far exceeds their productive language. In general, children show common trends in the way they acquire language. But children vary in terms of the age of the first word uttered,
whether or not a vocabulary spurt occurs, and whether their one-word speech
displays a referential style (mostly object words) or an expressive style (words that direct the behaviors of others). Cultural differences can be found in how children speak even
during the one-word stage.
Children derive the meanings of words in a variety of ways. The social pragmatic approach focuses on children's ability to interpret cues about word meanings provided in parent-child interactions. For instance, parents help children
by labeling objects in their environment and providing information by affording
linguistic contrast in the form of corrections. Infants have the ability
to use subtle cues to determine how labels and objects match up. The child also plays an active
role by using context to provide clues to the meaning of an unfamiliar spoken
word (a process called fast-mapping) and is predisposed to the mutual exclusivity bias, the tendency to treat unfamiliar words as labels for new objects in the child's immediate environment rather than as synonyms for words she or he already
knows. Children also generally assume that a word applies to the whole object
and particularly the shape of the object. -
Grammar
Two-word utterances begin at about twenty-four months of age, and shortly
thereafter the child combines more than two words to express relations among
objects and events. The child's grammar during the two-word stage has been described as telegraphic, consisting of combinations of nouns, verbs, and adjectives without modifiers.
The two-word utterances are highly ordered ("more milk, more cookie"), often containing a pivot word (more) that is used as an anchor for open words (milk, cookie). The order also often reflects knowledge of semantic relationships, although
parents provide little deliberate grammar instruction. Later, children begin
to fill in utterances with adjectives, pronouns, negatives, and prepositions and include inflections to signal plurals and verb tense. During this stage, children exhibit predictable
changes in the use of negatives and in forming questions. Sometimes grammatical
rules are overregularized, that is, extended to words that require exceptions to the rules. -
Pragmatics
Already as preschoolers, children have some understanding of the pragmatics
of language. Parents play an important role in teaching their children pragmatics,
the proper use of speech in a social context, by giving direct instructions ("Say thank you") and acting as models of politeness. Studies using referential communication tasks show that young children are limited in their ability to understand
the requirements of a listener when describing an object the listener can not see. However,
preschool children do adjust their speech to a simpler form when speaking
to a younger child. -
Metalinguistic awareness
Metalinguistic awareness, children's ability to understand and be aware of their own competency with grammatical
rules, does not occur until the early school years. Nevertheless, some early
indicators of metalinguistic awareness exist. Children as young as two years can identify grammatically incorrect passages, although they cannot correct
them. Children's appreciation of humor based on semantic ambiguities and their understanding
of metaphors further demonstrate their metalinguistic awareness. These developing abilities are most likely tied to advances in cognition.
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Explaining language acquisition
Several hypotheses have been proposed to explain the pattern of language
acquisition seen in children.-
The role of biology
The biological approach emphasizes the maturation of brain structures and
the role of lateralization in language development. Neuropsychological studies
reveal that several portions of the temporal, prefrontal and visual areas
of the brain are involved in language processing. Expressive aphasia, the inability to speak fluently, occurs when Broca's area is damaged; receptive aphasia, the inability to understand spoken speech, results from damage to Wernicke's area. Similar impairments are seen in children, but children are more likely to recover language. Brain wave activity
becomes more focused in the left hemisphere once children start speaking.
The predictable emergence of language milestones seen in all children (even
deaf children not exposed to a formal language) and the common features all languages share (such as
phonology, semantics, and syntax) suggest that language may result from an
innate biological mechanism.
There has been considerable debate concerning whether humans display a critical period for the acquisition of language. Some evidence for critical periods
exists, such as a decreasing ability to learn a second language with increasing
age. Neuropsychological studies suggest that separate regions of Broca's area are activated when a second language is acquired in adulthood, but not when the second language
is acquired early in childhood. Some investigators point to problems in interpreting
the research used to support the critical-period hypothesis. For instance,
many adults do become proficient in a second language. -
Learning and cognition
Learning theory explains language acquisition by selective reinforcement
of the child's vocalization and through imitation of a competent speaker of the language. -
The linguistic perspective
In his criticism of the learning theory of language acquisition, Noam Chomsky
proposed that language is generative and that the child is biologically prepared
to extract grammatical rules from language. Evidence in support of the linguistic
perspective includes the very rapid acquisition of words and syntactic rules
during the first five years, the application of those rules to new words
never seen before, and the overuse of such rules, as in overregularizations. The semantic bootstrapping hypothesis proposes that children derive information about syntax from the meanings
of words. The drive to find structure in language is also seen in the development
of Creole languages. Connectionist approaches describe language development in terms of networks of associations
that are organized in interconnected layers, much like the associations that
form between neurons. -
The social interaction perspective
The social interaction perspective views language as a social activity. Parents
often speak to their children in a simplified version of spoken language called parentese. Infants appear to be especially responsive to such speech. In this form of communication, questions are often used to encourage turn taking, alternating vocalization by parent and child, and as turnabout to explicitly request a response from the child. In addition, parents often
follow the child's verbalizations with a recast, repeating what the child has said but correcting any errors. Parentese
may assist the child's acquisition of word meaning, facilitate the acquisition of syntax, and
provide lessons in pragmatics such as conversational turn taking. Cross-cultural
studies, however, indicate that motherese is not a universal phenomenon. Children
may also develop language by learning to adjust to conversations with their
fathers, siblings, peers, and other members of their society.
Research Applied to Parenting: Reading to Children
Speech tends to be particularly diverse, expressive, and socially interactive
when mothers read to their children. A program of dialogic reading presents
advice to parents on how to read more effectively to young children. The program suggests that parents ask questions that stimulate the child
to speak, follow up with further questions, recast the child's utterances, model answers, and provide praise and social support in a gamelike
atmosphere. |
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The functions of language
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Language and cognition
Language has a powerful influence on cognitive accomplishments. Children
who use verbal rehearsal strategies are more likely to recall information following a time delay than children who
do not. Children are more successful in categorizing groups of objects if
they are provided with the name of one category member from each group. The
influence of language on thought is also illustrated by the better performances of bilingual children on
problem-solving tasks compared to monolingual children.
Controversy: How Should Bilingual Education Programs Be Structured?
More than 10 percent of school-age children in the United States are estimated to have limited English proficiency.
Controversy exists on whether such children should be initially educated
in their primary language or immersed in English much the way a child learns
a first language. Many programs offer some compromise to these two approaches, such as providing some
courses in English and others in the child's first language. Evaluations of bilingual programs have yielded mixed success,
often because of methodological difficulties. For instance, many language minority children come from backgrounds of poverty, which
may contribute to difficulties with school. Questions are raised about how
our knowledge of language learning bears on bilingual education. |
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Language and self-regulation
Lev Vygotsky saw a child's private speech as guiding the child's observable behavior and her or his inner speech as directing the nature of the child's thoughts. Research by American psychologists has provided mixed support for the ideas of their Russian colleagues. -
Language and cultural socialization
Language also plays an important role in the socialization of children by
helping them learn their culture's values and beliefs. For instance, in many languages the words used to speak to individuals
with greater authority differ from those used to speak to individuals of
equal status.
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