Language Development

Introduction

Language development refers to the process through which children acquire, or learn language.
This usually happens in a fairly consistent order, or sequence, without requiring explicit teaching
or effort from others. Typically children will learn by being surrounded by others speaking and
communicating with them socially.

This process is impacted on by a number of factors however, including both internal and external
forces. In other words, a child's genetic makeup may impact on the way they develop language
skills, just like the environment they grow up in and the people they interact with.

The difference between language and speech is often misunderstood; however, there is an
important distinction to be made. When we talk about language we are referring to "the set of
symbols, usually words or signs that are organized by convention to communicate ideas". This
means that when a child uses the word "star", for example, the child or adult listening to them
knows that they are referring to a sparkling entity seen up in the sky at night time. They know this
because the word "star" is part of a shared language.

Language can be thought of in two main categories: receptive and productive.

Receptive refers to a child's ability to understand the communication of other people, including
spoken words, gestures and written words.

Productive refers to a child's ability to produce language.

Language is comprised of a number of elements, including:

• Prosody - variations in pitch, intonation etc.

• Morphology - the formation of words
• Syntax - putting words together to make sentences
• Semantics - word meanings
• Vocabulary - the number of words a child understands, knows and uses
• Pragmatics - the social use of language

Language Acquisition Device (LAD)

Noam Chomsky, a pioneering linguist and a professor at MIT, put forth an idea called the
language acquisition device or LAD, for short. The LAD is a hypothetical tool hardwired into the
brain that helps children rapidly learn and understand language. Chomsky used it to explain just
how amazingly children are able to acquire language abilities as well as accounting for the innate
understanding of grammar and syntax all children possess. Keep in mind that the LAD is a

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theoretical concept. There isn't a section of the brain with 'language acquisition device' printed on
it and a big switch to turn on and learn a new language. Rather, the LAD is used to explain what
are most likely hundreds or thousands of underlying processes that humans have in their brains
that have evolved to make us particularly exceptional at learning and understanding language.
Chomsky developed the LAD in the 1950s, and since then, has moved on to a greater theory
called universal grammar (or UG) to account for the rapid language development in humans.

Language Acquisition Support System (LASS)

The LASS is conceptualized as essential to language learning and may interact with the language
acquisition device (LAD) of the younger child. Jerome Bruner’s idea of LASS, or Language
Acquisition Support System, a term coined in response to Chomsky’s LAD, or Language
Acquisition Device, refers to the importance of a child’s social support network, which works in
conjunction with innate mechanisms to encourage or suppress language development. Every
child has one, and particularly during the years of language explosion (roughly ages 2 to 5),
differences in the LASS significantly explain differences in language acquisition, according to
Bruner’s model.

How do children develop language?

Language acquisition usually refers to first-language acquisition, which studies infants'

acquisition of their native language.
Proponents of behaviorism argued that language may be learned through a form of operant
conditioning. In B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior (1957), he suggested that the successful use of a
sign, such as a word or lexical unit, given a certain stimulus. Skinner's behaviorist idea was
strongly attacked by Noam Chomsky. He believed that Skinner failed to account for the central
role of syntactic knowledge in language competence. Chomsky also rejected the term "learning",
which Skinner used to claim that children "learn" language through operant
conditioning. Instead, Chomsky argued for an approach to language acquisition based on a study
of syntax.
Chunking theories of language acquisition constitute a group of theories related to statistical
learning theories, in that they assume that language develops in chunks. By chunks is meant
different levels of language including the phonemes, lexemes (words), syntax.
Phonological development

Phonological development refers to forming and using speech sounds to clearly

communicate language. As more sounds of a language are acquired, language becomes clearer
and pronunciation, fluency and intonation all improve. Phonology is well developed in the
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primary years of life and children by age 5 have acquired most of the phonemes or individual
speech sounds. Phonemes are the smallest units of speech and they are written as graphemes, or
letters of the alphabet. Phonemic development emphasizes language development skills with the
ultimate goal of proficiently in reading and writing. Phonemic development begins with the
skill of phonology – the part of language that involves an individual speech sound that a letter
makes.

There are approximately 44 speech sounds in English. Speech sounds used combination with
other speech sounds produce an oral language. Phonological development refers to forming and
using speech sounds to clearly communicate language. As more sounds of a language are
acquired, language becomes clearer and pronunciation, fluency and intonation all improve.
Intonation involves pitch – how high or low a voice is when producing a sound; stress – how
low or soft a word is spoken; and juncture – the pauses or connections between words, phrases,
and sentences. Articulators must be used simultaneously to communicate effectively and
include the front and back of the tongue, teeth, lips, roof of the mouth, vocal cords and lungs.
Not only do articulators need to be manipulated to create sounds, but they must also be
connected together rapidly in order to form larger chunks of language. Over time, phonological
development acquires an ability called phonemic and phonological awareness. Phonemic
awareness refers to the ability to recognize and manipulate the smallest unit of the spoken word,
the phoneme, while phonological awareness applies to larger units of language such as
syllables. For understanding phonemic awareness take the example of the word cat. It consists
of three phonemes, corresponding to the letters c, a, t. And the phonological awareness can be
about the stress, number of syllables in the word etc.

Lexical development

Words are the building blocks of language. Word knowledge develops early in infancy and
before long, children are able to produce and comprehend many thousands of words, using their
vocabulary knowledge flexibly and creatively to communicate with others. Words are a crucial
component of comprehension, and therefore it is not surprising to find that children who struggle
with language during development often have difficulty dealing with words.

The words and word-parts children acquire at different stages. They first identify ‘words,’
recurring sequences of sounds, in the speech stream, attach some meaning to them, and, later,
analyze such words further into parts, namely stems and affixes. These are the elements they
store in memory in order to recognize them on subsequent occasions. When they coin words,
they make use of bare stems, combine certain stems with each other, and sometimes add affixes
as well. The options they choose depend on how much they need to add to coin a new word,
which familiar elements they can draw on, and how productive that option is in the language.
Children’s uses of stems and affixes in coining new words also reveal that they must be relying
on one representation in comprehension and a different representation in production. For

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comprehension, they need to store information about the properties of a word, taking into
account different occasions, different speakers, and different dialects. For production, they need
to work out which articulatory plan to follow in order to reproduce the target word. And they
take time to get their production of a word aligned with the representation they have stored for
comprehension. In fact, there is no consensus about whether lexical comprehension develops
first or lexical production develops first.

Semantic development:
Children’s semantic development is a gradual process beginning just before the child says their
first word. Following stages can be considered for a better understanding about child’s semantic
development:
1. A one year old can:
i. Name some common objects.
ii. Follow simple one-step directions.
iii. Identify some body parts.
iv. Answer basic yes/no questions.
v. Understand some locations words.
vi. Understand simple wh- questions of what, where and who
2. A two year old can:
i. Use a variety of word types (e.g., nouns, verbs, pronouns, prepositions, etc.).
ii. Understand some simple concept terms (e.g., big/little).
iii. Begin to follow simple two-step directions.
iv. Include basic emotions words in vocabulary (e.g., sad, happy, mad).
v. Understand some basic grammatical markers (e.g., -ing, plurals).
3. A three year old can:
i. Name parts of objects (e.g., wheels, door handle, etc.).
ii. Sort objects into categories (e.g., foods, animals, clothing, etc.).
iii. Identify items that are the same or different.
iv. Understand exclusionary term ‘not’ (e.g., find the hat that is not blue).
v. Use some shape, color, letter and number words.
4. A four year old can:
i. Describe the function of common objects (e.g., chair is for sitting, car is for driving).
ii. Describe differences and similarities between objects.
iii. Provide common antonyms (e.g., wet vs dry) and synonyms (e.g., fast and quick).
iv. Identify things that go together (e.g., ball and bat, fork and spoon) from a small group of
items.
v. Describe an object using 3 or more adjectives (e.g., size, shape, texture, appearance, etc.).
5. A five year old can:
i. Sort items based on different categorization qualities (e.g., items that move, come from a farm,
living Vs nonliving, etc.).

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ii. Use a variety of words based on personal interests and experiences (e.g., musical terms,
sporting words, cultural customs, etc.).
iii. Understand temporal concepts (e.g., before, after, yesterday, today, tomorrow). iv. Provide
simple definitions for some known words (e.g., genius means someone who is really smart).
v. Use past knowledge to help them understand new word meanings.
6. A six year old can:
i. Name categories and subcategories (e.g., Clothing – winter items).
ii. Describe an item with four or more terms (e.g., category, parts, description, place of origin,
etc.).
iii. Identify less obvious differences and similarities between objects (e.g. a bike is different from
a motorcycle because one has an engine and the other you pedal) iv. Understand superlatives
(e.g., big, bigger, biggest).
v. Understand more conjunctions (e.g. unless, so, while, since, etc.).
vi. Understand ordinal position (e.g., first, second, third, fourth, etc.).

Syntactic development

As a first approximation, it is common to divide the course of early syntactic development into
three periods or phases (sometimes called ‘stages’). Traditionally, these periods are characterized
by successive milestones or stages:
1. Single-word stage (around 9 to 18 months)
2. Two-word stage (around 18 to 24 months)
3. Multi-word stage (24 to 30 months)
For many of children’s one-word utterances express a whole sentence and are therefore this stage
is called the holophrastic stage. Thus “Mummy: might mean “There’s Mummy,” ball could mean
“I want the ball,” and so on. Comprehension appears to be considerably in advance of production
in the one-word stage.

Many of children’s utterances in the two-word stage show evidence of item-based learning.
Tomasello (2003) suggests that the formation of abstract constructions from word-based patterns
in this manner is the driving force behind syntactic development.
The transition to sentences containing three or more words can be rapid. It lacks function words
and inflections. The children at this stage that s/he shares the thought process with the listener.
So, s/he takes a lot for granted as s/he thinks the listener in “naturally” following him/her.
His/her language at this stage resembles the language of telegrams. This is why this stage is also
called the telegraphic stage. There are important commonalities across children in the emergence
of the grammatical morphemes that are absent during the telegraphic stage. The length and
complexity of children’s utterances increase rapidly once telegraphic speech begins.
A salient feature of children’s early multi-word utterances is the frequent absence of subjects (no
turn, helping Mommy). Syntactic development in children and the mysteries surrounding it
occupy a central place in linguistics and cognitive science and continue to baffle professionals.