THE HISTORY
OF THE STUDY
OF LANGUAGE
DEVELOPMENT
:
INTRODUCTI
ON
Language development is thought to
proceed by ordinary processes of
learning in which children acquire the
forms, meanings, and uses of words and
utterances from the linguistic input.
Children often begin reproducing the
words that they are repetitively exposed
to. The method in which we develop
language skills is universal.
NATIVIST
THEORY
• Noam Chomsky- language is a unique human accomplishment,
and can be attributed to either "millions of years of evolution"
or to "principles of neural organization that may be even more
deeply grounded in physical law". Chomsky says that all
children have what is called an innate language acquisition
device (LAD).
• Chomsky's claim is based upon the view that what children
hear—their linguistic input—is insufficient to explain how they
come to learn language. He argues that linguistic input from
the environment is limited and full of errors.
• This view has dominated linguistic theory for over fifty years
and remains highly influential, as witnessed by the number of
articles in journals and books.
EMPIRICIST
THEORY
• Suggests, contra Chomsky, that there is enough information in
the linguistic input children receive and therefore, there is no
need to assume an innate language acquisition device exists
(see above). Rather than a LAD evolved specifically for
language, empiricists believe that general brain processes are
sufficient enough for language acquisition.
• CDS is used so that children are given the necessary linguistic
information needed for their language.
• Empiricism is a general approach and sometimes goes along
with the interactionist approach.
EMPIRICIST
THEORY
• Statistical language acquisition, which falls under empiricist
theory, suggests that infants acquire language by means of
pattern perception.
• Interactionist perspective, consisting of social?interactionist
theories of language development. In such approaches,
children learn language in the interactive and communicative
context, learning language forms for meaningful moves of
communication.
• An older empiricist theory, the behaviorist theory proposed by
B. F. Skinner suggested that language is learned through
operant conditioning, namely, by imitation of stimuli and by
reinforcement of correct responses. New studies use this
theory now to treat individuals diagnosed with autism
spectrum disorders.
STAGES
0-1 years of age
An infant mainly uses non-verbal communication (mostly gestures)
to communicate.
• 1-5 months old have different tones of crying.
• 6-7 months old, infants begin to respond to their own name, yell
and squeal, and distinguish emotions.
• 7 and 10 months the infant starts putting words together.
• 10-12 months- verbal communications begins. The child starts
to imitate any sounds they hear.
The non-verbal communication of infants includes the use of gaze,
head orientation and body positioning. Gestures are also widely
used as an act of communication. Nonverbal communication begins
with the comprehension of parents and how they use it effectively
STAGES
1–2 years of age
• Verbal and nonverbal communication are both used at this
stage of development.
• Adults, especially parents, are used as a point of reference for
children in terms of the sound of words and what they mean in
context of the conversation. Children learn much of their verbal
communication through repetition and observing others.
• The vocabulary of a 1–2 year old should consist of 50 words and
can be up to 500.
STAGES
2-3 years of age
• Children aged 2–3 communicate best in a turn-taking style.
• Children during this stage in their life also go through a
recognition and continuity phase. Children start to see that
shared awareness is a factor in communication along with their
development of symbolic direction of language.
• It is a crucial part of self-discovery for the child when they begin
to take ownership over their own actions in a continuous
manner.
STAGES
3-5 years of age
• Children begin to be fluent in connecting sounds, syllables, and
linking words that make sense together in one thought.
• Stuttering can develop, generally resulting in slowed-down
speech with a few letter enunciations errors (f, v, s, z).
• At the beginning of this stage toddlers tend to be missing
function words and misunderstand how to use verb tenses. Over
time they start including functional words, pronouns, and
auxiliary verbs.
• Toddlers develop the skills to listen and partially understand
what another person is saying and can develop an appropriate
response.
STAGES
5-10 years of age
• Much language development during this time period takes place
in a school setting.
• They also begin to develop metalinguistic awareness which
allows them to reflect and more clearly understand the
language they use.
• Reading is a gateway for learning new vernacular and having
confidence in complex word choices while talking with adults
• As children continue to learn communication, they realize the
difference between forms of intentions and understand that
there are numerous different ways to express the same intent,
with different meaning.
STAGES
10-18 years of age
• By the age of 10, the child's cognitive potential has matured and
they can participate fully and understand the purpose of their
conversations.
• Adolescents go through changes in social interactions and cognitive
development that influence the way they communicate. They often
use colloquial speech (slang).
• During this period, adolescents tend to communicate less with their
parents and more with their friends.
• When discussions are initiated in different channels of
communication, attitude and predispositions are key factors that
drive the individual to discuss their feelings.
GENDER
DIFFERENCEChildren VS Adults
• Language development and processing begins before birth.
• DeCasper and Spence performed a study in 1986 by having
S
mothers read aloud during the last few weeks of pregnancy.
-The results for this experiment had shown that the infants were
able to recognize what they had heard in utero, providing insight
that language development had been occurring in the last six
weeks of pregnancy.
Prelinguistic gestures- nonverbal ways that infants communicate
that also had a plan backed with the gesture.
3 Major Criteria of Prelinguistic Gesture
[Link]
[Link]
[Link] of alternative plans
WRITING
DEVELOPMEN
Kroll’s theory- one of the most significant on children's writing
development.
T
Kroll’s 4 Phases of Children’s Writing Development
[Link] for writing phase- this phase the child is
believed to grasp the technical skills needed for writing,
allowing them to create the letters needed to write the
words the children say.
[Link] development to be consolidation- children begin to
consolidate spoken and written language.
3. differentiation- children begin to learn that written
language regularly differs in structure and style from
spoken language.
[Link] integration phase- speaking and writing have
WRITING
DEVELOPMEN
Four principles on early patterns in writing development
discussed by Marie Clay in her book What Did I Write?
T
[Link] principle
[Link] principle
[Link] principle
4. inventory principle
ENVIRONMENTAL
INFLUENCES
Environmental influences on language development
are explored in the tradition of social interactionist
theory by such researchers as Jerome Bruner, Alison
Gopnik, Andrew Meltzoff, Anat Ninio, Roy Pea,
Catherine Snow, Ernest Moerk and Michael
Tomasello. Jerome Bruner who laid the foundations
of this approach in the 1970s, emphasized that adult
"scaffolding" of the child's attempts to master
linguistic communication is an important factor in the
developmental process.
ENVIRONMENTAL
INFLUENCES
Child-directed speech (also known as baby talk or
motherese)- language spoken in a higher pitch than normal
with simple words and sentences.
-concentrates on small core vocabulary, here and now topics,
exaggerated facial expressions and gestures, frequent
questioning, para-linguistic changes, and verbal rituals.
-catches the child's attention, and in situations where words
for new objects are being expressed to the child, this form of
speech may help the child recognize the speech cues and the
new information provided.
ENVIRONMENTAL
INFLUENCES
Adults strategies other than child-directed
speech
• Recasting- rephrasing something the child has said,
perhaps turning it into a question or restating the child's
immature utterance in the form of a fully grammatical
sentence.
• Expanding-s restating, in a linguistically sophisticated
form, what a child has said.
• Labeling- identifying the names of objects.. Labeling can
also be characterized as referencing.
Some language development experts have
ENVIRONMENTAL
Cultural andINFLUENCES
socioeconomic effects
While most children throughout the world develop language at
similar rates and without difficulty, cultural and socioeconomic
differences have been shown to influence development.
• Mothers in the United States use more questions, are more
information-oriented, and use more grammatically correct utterances
with their 3-month-olds.
• Mothers in Japan, on the other hand, use more physical contact with
their infants, and more emotion-oriented, nonsense, and
environmental sounds, as well as baby talk, with their infants.
ENVIRONMENTAL
INFLUENCES
Specifically, in North American culture, maternal race,
education, and socioeconomic class influence parent-
child interactions in the early linguistic environment.
• Mothers from higher social classes who are better educated also tend
to be more verbal, and have more time to spend engaging with their
infants in language.
• lower class infants may receive more language input from their
siblings and peers than from their mothers.
SOCIAL
PRECONDITIONS
• It is crucial that children are allowed to socially
interact with other people who can vocalize and
respond to questions. For language acquisition to
develop successfully, children must be in an
environment that allows them to communicate
socially in that language. Children who have learnt
sound, meaning and grammatical system of language
that can produce clear sentence may still not have the
ability to use language effectively in various social
circumstance. Social interaction is the footing stone of
language.
SOCIAL
PRECONDITIONS
Different theories as to why and how children develop
language.
• language is acquired through imitation- Lester Butler, argues that
children do not use the grammar that an adult would use.
• "children's language is highly resistant to alteration by adult
intervention",- meaning that children do not use the corrections given
to them by an adult. . R.L Trask also argues in his book Language:
The Basics that deaf children acquire, develop and learn sign
language in the same way hearing children do.
Trask's theory therefore is that children learn language by acquiring and
experimenting with grammatical patterns, the statistical language
SOCIAL
The PRECONDITIONS
two most accepted theories in
development are psychological and functional.
language
• Psychological explanations- focus on the mental processes
involved in childhood language learning.
• Functional explanations- look at the social processes involved
in learning the first language.
DIFFERENT
ACPECTS
1. Phonology involves the rules about the structure and sequence of speech sounds.
2. Semantics consists of vocabulary and how concepts are expressed through words.
3. Grammar involves two parts.
▪ The first, syntax, is the rules in which words are arranged into sentences.
▪ The second, morphology, is the use of grammatical markers
(indicating tense, active or passive voice etc.).
4. Pragmatics involves the rules for appropriate and effective communication.
Pragmatics involves three skills:
• using language for greeting, demanding etc.
• changing language for talking differently depending on who it is you are talking to;
• following rules such as turn taking, staying on topic.
DIFFERENT
ACPECTS
• Phonological Development
-A significant first milestone in phonetic development is the babbling stage (around the
age of six months).
-As the baby grows older, the babbling increases in frequency and starts to sound more
like words (around the age of twelve months).
-Although every child is an individual with different pace of mastering speech, there is a
tendency to an order of which speech sounds are mastered:
• Vowels before consonants
• Stop sounds before any other consonant sounds (for example: 'p','t','b')
• Place of articulation – labials, alveolar, velars, alveopalatals, and interdentals in that
order by the age of 4. That means that there is some order to the development of the
physical system in young children.
DIFFERENT
ACPECTS
• Early Phonetic Processes
-As the children's ability to produce sound develops, their ability to perceive the phonetic
contrast of their language develops.
Some processes that occur in early age:
• Syllable deletion- stressed syllables are emphasis that may be given to certain
syllables in a word.
• Syllable simplification- another process that happens in order to simplify
syllable structure, children delete certain sounds systematically.
• Substitution- systematic replacement of one sound by an alternative, easier one
to articulate.
• Assimilation- modification of segments of the word influenced by neighboring
sounds, due to ease of articulation.
DIFFERENT
ACPECTS
• 0-8 months range- the child is engaged in vocal play of vegetative sounds,
laughing, and cooing.
• 8-12 months range- the child engages in canonical babbling, i.e. dada as well
as variegated babbling.
• 12-24 months- babies can recognize the correct pronunciation of familiar words.
-This period is often called the holophrastic stage of development, because one word
conveys as much meaning as an entire phrase.
• 24-30 months- awareness of rhyme emerges as well as rising intonation.
• 36-60 months- phonological awareness continues to improve as well as
pronunciation.
• 6-10 years- children can master syllable stress patterns, which helps distinguish
slight differences between similar words.
DIFFERENT
Semantic Development
ACPECTS
There are three stages for learning the meaning of new words:
• Whole object assumption: A new word refers to a whole object.
• Type assumption: A new word refers to a type of thing, not just to a particular thing.
• Basic level assumption:A new word refers to objects that are alike in basic ways
There are a few types of semantic errors:
• Overextension: When a child says or hears a word, they might associate what they see or
hear as more generalized concept than the real meaning of the word.
• Under extension: It involves the use of lexical items in an overly restrictive fashion. In other
words, the child focuses on core members of a certain category.
• Verb meaning: when a pre-school child hears the verb 'fill', he understands it as the action
'pour' rather than the result, which is 'make full'.
• Dimensional terms: the first dimensional adjectives acquired are big and small because they
belong to the size category. The size category is the most general one.
DIFFERENT
ACPECTS
• 12–18 months semantic roles are expressed in one-word speech including agent, object,
location, possession, nonexistence and denial.
• 18–24 months Prevalent relations are expressed such as agent-action, agent-object, action-
location
• 30–36 months the child is able to use and understand why question and basic spatial terms
such as in, on or under.
• 36–42 months There is an understanding of basic color words and kinship terms.
• 42–48 months When and how questions are comprehended as well as basic shape words
such as circle, square and triangle.
• 48–60 months Knowledge of letter names and sounds emerges, as well as numbers.
• 3–5 years, children usually have difficulty using words correctly.
• 6–10 years, children can understand meanings of words based on their definitions.
DIFFERENT
Morphological DevelopmentACPECTS
Morphological structures development occurs over a period of several years. Before language is
acquired, children lack any use of morphological structures.
The morphological structures that children acquire during their childhood, and even up to the early
school years, are:
•determiners
•-ing inflection
•plural –s
•auxiliary
•possessive
•third person singular
•past tense
DIFFERENT
Morphological Development
ACPECTS
Factors determine the order of acquisition:
1. Morphemes that come at the end of an utterance are remembered better.
2. Children seem to remember morphemes such as –ing better because they contain their own
syllables rather than single consonant morpheme, such as plural –s.
3. Affixes with more than one meaning are more difficult to acquire, e.g., –s functions both as
plural noun and singular third.
As it comes to word formation processes such as derivation and compounding, the earliest
derivational suffixes to show up in children's speech are those they hear adults use most
frequently.
DIFFERENT
Grammatical Development
ACPECTS
• Syntactic development and morphological development
- Brown proposed a stage model that describes the various types of morphological
structures that are developed in English and the age range within which they are normally
acquired.
Stage I: From 15–30 months, children start using telegraphic speech, which are two-word
combinations. Brown (1973) observed that 75% of children's two-word utterances could be
summarized in the existence of 11 semantic relations:
- Attributive: 'Big house' - Nominative: 'That ball'
- Agent-action: 'Daddy hit' - Demonstrative: 'There ball'
- Action-object: 'Hit ball' - Recurrence: 'More ball'
- Agent-object: 'Daddy ball' - Non-existence: 'All-gone ball'
- Entity + Locative: 'book table' - Possessive: 'Daddy chair'
- Action + Locative: 'go store
DIFFERENT
ACPECTS
Stage II: At around 28–36 months, children begin to engage in the production of simple
sentences, usually 3-word sentences.
The morphological developments seen in this age range include use of present progressive
(-ing endings), the prepositions "in" and "on", and regular plurals (-s endings).
Stage III: Around 36–42 months, children continue to add morphemes and gradually
produce complex grammatical structures. The morphemes that are added at this age include
irregular past tense, possessive ('s), and use of the verb 'to be' (It is, I am, etc.)
Stage IV: Around 40–46 months children continue to add to their morphological knowledge.
This range is associated with use of articles (a or the), regular past tense (-ed endings), and
regular third person speech (He likes it).
Stage V: Around 42-52+ months children refine the complex grammatical structures and
increase their use of morphemes to convey more complex ideas. Children in this stage use
irregular third?person speech, the verb 'to be' as an auxiliary verb (She was not laughing), and in
its contraction forms (It's, She's, etc.).
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