Normal Language
Development
Specific pre-requisites for language
development
• Brain development
• Adequate Sensory abilities (normal hearing and vision )
• Normal speech mechanism
• Cognitive skill & Processing skills (attention, memory)
• Nuturing and Stimulating environment
• Normal motor development
Both Nature and Nuture play a vital role in normal acquisition of speech
and language skills.
Pre requisite for speech and
language development
• Behaviourist theory claims that language is a behavior that can be
learnt through imitation and reinforcement.
• B. F. Skinner in the year 1957, suggested that a child imitates the
language of parents or carers.
• Successful spoken words attempts are rewarded by an adult by
praising the child and/or giving the child what he or she has wanted.
The reinforced spoken word would develop and unreinforced
behavior is forgotten.
Nativist theory
• Noam Chomsky (1957) criticized behaviorist theory focusing on the
impoverished language input that children receive as adults donot speak
grammatically complete sentences and the child hears only a sample of
language.
• He is the proponent of Nativist theory and claimed that language acquisition
is biologically determined.
• That is they are born with neural circuits that contains linguistic information
at birth.
• He called this natural inborn faculty “Language acquisition device”.
• This language acquisition device is triggered by hearing speech and the
child's brain is able to interpret heard speech according to the underlying
principles or structures it already contains.
Cognitive theory
• Cognitive theory, proposed by Jean Piaget (1954) claims that
language develops within the context of cognitive developments.
• He argued that a child has to understand a concept before he or she
can acquire the particular language form which expresses that
concept.
• For example, the concept of size is learnt prior to the use of
comparative terms ‘bigger’ and ‘smaller’
Social interaction theory
• Lev Vygotsky in 1930s - advocated that children learn language by interacting with adults.
• Adults or parents in the child’s environment aid use Child directed speech to aid to child
in language development. When adults interact with infants, they typically use a
communication style.
• Components of child directed speech or motherese are
• short utterances
• syntactically simple but grammatically well-formed utterances
• use of more concrete nouns and verbs and fewer modifiers in utterances replacing proper nouns
with pronouns
• higher pitched voice with rising intonation patterns rather than falling patterns at the ends of the
utterances
• longer duration of spoken words with reduced rate of speech
• obvious pauses and use of more than one stressed word in a utterance.
• While interacting with toddlers or young children speak, adults simplify
their verbal input, and alter the ways they respond to children’s
utterances.
• Parents, often respond to their child’s speech by expanding or
rephrasing or correcting the child’s utterances and repeating the
message.
• Parents tend to correct child’s semantic errors initially and as the child
grow they also correct morphosyntactic and phonological errors.
• Thus parent - child interaction is crucial for child’s speech and language
acquisition.
Communication development in
prelinguistic period
In this period infants communicate through their behavior but have not started
to use language.
Their communication development - three stages
1. Perlocutionary (birth to 8months): The child has not yet developed intention
to communicate. The care giver interpret the child’s behavior, including cries
(for hunger, pain or anger), facial expression, eye gaze patterns, deictic gaze- to
look at the object of interest, moving limbs, opening mouth, and pushing the
tongue forward.
•Protoconversations: Caregiver initiates the interaction and it is followed by the
infant and caregiver engaging in greeting behaviors (mutual smile and eye
gazes). At times the caregiver talks and then pauses to allow the infant vocalize
and further continue with the caregiver taking his turn to talk and so on.
•A Proto conversation by 3 months is dyadiac and by 6 months it matures to
triadic interaction wherein the infant and caregiver look at an object and
interact.
2. Illocutionary Period (8 to 12months): In this period, infants begin to show
communicative intent through gestures by showing objects to adults,
requesting by pointing to the object.
•Infant is able to follow eye directions of an adult and locates the object and
comprehends spoken words.
•Early Intentions: Typically developing children between 8 -18months
communicate through gestures (8 to 12months), vocalization or words.
• Proto-imperatives: communication intention used to get an adult to do or not do
something. In this period, children requests for objects or actions, express rejection
or protest.
• Proto-declaratives: communication intentions for the purpose of establishing social
interaction and joint attention, children show off or point or comment on objects
3. Locutionary Period (12 to 18 months)
Uses joint attention to locate objects outside the immediate visual field.
The child uses words (true words) along with gestures or replaces
gestures. Child starts to verbally represent thoughts using Symbols
(words).
Pre linguistic vocal development
in infancy
• Reflexive Vocalizations (Birth to 2 Months): reflexive cries for hunger,
anger and pain. Other types of reflexive vocalizations include coughing,
grunting, and burping.
• Cooing (2 to 4 Months): Cooing refers to vowel-like sounds (“o”) preceded
by velar consonant-like sounds such as “g” or “k.”
• Vocal Play (4 to 6 Months): Marginal babbling - consonant and
consonant-like sounds combine with vowels to create approximated
syllables. Infant plays with sounds and explore the vocal and articulatory
systems by yelling, squealing, producing “raspberries” and lip smacking
• Canonical Babbling (6 Months and Older): consists of reduplicated and
nonreduplicated (or variegated) babbling
• Jargon Stage (10 Months and Older): Jargon refers to series of mostly
nonreduplicated (variegated) babbles overlaid with varieties of intonation
and stress patterns.
• The First-Word Period (around 1 year): The words may not match the
adult pronunciation, but closely resemble the adult target. For the first
words to be considered as true word, it needs to be used consistently in a
specific context, and it needs to have a recognizable phonetic form.
Language Development in
Childhood
Semantic Development
Lahey’s (1988) classified the first word productions in to substantive words, relational
words and social words.
• Substantive words – refers to names of objects eg. cookie, ball, and shoe
• Relational words –
• Existence, -this, that, ball, there
• Nonexistence/disappearance - all gone, no, bye-bye, away
• Recurrence - more, another, again
• Rejection - no
• Denial - no
• Attribution -big, little, hot, dirty, pretty, some
• Cessation: no, stop, all done
• Possession - mine, my
• Action - go, open, get, do, make, throw, eat, find, draw, fix, wash, kiss, bump, help
• Locative - here, there, in, up, put, take, up, down, out, fit, sit, fall, go, dump, turn, in, on, here, out,
• Social words- Hi, bye, night-night, yes
Protowords, Holophrastic words and
true words
• Prior to uttering true words, toddlers use protowords.
• Protowords are specific combinations of sound that child that
symbolically represent a specific object.
• These words are generally of one or two syllables.
• Examples of protowords reported in 12 to 18 months old toddlers
are /ha/ for “hot” and /mamam/ for “food” (Shishira, Sushma &
Sridevi, 2015).
• Holophrastic words
• Words that implies more than the meaning of the single word.
• /ba/ to indicate both come and go
• /bo/ - for all animals and to indicate not to touch them
• /dada/ for “Where is daddy?” and “I want daddy” depending on the context.
True words
• True words has a relatively stable form and is phonetically and
meaningfully relevant to the context and consistently matches to the
adult production. Owens (1996).
• Examples of true words /amma/ for “mother”, /bisi/ for “hot” in
Kannada (Shishira, Sushma & Sridevi, 2015).
•
• Children use certain strategies while learning meanings of words and follow
a pattern -Pan & Uccelli, 2008.
• Overextension and underextension of the meanings of words.
• Underextension is when child use a word to mean a particular thing and not a class of
similar things. For example, ‘doggie’ to mean only pet dog and not other dogs.
• Over extension is, when child use a word to mean more things. For example, labeling
‘ball’ while looking at moon.
• Acquiring words that occur more frequently in their environments
• A general tendency to label first objects and actions, then words that
attach attributes to objects or events (big), and, finally, words that express
temporal, spatial, conditional, and causal relationships.
• A shift from classifying words on the basis of perceptual or functional
characteristics (concrete classifications) to classifying words according to
abstract properties such as temporal–spatial features or animate–
inanimate characteristics.
• Children could learn words by fast mapping and quick incidental learning.
• According to Dollaghan (1987), children rapidly construct a representation for an
unfamiliar word on the basis of a single exposure to it.
• This initial representation might contain information on the semantic, phonological, or
syntactic characteristics of the new lexical item, as well as nonlinguistic information
related to the situation in which it was encountered.
• This first meaning may or may not be complete.
• with additional or repeated experience (of words and referents) in a context, children are
able to discern the meaning and acquire the words.
• Thus, the context in which children encounter words and their referents is central to their
word learning. The full knowledge of a word and its referents are acquired by multiple
exposures to the word in multiple contexts.
Two word combinations
• Children start to produce two-word utterance usually around 18 to 26 months of age.
• A vocabulary of at least 50 words is generally considered the minimum prerequisite to beginning
to combine two words.
• In this period children form meaning relations between 2 different words that they produce.
• This period when child uses semantic relations is classified as stage 1 in language development
by Brown (1973).
• Another significant characteristic of this stage is the absence of morphological endings on the
words used.
• That is children do not use the possessive word endings even though their intent is to indicate
possession, and do not use any endings on verbs.
• Instead, only lexical, or root, forms of words are used. A mean length of utterance at this period
is around 1.5
Semantic relations expressed by children as given by Brown (1973)
Semantic relations Example
Nomination “that ball”
Nonexistence “no ball”
Action-object “roll ball”
Action –agent “Baby cry”
Recurrence “More cookie”
Action + locative “jump{on} chair”
Entity + locative “ball (in) chair”
Possessive-possession “baby ball”
Agent-object “baby ball”
Entity-attribute “pretty ball”
Notice “hi ball”
Instrumental “cut {with} knife”
Action-indirect object “give {to}doggie”
Conjunction “coat {and}hat”
• In typically developing children, the order of comprehension of
question words was provided by James (1990) in English speaking
children.
• Question words
• “what (2.0 years) and where (2.6 years)” questions occurs early
followed by “who, whose, why, how many (at 3.0 years)” and “how
(3.6 years)” questions.
• “When” question comprehension is at about 4 and half years or later.
• Spatial terms are learnt earlier compared to temporal terms (before,
after, when).
• Spatial prepositions ‘beside’, ‘in’, ‘in front of’, ‘next to’, ‘on’, ‘over’,
‘under’ were comprehended by 3 years.
• Prepositions ‘on top’, and ‘between’ by 4 years, ‘behind’ and ‘below’ by
5 years and ‘above’ by 6 years (Bhoem, 1989).
• Deictic words are terms that have changing referents, depending on who in a
communicative dyad is speaking, on the respective locations of objects and people,
and on the temporal relationships relative to the speaker and listener (Pan &
Uccelli, 2008).
• The spatial prepositions, pronouns (I, you, me), the terms ‘here’/ ‘there’ and
‘this’/‘that’ and, deictic verbs (come, go, bring, and take) vary depending on the
location of the speaker, listener, and/or objects.
• Literature suggests that children learn first- and second-person pronouns (I, you,
me) approximately between 1 and 2 years of age.
• Third-person pronouns are learnt between approximately 2 and 3 years of age, and
their development may even continue to 5 years of age.
• When children’s MLUs approach 4.0, they use terms here, there, this, and that.
• Studies in Indian languages are scarce in this area of language development.
• Children in the age of 5 to 5.11 years, are able to do auditory discrimination of two words,
define words, build sentences and uses words to express quantity.
• In the age range of 6 to 6.11 years, children can add and subtract up to 5 and can do
phonemic awareness tasks.
• They are able to use comparative and superlative forms, retells story and answer
questions from a story narrated.
• Between 7 to 7.11 years, they are able to answer questions involving linguistic
relationships
• For example: The tree fell on the bike. Was the bike under the tree?
• listens to narration and answers questions. They are able to express synonyms and
antonyms (whether two words means the same or the opposite) Lakkanna, Venkatesh, &
Bhat (2008).
Syntax development
Browns Age MLU range Language development
stage (months)
I 12 to 26 1.0 - 2.0 First words. Simple sentence
II 27 to 30 2.0 - 2.5 Simple sentences with emergence of
grammatical morphemes
III 31-34 2.5 - 3.0 Noun phrase and auxillary verbs. Emergence
of different sentence modalities (e.g., questions,
negatives, imperatives).
IV 35 to 40 3.0-3.75 Emergence of complex sentence. Embedding of
sentence elements
V 41 to 46 3.75 –4.5 Compound sentences