Transcript Slide 1

HUMAN DEVELOPMENT 1
PSYCHOLOGY 3050:
Language Development (Ch 9)
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Dr. Jamie Drover
SN-3094, 864-8383
e-mail – [email protected]
Winter Semester 2015
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Early Language Development
• There are 5 different aspects of language.
• Phonology, Morphology, Syntax, Semantics, and
Pragmatics.
• Each develops over time.
Phonological Development
• Phonology: The sounds of language.
• Age-related changes in the tongue, mouth, and
position of the larynx allow for phonological
development.
• See Table 9.2 (p. 354)
• Cooing and laughing start at 2-4 months and increase
until one-word utterances begin.
• Babbling sounds change with age and may be based
on the language they hear.
Phonological Development
• May be a way to socially relate with family members
before they can appreciate language.
– The intonation of babbling approximates the conventions
of speech
– Take turns, match speaker’s tone of voice, pause between
syllables, use inflections.
• Holowka and Petitto (2002) investigated the speechlike nature of babbling (p 355).
Phonological Development
• If babbling is linguistic in nature, left hemispheric
specialization should be reflected by right mouth
asymmetry while babbling.
• If it is motoric, there should be equal mouth
opening.
• Babies were videotaped while babbling between the
ages of 5 and 12 months.
• Infants showed right mouth asymmetry.
– It is linguistic in nature.
Morphological Development
• Morphology: the structure of words.
• Morpheme: the smallest unit of meaning in a
language.
– Free morpheme: can stand alone.
– Bound morphemes: can not stand alone.
• There may be a common order of morpheme
development (see Table 9-3, p. 357).
Morphological Development
• Children learn word endings but show
overregulation.
• The apply rules for regular words to irregular words.
– Eg. Drinked, runned, feets, mices.
Syntactic Development
• Syntax: rules for how words are combined into
sentences.
• By understanding sentences, we can change
sentences into negatives, questions, or into the
passive form.
• We may know these rules implicitly.
• All languages have rules of syntax.
Syntactic Development
• Toddlers speak in one word utterances, but
can convey complicated meaning through
these utterances.
• Holophrases: One word sentences.
• Children move beyond two word phrases by omitting
small words.
– Telegraphic speech
• Most children use complex sentences by age
4.
Syntactic Development
Negatives
• During toddlerhood, children add “n” words to the
beginning or ending of positive sentences.
– No drink milk…Not bath Mommy…Drink milk no
• Later they attach the negative term to the verb.
• I no do it…She no go
Questions
• Children start with “wh” questions at age 3.
Syntactic Development
• They later show increasing ability to handle “wh”
questions.
Passive Sentences
• Learn about passive sentences late in the preschool
years.
• Eg. The ball was hit by John.
• By age 6 or 7, syntax is almost adultlike.
Semantic Development
• Semantics: meaning, the meaning of language and
terms.
• Includes concepts as well as words.
Vocabulary Development
• Early words usually refer to family members.
• After children start speaking, they learn words at a
rate of 8-11 per month.
• At 18 months, they show a spurt where they start to
learn 22-37 words per months, i.e. word spurt.
Semantic Development
• Most of these words are nouns.
• From 12 to 17 months, children show increases in
receptive vocabulary which probably precedes the
word spurt.
• Children may show fast mapping.
– Learn new words based on very little input.
Semantic Development
• Mervis and Bertrand (1994) showed 16- to 20month-olds sets of objects, one of which was
unfamiliar.
• They were asked to pick out items and a nonsense
word was used for the unfamiliar item.
• Children with large vocabularies learned the new
words with only a few exposures.
• The other children later went through a word spurt
and could show fast mapping.
Semantic Development
Overextensions and Underextensions
• Children make error when using language.
• Overextensions: stretching a familiar word beyond
its correct meaning.
• Overextension may prompt adults to provide
corrections.
• Underextensions: restricting the use of a term.
Pragmatics
• Knowledge of how language can be used and
adjusted to fit different circumstances.
• Children have to learn that messages need the right
quantity of information, or be at the proper level of
description.
• Children must also learn that messages should be
relevant.
• They must also learn to take turns during
conversations.
Pragmatics
• Toddlers learn to watch their listeners to make sure
they’re understood.
– They can clarify their speech if they’re not understood.
• The know to talk louder at long distances.
• Toddlers provide non-verbal and verbal cues so the
speaker knows the message is understood.
• They also understand rhetorical questions.
Communication and Egocentrism
• Young children’s speech is egocentric and presocial.
• They try to communicate socially, but their
egocentric view often prevents the message from
getting across.
• They’re often unaware that they’re not being
comprehended.
• Pre-schoolers often talk with each other, but not to
each other.
Theoretical Perspectives
• Development of syntax has been explained using
behaviorist, nativist, and social-interactionist
approaches.
• Behaviorists focused on the role of adults as models
and the provision of reinforcement.
• The behaviorist approach of language development
has been largely disregarded.
• Conditioning techniques work in the lab for language
development, but parents rarely use these
techniques at home.
Nativist Perspective
• Children are biologically prepared to learn language
and do so with special, innate learning mechanisms,
not through domain general mechanisms.
• Arose from the ideas of Noam Chomsky who
believed that language was produced by the child’s
biology.
• Language has two structures; surface structure and
deep structure.
Nativist Perspective
• Surface structure: the words used in a sentence.
What is spoken.
• Infants hear surface structure and can reproduce it
within a few years.
• Deep structure: the underlying meaning of language.
• Humans possess an innate mental organ that is
dedicated to language use (architectural innateness).
– Language Acquisition Device: imposes order on incoming
linguistic stimuli allowing us to learn language.
Nativist Perspective
• The idea that language is innate was also proposed
by Lenneberg (1967) who said language is a special
ability with a strong biological basis.
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It’s species-specific
It’s species uniform
It’s difficult to retard
It develops in a regular sequence.
There are specific structures for language.
There are language disabilities that are genetically based.
Universal Grammar and Language Development
• Aside from the LAD, infants have a primitive
knowledge about the structure or syntax of language
(representational innateness).
• Universal Grammar: the grammatical rules that
typify all languages.
• Infants have a set of principles and parameters that
guide their perception of speech.
– There is evidence for this (see Bloom, Lightbown, & Hood,
1975; p 377).
Universal Grammar and Language Development
• All language have vocabularies divided into
categories that include nouns and verbs.
• All languages have prefixes and suffixes.
• Children from around the world acquire grammatical
forms in the same way and at the same rate.
Is There a Critical Period for Language?
• Children are superior to adults in acquiring both first and
second languages.
• Thus, there seems to be a critical period or sensitive period
during which children should be exposed to a language in
order to master it.
• With age, the nervous system loses its flexibility, so that by
puberty, the organization of the brain is fixed making language
learning difficult.
• Locke (1993) points out that there are four pieces of evidence
for the critical/sensitive period.
Is There a Critical Period for Language?
• Children who are socially isolated have a tenuous
mastery of language.
• Proficiency in a foreign language is related to the age
of first exposure.
• Grammatical proficiency in sign language is related to
first exposure to sign language.
• Plasticity in response to brain injury decreases with
age.
Is There a Critical Period for Language?
• When a second language is developed early, it is
under the control of the same area of the brain
responsible for their first language.
• This is not the case for people who learn their
second language later in life.
Social-Interactionist Perspectives of Language
Development
• Tend to agree with nativism
– humans are specially prepared to speak language, there is
a universal grammar, and a critical period.
• But they see the social environment as playing a
more important role.
• Bruner (1983) believes that language is presented to
the children by people around them who select
content compatible with their abilities.
– Social-pragmatic view of language
Social-Interactionist Perspectives of Language
Development
• Content is selected that’s best for the child’s current
abilities, and presentation is executed to give them
the best possible chance for learning.
Child-Directed Speech
• Mothers speak “motherese” to their babies.
– simple, redundant, involves lots of questions, relies on
high-pitched tones, and simplified version of adult words.
• It was found to later be used by fathers and 4-yearold children.
– Child-directed speech, infant-directed speech.
Child-Directed Speech
• Adults appear to have a device in their brains that
cause them to respond to infants by automatically
altering their speech to a more understandable form.
– Language acquisition support system (LASS).
Child-Directed Speech
• Prosody: the ups and downs of the tones and
rhythms of the sounds we make.
• Infant-Directed Speech (I-D speech) involves higher
tones of voice, more high and low tones in general,
and more tones that move from low to high.
– This appears somewhat universal.
– Latvian, Comanche, Chinese, Japanese, etc.
• Infants appear to prefer being spoken to this way.
– They will selectively turn their heads towards I-D speech as
opposed to A-D (Adult-directed) speech (Cooper & Aslin,
1990; p 386).
Child-Directed Speech
• I-D speech also allows infants to discriminate
between words.
• Child-directed speech appears to play a role in the
development of language and in forming an
emotional relationship between caregiver and child.
– They use repetition and questions that aid in syntactic
development.
– I-D speech regulates infants’ emotions.
– Child directed speech is tailored to infants’ limited
cognitive abilities.