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Language development is a process starting early in human life. Infants start without language, yet by 4 months of age, babies can discriminate speech sounds and engage in babbling. Some research has shown that the earliest learning begins in utero when the fetus starts to recognize the sounds and speech patterns of its mother's voice.
Usually, productive language is considered to begin with a stage of preverbal communication in which infants use gestures and vocalizations to make their intents known to others. According to a general principle of development, new forms then take over old functions, so that children learn words to express the same communicative functions which they had already expressed by preverbal means.
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Contents
- 1 Theoretical frameworks of language development
- 2 Biological preconditions
- 3 Gender Differences
- 3.1 Children versus adults
- 3.2 Lateralization effect on language
- 4 Environmental Influences
- 5 Social preconditions
- 5.1 Phonological development
- 5.2 Semantic development
- 5.3 Grammatical development
- 5.4 Pragmatics development
- 6 Different Connotation of "Development"(Economics)
- 7 See also
- 8 Reference list
- 9 Further reading
- 10 External links
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Theoretical frameworks of language development
Main article: Language acquisition
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. The method in which we develop language skills is universal[1] however, the major debate is how the rules of syntax are acquired. There are two major approaches to syntactic development, an empiricist account by which children learn all syntactic rules from the linguistic input, and a nativist approach by which some principles of syntax are innate and are transmitted through the human genome.
The nativist theory, proposed by Noam Chomsky, argues that language is a unique human accomplishment. Chomsky says that all children have what is called an LAD, an innate language acquisition device that allows children to produce consistent sentences once vocabulary is learned. His claim is based upon the view that what children hear - their linguistic input - is insufficient to explain how they come to learn language. While 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.
The empiricist theory suggests, contra Chomsky, that there is enough information in the linguistic input that children receive, and therefore there is no need to assume an innate language acquisition device (see above). Some researchers in this tradition employ a methodology involving the construction of computational models that learn aspects of language and/or that simulate the type of linguistic output produced by children, such as the statistical learning theories suggested by Saffran,[2] such as connectionist models and chunking theories.
Other researchers embrace an 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. These theories focus mainly on the caregiver's attitudes and attentiveness to their children in order to promote productive language habits.[3]
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 . This perspective has not been widely accepted at any time, but by some accounts, is experiencing a resurgence.[4] Some empiricist theory accounts today use behaviorist models.[5]
Other relevant theories about language development include Piaget's theory of cognitive development, which considers the development of language as a continuation of general cognitive development[6] and Vygotsky's social theories that attribute the development of language to an individual's social interactions and growth.[7]
Biological preconditions
Evolutionary biologists are skeptical of the claim that syntactic knowledge is transmitted in the human genome. However, many researchers claim that the ability to acquire such a complicated system is unique to the human species. Non-biologists also tend to believe that our ability to learn spoken language may have been developed through the evolutionary process and that the foundation for language may be passed down genetically. The ability to speak and understand human language requires a specific vocal apparatus as well as a nervous system with certain capabilities.
One hotly debated issue is whether the biological contribution includes capacities specific to language acquisition, often referred to as universal grammar. For fifty years, linguist Noam Chomsky has argued for the hypothesis that children have innate, language-specific abilities that facilitate and constrain language learning. In particular, he has proposed that humans are biologically prewired to learn language at a certain time and in a certain way, arguing that children are born with a Language Acquisition Device (LAD).[8] However, since he developed the Minimalist Program, his latest version of theory of syntactic structure, Chomsky has reduced the elements of universal grammar which are in his opinion to be prewired in humans to just the principle of recursion, thus voiding most of the nativist endeavor.[9]
Researchers who believe that grammar is learned rather than innate, have hypothesized that language learning results from general cognitive abilities and the interaction between learners and their human interactants. It has also recently been suggested that the relatively slow development of the prefrontal cortex in humans may be one reason that humans are able to learn language, whereas other species are not.[10][11]
Gender Differences
Children versus adults
It seems as if during the early years of language development females exhibit an advantage over males of the same age. When infants between the age of 16 to 22 months were observed interacting with their mothers, a female advantage was obvious. The females in this age range showed more spontaneous speech production than the males and this finding was not due to mothers speaking more with daughters than sons (Huttenlocher, Haight, Bryk, Seltzer, and Lyons 1991). In addition, boys between 2 and 6 years as a group did not show higher performance in language development over their girl counterparts on experimental assessments. In studies using adult populations, 18 and over, it seems that the female advantage may be task dependent. Depending on the task provided, a female advantage may or may not be present (Bornstein, Hahn and Haynes 2004).
Lateralization effect on language
It is currently believed that in regards to brain lateralization males are left lateralized, while females are bilateralized. Studies on patients with unilateral lesions have provided evidence that females are in fact more bilateralized with their verbal abilities. It seems that when a female has experienced a lesion to the left hemisphere she is better able to compensate for this damage than a male can. If a male has a lesion in the left hemisphere his verbal abilities are greatly impaired in comparison to a control male of the same age without that damage (Frith and Vargha-Khadem 2001). However, these results may also be task dependent as well as time dependent (Kansaku and Kitazawa 2001).
Environmental Influences
The environment a child develops in has influences on language development. The environment provides language input for the child to process. Speech by adults to children help provide the child with correct language usage repetitively. 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.
One component of the young child's linguistic environment is child-directed speech (also known as baby talk or motherese), which is language spoken in a higher pitch than normal with simple words and sentences. Although the importance of its role in developing language has been debated, many linguists think that it may aid in capturing the infant's attention and maintaining communication.[12] When children begin to communicate with adults, this motherese speech allows the child the ability to discern the patterns in language and to experiment with language.
Throughout research done, it is concluded that children exposed to extensive vocabulary and complex grammatical structures more quickly develop language and also have a more accurate syntax than children raised in environments without complex grammar exposed to them. With motherese, the mother talks to the child and responds back to the child, whether it be a babble the child made or a short sentence. While doing this, the adult is prompting the child to continue communicating which may help a child develop language sooner than children raised in environments where communication is not fostered. This motherese speech will also catch 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. Data shows that children raised in highly verbal families had higher language scores than those children raised in low verbal families. Continuously hearing complicated sentences throughout language development increases the child's ability to understand these sentences and then to use complicated sentences as they develop. Studies have shown that students enrolled in high language classrooms have two times the growth in complex sentences usage than students in classrooms where teachers do not frequently use complex sentences.
Adults use strategies other than child-directed speech like recasting, expanding, and labeling: Recasting is 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. For example, a child saying "cookie now" a parent may respond with "Would you like a cookie now?" Expanding is restating, in a linguistically sophisticated form, what a child has said. For example, a child may say "car move road" and the parent may respond "A car drives on the road." Labeling is identifying the names of objects[8] If a child points to an object such as a couch the mother may say "couch" in response.
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.
There are a few different theories as to why and how children develop language. The most popular—and yet heavily debated—explanation is that language is acquired through imitation. The two most accepted theories in language development are psychological and functional. 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.
There are four main components of language:
- Phonology involves the rules about the structure and sequence of speech sounds.
- Semantics consists of vocabulary and how concepts are expressed through words.
- 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.).
- 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
Each component has its own appropriate developmental periods.
Phonological development
From shortly after birth to around one year, the baby starts to make speech sounds. At around two months, the baby will engage in cooing, which mostly consists of vowel sounds. At around four months, cooing turns into babbling which is the repetitive consonant-vowel combinations. Babies understand more than they are able to say.
From 1–2 years, babies can recognize the correct pronunciation of familiar words. Babies will also use phonological strategies to simplify word pronunciation. Some strategies include repeating the first consonant-vowel in a multisyllable word ('TV'--> 'didi') or deleting unstressed syllables in a multisyllable word ('banana'-->'nana'). By 3–5 years, phonological awareness continues to improve as well as pronunciation.
By 6–10 years, children can master syllable stress patterns which helps distinguish slight differences between similar words.
Semantic development
From birth to one year, comprehension (the language we understand) develops before production (the language we use). There is about a 5 month lag in between the two. Babies have an innate preference to listen to their mother's voice. Babies can recognize familiar words and use preverbal gestures.
From 1–2 years, vocabulary grows to several hundred words. There is a vocabulary spurt between 18–24 months, which includes fast mapping. Fast mapping is the babies' ability to learn a lot of new things quickly. The majority of the babies' new vocabulary consists of object words (nouns) and action words (verbs). By 3–5 years, children usually have difficulty using words correctly. Children experience many problems such as underextensions, taking a general word and applying it specifically (for example, 'blankie') and overextensions, taking a specific word and applying it too generally (example, 'car' for 'van'). However, children coin words to fill in for words not yet learned (for example, someone is a cooker rather than a chef because a child will not know what a chef is). Children can also understand metaphors.
From 6–10 years, children can understand meanings of words based on their definitions. They also are able to appreciate the multiple meanings of words and use words precisely through metaphors and puns. Fast mapping continues.
Grammatical development
From 1–2 years, children start using telegraphic speech, which are two word combinations, for example 'wet diaper'. Brown (1973)[13] observed that 75% of children's two-word utterances could be summarised in the existence of 11 semantic relations:
Eleven important early semantic relations and examples based on Brown 1973:
- Attributive: 'big house'
- Agent-Action: 'Daddy hit'
- Action-Object: 'hit ball'
- Agent-Object: 'Daddy ball'
- Nominative: 'that ball'
- Demonstrative: 'there ball'
- Recurrence: 'more ball'
- non-existence: 'all-gone ball'
- Possessive: 'Daddy chair'
- Entity + Locative: 'book table'
- Action + Locative: 'go store'
At around 3 years, children engage in simple sentences, which are 3 word sentences. Simple sentences follow adult rules and get refined gradually. Grammatical morphemes get added as these simple sentences start to emerge. By 3–5 years, children continue to add grammatical morphemes and gradually produce complex grammatical structures. By 6–10 years, children refine the complex grammatical structures such as passive voice.
Pragmatics development
From birth to one year, babies can engage in joint attention (sharing the attention of something with someone else). Babies also can engage in turn taking activities. By 1–2 years, they can engage in conversational turn taking and topic maintenance. At ages 3–5, children can master illocutionary intent, knowing what you meant to say even though you might not have said it and turnabout, which is turning the conversation over to another person.
By age 6-10, shading occurs, which is changing the conversation topic gradually. Children are able to communicate effectively in demanding settings, such as on the telephone.
Different Connotation of "Development"(Economics)
“Development” as it is deployed in Economics is also followed by Sociolinguists. Their questions are: What is developed language and what is under/un-developed language? The popular notions of “good” standard language vis a vis dialect, patois, Pidgin, Creole, Folk-language etc., which are used in the classroom discourse also, are contested by some post-structuralists following Phillipson.[14] The cultural convention of using these terms in an epistemological discipline is approximated by the extra-linguistic socio-economic condition.[15] An E-language is developed if and only if the capital-relationship established through the investment of money-sign.
See also
- Artificial neural network
- Babbling
- Essay on the Origin of Languages
- Evolutionary linguistics
- Infantile speech
- Language acquisition
- Language acquisition device
- Language delay
- List of language acquisition researchers
- Mean length of utterance
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- Origin of language
- Phonological development
- Pragmatic mapping
- Proto-Human language
- Speech
- Speech delay
- Speech disorder
- Speech sound disorder
- Speech repetition
- Metalinguistic awareness
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Reference list
- Frith U, Vargha-Khadem F. (2001). Are there sex differences in the brain basis of
literacy related skills? Evidence from reading and spelling impairments after early unilateral brain damage. Neuropsychologia, 39, 1485-1488.
- Huttenlocher, J., Haight, W., Bryk, A., Seltzer, M., & Lyons, T. (1991). Early vocabulary
growth: Relation to language input and gender. Developmental Psychology, 27(2), 236-248.
- Kansaku, K. & Kitazawa, S. (2001). Imaging studies on sex differences in the
lateralization of language. Neuroscience Research, 41, 333-337.
- Bornstein, M., Hahn, C., & Haynes, O. (2004). Specific and general language
performance across early childhood: Stability and gender considerations. First Language, 24(3), 267-303.
- ^ Corbett Dooren, Jennifer (15 September 2004). "No Matter What the Language, Toddlers Learn it the Same Way". Wall Street Journal.
- ^ Saffran, Jenny R. (2003). "Statistical language learning: mechanisms and constraints". Current Directions in Psychological Science 12 (4): 110–114. doi:10.1111/1467-8721.01243. ISSN 0963-7214.
- ^ Poll, Gerard H. (October 2011). "Increasing the Odds: Applying Emergentist Theory in Language Intervention.". Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools 42 (4): 580–591.
- ^ Roediger, R. (2004) "What happened to Behaviorism." American Psychological Society.
- ^ Ramscar M, Yarlett D (November 2007). "Linguistic self-correction in the absence of feedback: a new approach to the logical problem of language acquisition". Cogn Sci 31 (6): 927–60. doi:10.1080/03640210701703576. PMID 21635323. http://psych.stanford.edu/~michael/papers/ramscar-and-yarlett-lwof.pdf.
- ^ Clibbens, John (October 1993). "From theory to practice in child language development". Down Syndrome Research and Practice 1 (3): 101–106. http://www.down-syndrome.org/reviews/20/reviews-20.pdf. Retrieved 2012-11-20.
- ^ Schneider, Phyllis; Watkins, Ruth (April 1996). "Applying Vygotskian Developmental Theory to Language Intervention". Language, Speech & Hearing Services in Schools 27 (2): 157–170.
- ^ a b Santrock, John W. (2007). A Topical Approach to Lifespan Development. McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social Sciences/Languages. ISBN 0-07-338264-7. OCLC 171151508.
- ^ Hauser MD, Chomsky N, Fitch WT (November 2002). "The faculty of language: what is it, who has it, and how did it evolve?". Science 298 (5598): 1569–79. doi:10.1126/science.298.5598.1569. PMID 12446899. http://www.chomsky.info/articles/20021122.pdf.
- ^ Thompson-Schill SL, Ramscar M, Chrysikou EG (2009). "Cognition without control: When a little frontal lobe goes a long way". Curr Dir Psychol Sci 18 (5): 259–263. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8721.2009.01648.x. PMC 2855545. PMID 20401341. http://psych.stanford.edu/~michael/papers/Ramscar_control.pdf.
- ^ Ramscar M, Gitcho N (July 2007). "Developmental change and the nature of learning in childhood". Trends Cogn. Sci. (Regul. Ed.) 11 (7): 274–9. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2007.05.007. PMID 17560161. http://psych.stanford.edu/~michael/papers/Ramscar_tics.pdf.
- ^ Mani, Nivedita; Plunkett, Kim (2010). "Twelve-Month-Olds Know Their Cups From Their Keps and Tups". Infancy 15 (5): 445–470. doi:10.1111/j.1532-7078.2009.00027.x. ISSN 15250008.
- ^ Brown, R. (1973). A first language: The early stages. Harvard University Press.
- ^ [Phillipson,R.1992.Linguistic Imperialism.]
- ^ Understanding Semantics of Language Development
Further reading
- Balari S, Benítez-Burraco A, Camps M, Longa VM, Lorenzo G, Uriagereka J (2011). "The archaeological record speaks: bridging anthropology and linguistics". Int J Evol Biol 2011: 382679. doi:10.4061/2011/382679. PMC 3123707. PMID 21716806. //www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3123707/.
- Berk, Laura E. (2009). "9, Language Development". Child development. Boston: Pearson Education/Allyn & Bacon. ISBN 0-205-61559-7. OCLC 637146042.
- Campbell R (March 2008). "The processing of audio-visual speech: empirical and neural bases". Philos. Trans. R. Soc. Lond., B, Biol. Sci. 363 (1493): 1001–10. doi:10.1098/rstb.2007.2155. PMC 2606792. PMID 17827105. //www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2606792/.
- Hickok G, Poeppel D (2004). "Dorsal and ventral streams: a framework for understanding aspects of the functional anatomy of language". Cognition 92 (1-2): 67–99. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2003.10.011. PMID 15037127. https://hpc.hamilton.edu/~lablab/Hickok_2004.pdf.
- Kuhl PK, Conboy BT, Coffey-Corina S, Padden D, Rivera-Gaxiola M, Nelson T (March 2008). "Phonetic learning as a pathway to language: new data and native language magnet theory expanded (NLM-e)". Philos. Trans. R. Soc. Lond., B, Biol. Sci. 363 (1493): 979–1000. doi:10.1098/rstb.2007.2154. PMC 2606791. PMID 17846016. //www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2606791/.
- Perani D, Saccuman MC, Scifo P, et al. (September 2011). "Neural language networks at birth". Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 108 (38): 16056–61. doi:10.1073/pnas.1102991108. PMC 3179044. PMID 21896765. //www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3179044/.
- Richardson FM, Price CJ (October 2009). "Structural MRI studies of language function in the undamaged brain". Brain Struct Funct 213 (6): 511–23. doi:10.1007/s00429-009-0211-y. PMC 2749930. PMID 19618210. //www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2749930/.
- Wandell BA, Rauschecker AM, Yeatman JD (January 2012). "Learning to see words". Annu Rev Psychol 63: 31–53. doi:10.1146/annurev-psych-120710-100434. PMC 3228885. PMID 21801018. //www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3228885/.
External links
- http://www3.niu.edu/acad/psych/Millis/History/2003/cogrev_skinner.htm
- http://www.asha.org/public/speech/development/Pragmatics.htm
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Developmental disorders: Dyslexia and related specific developmental disorders (F80–F83, 315)
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| General conditions |
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Speech and language impairments /
communication disorders
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- Expressive language disorder
- Landau–Kleffner syndrome
- Language disorder
- Lisp
- Mixed receptive-expressive language disorder
- Specific language impairment
- Speech disorder
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Scholastic skills/
learning disorder
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- Developmental dyslexia
- Dysgraphia (Disorder of written expression)
- Dyscalculia
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Motor function
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Developmental dyspraxia
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Other
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- Auditory processing disorder
- Scotopic sensitivity syndrome
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| Related topics |
- Dyslexia research
- Management of dyslexia/Dyslexia interventions
- Reading acquisition
- Writing system
- Spelling
- Literacy
- Irlen filters
- Learning Ally
- Neuropsychology
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| Lists |
- Languages by Writing System
- People with dyslexia
- Dyslexia in fiction
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dsrd (o, p, m, p, a, d, s), sysi/epon, spvo
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proc (eval/thrp), drug (N5A/5B/5C/6A/6B/6D)
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