HUMAN DEVELOPMENT 1 PSYCHOLOGY 3050: Language Development (Ch 9)

1. HUMAN DEVELOPMENT 1PSYCHOLOGY 3050:Language Development (Ch 9) • Dr. Jamie Drover • SN-3094, 864-8383 • e-mail – jrdrover@mun.ca • Winter Semester 2015

2. Early Language Development • There are 5 different aspects of language. • Phonology, Morphology, Syntax, Semantics, and Pragmatics. • Each develops over time.

3. 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.

4. 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 speech-like nature of babbling (p 355).

5. 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.

6. 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).

7. Morphological Development • Children learn word endings but show overregulation. • The apply rules for regular words to irregular words. • Eg. Drinked, runned, feets, mices.

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. 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.

11. 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.

12. 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.

13. 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.

14. Semantic Development • Mervis and Bertrand (1994) showed 16- to 20-month-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.

15. 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.

16. 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.

17. 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.

18. 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.

20. 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.

21. 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.

22. 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.

23. 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. • 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.

24. 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).

25. 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.

26. 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.

27. 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.

28. 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.

29. 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

30. 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.

31. 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-year-old children. • Child-directed speech, infant-directed speech.

32. 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).

33. 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).

34. 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.