Language development
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Since language development is the crucial part of the human cognitive nature, understanding language development is an important aspect to understand the base and to recall its various components of linguistics. And as to their universality, the cognitive aspect of communication in language is understood as similar among primates, non-primates, and human in some aspects, and differs in other aspects in term of:
- Predisposed communication
- Photographic utterances
- Language acquisition
- Telegraphic utterances
- Morphosyntactic components
- Pragmatic components
Language development is a process starting early in human life, when a person begins to acquire language by learning it as it is spoken and by mimicry. Children's language development moves from simple to complex[citation needed]. Infants start without language. Yet by four months of age, babies can read lips and discriminate speech sounds. The language that infants speak is called babbling.
Usually, language starts off as recall of simple words without associated meaning, but as children grow, words acquire meaning, with connections between words formed. In time, sentences start as words are joined together to create logical meaning. As a person gets older, new meanings and new associations are created and vocabulary increases as more words are learned.
Infants use their bodies, vocal cries and other preverbal vocalizations to communicate their wants, needs and dispositions. Even though most children begin to vocalize and eventually verbalize at various ages and at different rates, they learn their first language without conscious instruction from parents or caretakers. In fact research has shown that the earliest learning begins in utero when the fetus can recognize the sounds and speech patterns of its mother's voice.
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[edit] Biological preconditions
Linguists do not agree on the biological factors contributing to language development, however most do agree that the ability to acquire such a complicated system is unique to the human species. Furthermore, many 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.
Some evidence that language is biological includes:
- there are proven areas of the brain that are responsible for language production and comprehension (Broca's Area and Wernicke's Area)
- during brain lateralization, there seems to be a sensitive period for speech production
- Linguist Noam Chomsky (1957)proposed that humans are biologically prewired to learn language at a certain time and in a certain way. He argued that children are born with a Language Acquistion Device (LAD) [1]
[edit] Environmental Influences
"The behavioral view of language development is no longer considered a viable explanation of how children acquire language, yet a great deal of research describes ways in which a children's environmental experiences influence their language skills. Michael Tomasello (2003, 2006; Tomasello & Carpenter, 2007) stresses that young children are intensely interested in their social world and that early in their development they can understand that intentions of other people."[1]
"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. Athough the importance of its role in developing language has been debated many linguists argue it to have the important function of capturing the infant's attention and maintaining communication. 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. Expanding is the restating, in a linguistically sophisticated form, what a child has said. Labeling is identifying the names of objects[1]
[edit] 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.
[edit] 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.
[edit] 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.
[edit] Grammatical development
From 1–2 years, children start using telegraphic speech, which are two word combinations, for example 'wet diaper'. Brown (1973) 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.
[edit] 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.
[edit] Theoretical frameworks of language development
There are four major theories of language development.
The behaviorist theory, proposed by B. F. Skinner (father of behaviorism) says that language is learned through operant conditioning (reinforcement and imitation). This perspective sides with the nurture side of the nature-nurture debate. This perspective is not widely accepted today because there are many criticisms. These criticisms include that the perspective is too specific, encourages incorrect phrases and is not entirely possible. In order for this to be possible, parents would have to engage in intensive tutoring in order for language to be taught properly.
The nativist theory, proposed by Noam Chomsky, says 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. He also says that grammar is universal. This theory, while there is much evidence supporting it (language areas in the brain, sensitive period for language development, children's ability to invent new language systems) is not believed by all researchers.
The empiricist theory argues 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). This approach is characterized by the construction of computational models that learn aspects of language and/or that simulate the type of linguistic output produced by children. The most influential models within this approach are statistical learning theories such as connectionist models and chunking theories such as CHREST.
The last theory, the interactionist perspective, consists of two components. This perspective is a combination of both the nativist and behaviorist theories. The first part, the information-processing theories, tests through the connectionist model, using statistics. From these theories, we see that the brain is excellent at detecting patterns.
The second part of the interactionist perspective, is the social-interactionist theories. These theories suggest that there is a native desire to understand others as well as being understood by others.
[edit] Theoretical stages of morphemes in language development
Much of the research on language acquisition borrows heavily from the dominant paradigm in first-language of English acquisition and focusing on the circumstances of how such linguistic structures are acquired. Many studies, for example, have examined the acquisition of morphological features of language that are in place in native speakers. Among these studies, one of the notable study has been conducted is by Brown in his longitudinal study of Adam, Eve, and Sarah, namely--the “Brown’s fourteen morphemes” in their acquisition orders consisting of the stages on present progressive, prepositions, plural, irregular past tense, possessive, non-contractible copula, article, regular past tense, third-person present singular regular, third-person singular irregular, non-contractible auxiliary, contractible copula, and contractible auxiliary.
This theoretical and empirical work in language acquisition serves as the basis for understanding what it means by acquisition of morphology in the patterns of universal grammar. And while long-standing theories describe acquisition of language through an innate language acquisition device, an alternative approach that is gaining ground is the adaptation of linguistic structures to the human brain, rather than vice versa.[2] On this account, language universals may reflect non-linguistic cognitive constraints on learning and processing of sequential structure, rather than constraints prescribed by an innate universal grammar. However, some researchers have defined this narrowly around the parameter of grammatical rules, others around the abilities in accomplishing cognitive tasks, and still others around the social and communicative aspects of language.
According to their parameters in similarities between syntax and morphology in their acquisition, in syntax, it is understood that the mechanisms of UG and their role in language acquisition as consisting of a highly structured and restrictive system of principles with certain open parameters by their cognition to be fixed.[3]
As these parameters are fixed, a grammar is determined, what is in turn termed SVO or SOV or VSO. In this theory, the role of principles i.e., the linguistically invariant properties of syntax common to all languages is to facilitate acquisition by constraining learners' grammars by reducing the learner's hypothesis from an infinite number of logical possibilities to the set of possible human languages—the UG.
Thus, it provides an important context for investigating the acquisition of general cognitive and specifically linguistic processes of morphology based on its parameters, for example, SVO language. This perspective however differs from its comparison to which has provided by the study of first language (L1) acquisition in children and in adult (L2) learners. As adult learners bring capacities to bear the language learning process that are both similar to and different from the capacities of children, the role of parameters which express the highly restricted respects in which languages can differ morphosyntactically is to account for cross-linguistic syntactic variation. In principles, it admits of a limited number of ways in which they can be instantiated, namely those allowed by the parameters specifying possible variation in the order of morphological acquisition.
In addition to the acquisition pattern in “Brown’s fourteen morphemes”, in general and in all languages, it is agreed that the state of knowledge of morphological awareness and learning begin by overgeneralization of various lexical entries. In terms of the causative factor, it is also understood as a universal pattern in children’s innateness, and the variations as the seriate aspects of linguistics in acquiring morphology. In this approach, children’s knowledge of tense morphology were examined using elicitation and grammaticality judgment tasks to predict variability in the morphophonological expression and knowledge of tense in developing grammars. It has long been noted that the acquisition of tense-marking morphology is a vulnerable domain for language learners across all languages in acquisition contexts, For example, children in English language typically enrol in three gradual stages to produce tense morphemes accurately; applying morphemes correctly but without knowing--the stage 1, applying analogy--the stage 2, and understanding the morphological differences--the stage 3.
And some other factors also have shown similarities in morphological acquisition across languages, like linguistic markedness of syntactic operations not involving forms with tense features like optional infinitives in one aspect, and linguistic markedness of syntactic operations involving forms with tense features like negation, modalities, passives, and coordinations on the other aspect.
[edit] See also
- Evolutionary linguistics
- Language acquisition
- Language acquisition device
- Babbling
- Mean length of utterance
- Artificial neural network
- Language delay
- Origin of language
- Speech
- Infantile speech
- Speech sound disorder
- Speech delay
- Speech disorder
- Phonological development
- List of language acquisition researchers
- Proto-Human language
- Essay on the Origin of Languages
[edit] Reference list
- ^ a b c Santrock, J (2008). A topical Approach to Life-Span Development. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Higher Education.
- ^ Gray, W.D. & Schunn, C.D. (eds) 2002, Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, NJ.
- ^ Slobin, D.I. 1986, The Crosslinguistic Study of Language Acquisition, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, NJ.
- Berk, L. E. (2006). Chapter 9 - Language Development. In Child Development (8th ed., pp. 356–395). Pearson. (Original work published 1989)
- Santrock, J (2008). A topical Approach to Life-Span Development. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Higher Education.
