PSY 325 Chapter 9 Language Development PDF

Preview

Summary

chapter 9...

Description

Foundations of Language - Language is a complex system of associations between sound (or gesture) and meaning - There are five basic components that underlie all languages - 1. Phonology: knowledge of sounds used in a given language - Learning how to discriminate speech sounds - Humans are capable of generating many more sounds than any one language uses, and languages have different phonologies - 2. Morphology: understanding the ways that sounds can be combined to form words - Infants learn that sounds can be combined in meaningful ways - 3. Semantics: meaning or content of words and sentences - Growing vocabulary signals increases in semantic knowledge - 4. Syntax: knowledge of the structure of sentences - Rules by which words are to be combined to form sentences - 5. Pragmatics: understanding how words are to be combined to form sentences - Eg., speaking different when addressing your children, having a different intonation when asking a question vs. making a statement From Sounds to Symbols: Language Development in Infancy Early PReferences for Speech Sounds - Newborns naturally attend to speech - They tend to hear speech sounds over acoustically comparable nonspeech sounds - Phonological development may begin before birth - There is some research evidence to support that fetuses learn to recognize familiar voices in utero - Can perceive and discriminate sounds from all languages but their developing capacities and preferences are influenced by context - They become more attuned to sounds (and distinctions between sounds) that are more meaningful in their native language and become less able to distinguish speech sounds that are not used in their native language Prelinguistic Communication - At birth, crying is the infant’s only means of communication - Cooing: making deliberate vowel sounds - Occurs between 2 and 3 months - Babbling: repeating strings of consonant and vowel sounds - Begins around 6 months - At first, babbling is universal--all babies do it and the sounds they make are similar, no matter what language their parents speak or in what part of the world they are raised - But over time the sounds they make start to sound more and more like their native language - Language acquisition is a socially interactive process: social interaction elicits

cooing, and babies modify their babbling in response to caregiver interactions. First words - First words appear at about 1 year of age - Holophrases: one-word expressions to express complete thoughts - Typical words the infant hears often that are meaningful to him or her (eg., their name) - Receptive language (what infants can understand) exceeds productive language (what they can produce) - However, infant understand more words than they can use Learning words: Semantic Growth - Fast mapping: process of quickly acquiring and retaining a word after hearing it applied a few times - Improves with age - Naming explosion, or vocabulary spurt: period of rapid vocabulary learning between 16 and 24 months - This is not universal--infants vary in the speed of word acquisition - Underextension: applying a word more narrowly than is is usually applied so the word’s use is restricted to a single object - Overextension: applying a word to broadly Two-word utterances: emerging syntax and pragmatics - Telegraphic speech: like a telegram, child’s speech only includes a few essential words - Emerges about 21 months of age - Awareness of the communicative purpose of speech and importance of being understood emerges by 2.5 years - Competence using syntax emerges around 20-30 months Language Development over the LifeSpan Advances in Language During Early Childhood - Vocabulary - Learns a new word every 1-2 hrs, on average - At age 2, a child knows 500 words, but by age 6 they know 14,000 words - Much of this rapid acquisition is due to continued use of fast mapping - Children tend to learn best in interactive contexts--contexts that entail turn-taking, joint attention, and scaffolding - Logical Extension: when learning a word, children extend it to other objects in the same category - This is another strategy to increase vocabulary - Mutual exclusivity assumption: assume that objects have only one label or mane - Occurs around age 3 - Syntax - Children increasingly learn to combine words into sentences in increasingly sophisticated ways an dshow growth in morphology and syntax - Parent conversations and support for language learning are associated with faster and more correct language use - Overregularization errors: grammatical mistakes due to applying grammatical

rules to stringently - This is a sign of the child’s increasing grammatical sophistication - Private Speech - Private speech: self-talk (ie., talking out loud to oneself) with no apparent intent to communicate with others - Developmental functions of private speech - Piaget thought it was a sign of cognitive immaturity (called egocentric speech)--argued it was reflecting the egocentrism of preoprations (although subsequent research had not supported this idea) - Private speech is thinking--it is personal speech that guides behavior and fosters new ideas (scaffolding for themselves) - Self-regulation: ability to control one’s impulses and appropriately direct behavior - Private speech eventually declines and becomes internalized Language Development in School-Age children and Adolescents - Metalinguistic awareness: awareness of and knowledge about the nature and qualities of language - Increases in childhood and adolescence - Schools actively teach children about language - Vocabulary expansion and greater understanding of meaning of words - Vocabulary expands by 4 times by end of elementary school and by 6 times by the end of formal schooling - Learn about multiple meanings - Role of experience and culture - Experiences help acquire greater understanding of words and language - Different cultures emphasize different elements of languages, so children learn most of what their culture emphasizes - Eg., some cultures use passive voice more than others, so those children become better at using passive voice than those who don’t hear it much - Greater development of language pragmatics - Ability to understand irony Language Development During Adulthood - Adults continue to add new words to their vocabulary - The average healthy older adult does not significant losses in the ability to use language effectively - Sensory and cognitive processing may affect language comprehension and production - Hearing loss may make it difficult to hear words spoken in conversation - Deficits in accuracy and speed of word retrieval and naming Perspectives on Language Development Learning Theory and Language Development - Argues that language is learned through operant conditioning: reinforcement and punishment, and imitation - But learning theory cannot account for unique utterances or errors

-

Children come up with unique utterances and errors that they’ve never heard before, so where did they come from if all language development is simply imitation or reinforcement? Nativist Theory and Language Development - Grammar: the rules of language - All children learn grammar at an early age - Nativist theory argues that the human brain has an innate capacity to learn language - Language acquisition Device (LAD): innate facilitator of language that permits infants to quickly and efficiently analyze everyday speech and determine its rules - Universal grammar: innate storehouse of rules that apply to all human languages - This theory however, does not really explain the process of language development Interactionist Perspective on Language - Language influenced by maturation and context - Biological contributions - Brain: left hemisphere is wired for language at birth - Two areas in the left hemisphere contribute to language - Broca’s area: controls ability to use language for expression - Individuals with damage to this area are sometimes unable to generate any speech or capable of generating meaningful but ungrammatical speech (broken speech) - Wernicke’s Area: responsible for language comprehension - Individuals with damage to this area have problems with comprehension--they can sometimes produce grammatical but meaningless speech - They cannot connect what someone is telling them to do and then do it - Contextual contributions - Canonical babbling: type of babbling with well-formed syllables that sound remarkably like language - Parents, regardless of SES, ethnicity, and home environment, tune into these and treat these vocalizations in a new way - Parental responsiveness to infants’ vocalizations predicts size of infants’ vocabularies, the diversity of infants’ communications, and the timing of language milestones - Expansions: enriched versions of children’s statements - Adults often respond to children’s statements with expansions - Recast: restating children’s sentences into new grammatical forms Contextual Influences on Language Development Infant-Directed Speech - Infant-Directed speech: type of speech that uses repetition, short words and sentences, high and varied pitch, and long pauses - Preferred by infants - Makes sounds more exaggerated: helps infants hear and distinguish different sounds and enables them to map sounds to meanings

-

Cross-cultural: infant-directed speech has been documented in many languages and cultures Culture and Language Development - Parents from different cultures vary in how often they respond to their infants: - But parents response patterns that are warm, consistent, and contingent on infants’ actions are associated with positive language development in infants across cultures - Cultures differ in the use of infant-directed speech - Culture shapes they types of words infants learn Poverty and Language Development - Lower SES linked with poorer language development - Tend to know fewer words, use a smaller variety of words, produce shorter utterances, and demonstrates less development syntax than their peers from more advantage homes - One way poverty influences language is through exposure to speech: children from low SES are exposed to less speech than those from high SES - Quality of parent-child interactions - Children in High-SES homes are talked to more and the speech they hear is often more complicated and supportive of language development than in lowSES homes - Household instability and disorder - More common in low-SES homes, which could overwhelm children with too much stimulation (and thus cause withdrawal as a response) Bilingualism and learning a second language - Simultaneous Bilingualism: exposure to two languages from birth - Also known as bilingual first language learners - Infants who are exposed to two languages build distinct language systems from birth - Speed of process influenced by degree to which two languages differ, how often child hears each language, and how clearly speakers enunciate speech sounds - Course of languages development is similar for each language the child learns - Advantages of bilingualism - Ability to speak more than one language is associated with many cognitive skills: - Higher scores on memory, selective attention, analytical reasoning, concept formation, cognitive flexibility, and executive function (control attention and ignore misleading info) - More cognitively and socially flexible - Can participate in both cultures - Second Language Learning: - Immersion: foreign-language-speaking children are placed into English-Speaking classes - Requires them to learn English and course content at the same time - Dual Language Learning: English-speaking and non-English speaking students learn together in both languages and both languages are valued equally - Send message that both cultural heritages are respected and strengthens

cultural identity and self-esteem...