Language development in young children

As soon as children are born, they begin to learn the tools with which to understand and communicate with the world around them. Psychologists have mapped out a series of steps taken by young children as they begin to master oral communication.

 

1. 3 months – 1 year: Babbling – children make meaningless sounds and imitate the sounds, tones, and pitches made by the adults around them. While children in all cultures babble, eventually the sounds uttered will resemble the sounds found in the child’s environment
2. Around 1 year: Children can express short words (usually beginning with consonants) – ball, dada. Children at this stage have a good deal of comprehension
3. 1-3 years: Begin to speak in 2-3 word combinations. By age 2, a child’s vocabulary is around 50 words. Rapid vocabulary increase begins around 18 months. Children start to produce telegraphic sentences (sentences without articles – e.g. “Go potty,” “I pet cat”).
4. 3 years: Children begin to pluralize words and use past tense. Children often overgerneralize – for example, they add the suffix “-ed” to all past tense verbs (“I falled down,” “Mommy goed to work”).
5. 5 years: By this age, children have acquired the basic rules of languge but their vocabulary and grammatical skills continue to grow.

First Words - from http://www.getmiked.com

Theories of Language Acquisition

Nativistic Theory

Key thinker: Noam Chomsky

• We are pre-programmed to learn language in a rapid and systematic manner
• Chomsky identified several problems with the behaviourist approach that prevailed during the mid-20th Century – claimed there must be a biological basis for language for three primary reasons:

1. Children learn language rapidly and easily despite limited cognitive abilities
2. Children do not receive punishment or reinforcement during language learning nor is the spoken language they hear “proper” language, there are no formal lessons to condition children to speak
3. Generativity – infinite combinations of words are possible, and children are able to produce many statements & combinations of words they have never heard before

• Children have innate mechanisms for learning language (LAD – language Acquisition Device)
• Languages have surface structure and deep structure – transformational grammar allows us to translate surface words to reveal their deep structure and understand their meaning
• Universal LADs evolved so that children can grasp the abstract structures of language without putting heavy demands on their cognitive abilities – innate mechanisms allow children to process subject-verb-object structure

Environmental/Learning Approach

Key thinkers: Based on Bandura’s social-learning theory (instead of learning through operant conditioning, we learn through observing and imitating models and transferring understandings from similar but not identical experiences)

• Combination of cognitive and environmental factors
• Language develops through observational learning , imitation does not necessarily involve direct copying
• Contrary to what Chomsky believed, people do actually model accurate language for young children – we speak “motherese” or Infant Directed Speech (IDS). IDS is slow, precise, grammatically accurate, simple, and repetitive.
• Parents reinforce children’s speech through positive and negative feedback and instruction

Cognitive-Developmental Models

Key thinkers: Based on Piaget’s theory of cognitive developmental stages

• Language is dependent upon thought
• Young children’s language learning mirrors their knowledge about the world they live in
• Children learn language forms that they can map onto cognitive concepts
• Most language acquisition happens during late sensorimotor to early preoperational stages and corresponds to the cognitive capabilities children master at this stage – for example, children need an understanding of object permanence before they can utter things like “all gone.”
• Children analyze speech into meaning based concepts (e.g. who did what to whom)

Sociocultural Approach

Key thinker: Bruner & others

• functional basis for learning (we learn language in order to interact with the world around us)
• language is pragmatic – it is a tool that allows inherently social beings to communicate with their world
• Language Acquisition Support System (LASS) – structured opportunities for children to learn the building blocks of language – formats are common across cultures, including: sing-song, name games, reading aloud, songs with gestures, action games. Eventually adults modify the format to encourage greater contribution from the child.

Pioneers of the Social Sciences: Noam Chomsky (by Yoni)

Early Life and Background

–       Born on December 7^th 1928 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania United States

–       He was a linguist which is a sub field of psychology

–       He studied linguistics which is the study of human speech patterns

–       Father of modern linguistics

–       Jewish

–       At an early age Chomsky was interested in Hebrew literature and went to Hebrew school

–       Later on became a Hebrew teacher himself

–       Russian background

–       Introduced to linguistics by his father who was a Hebrew teacher

–       Chomsky was a pioneer in the field of psycholinguistics which beginning in the 1950s helped establish a new relationship between linguistics and psychology

Education:

–       Studied at the University of Pennsylvania where he got his bachelors, masters, and PhD degrees

–       Taught modern languages and linguistics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology

–       All this by the age of 33



Chomsky’s Work:

–       Pioneered new theories in the field of linguistics, we have used his finding since the 1960’s

–       His work was controversial because it was a major theory that shocked and tested the age-old debate of how one acquires language

–       Chomsky claimed that a normal child acquired language skills much faster than any other skill, mastering the basic rules by the age of four

–       Before the 1960’s scientists believed that language was acquired by learning, training, repetition, sentence structure, and grammatical guidelines

–       This is a behaviorist approach to language acquisition

–       Chomsky rejected this view and said that humans have an innate ability to understand their native language and do not need to be taught

–        This innate ability explains how young children are able to sound and construct words/sentences that they have never heard before

–       Chomsky said that the logical structure of language may be universal, hard-wired into our brains a set of rules for organizing our language

–       This is called transformational-generative grammar

–       Chomsky distinguished between two levels of structure in sentences

• Surface structure: the actual words and structures used in a sentence
• Deep structure: carries the sentence’s deeper meaning

–       People are able to create and interpret sentences by generating the words of surface structure from deep structure

–       This is called transformational rules

Publishing and Awards:

–       His first book, and most controversial,  Syntactic Structures opposed the traditional learning theory basis of language acquisition

–       Chomsky has published more than 70 books and 1,000 articles

–       Covering linguistics, politics, philosophy, and psychology

–       Continues to teach and write on the interface of human beings, science, and technology

–       Winner of the Kyoto Prize, a Japanese award similar to the Nobel Prize, as it recognizes outstanding works in the fields of philosophy, arts, science and technology.

–       Twice winner of the Orwell Award

–       Recipient of the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association

–       Winner of the Holtz Medal

–       Dorothy Eldridge Peacemaker Award

–       Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science

–       Received the Erich Fromm prize in Germany

–       Prestigious awards from numerous universities and institutes

Citation Using APA Format

Hutchinson, Leslie. (June 1, 2000). Avram Noam Chomsky. In Josh Laver and Neil Schlager. In Science and Its Times. Retrieved November 23, 2010, from http://ic.galegroup.com/ic/bic1/ReferenceDetailsPage/ReferenceDetailsWindow?displayGroupName=K12-Reference&prodId=BIC1&action=e&windowstate=normal&catId=&documentId=GALE|K2643413054&mode=view.

Zoltán Gendler Szabó. (n.d). Chomsky Info. In Noam Chomsky: Dictionary of Modern American Philosophers. Retrieved November 28, 2010, from http://www.chomsky.info/bios/2004—-.htm.