The Development of
Language
Chapter 9
Language and Communication
How do we develop the
ability to communicate?
Module Objectives:
What are the elements of speech?
How do children develop speech?
How do children learn the meaning of
words?
Infants begin making
sounds at birth. They cry,
coo, and laugh…but in the
first year they don’t really
do much talking
It could be argued that infants DO
communicate with others, but do
not have language
What is Language?
Think about your language…maybe
you even speak more than one!
What makes a language?
This is a broad concept…language is
a system that relates sounds or
gestures to meaning.
‐ Language is expressed through speech,
writing and gesture.
Children must learn to hear
the differences in speech
sounds and how to produce
them; they must learn the
meaning of words and rules
for combining them into
sentences and they must
learn effective ways to talk
with others
The language environment
for infants is not solely
auditory. Much language
exposure comes from face-
to-face interaction with
adults
Infants use many tools to
identity words in speech.
They don’t understand the
meaning of the word yet,
but they can recognize a
word as a distinct
configuration of sounds
Parents and adults help
infants master language
sounds by talking in a
distinctive style
Think on your own…
In what distinctive way do adults talk
to infants? How can this help infants
master the language?
When talking to girls,
adults use more words like
“doggie” and “blankie”
whereas with boys, adults
use more words like “dog”
and “blanket”.
Girls hear twice as many
diminutives.
If infant-directed speech
helps infants perceive
sounds that are essential to
the development of their
language…
What about children
who cannot hear?
Deaf Children
About 1 in every 1,000 American infants is
born deaf
‐ Over 90% of deaf children have hearing
parents
‐ These children are often delayed in
language and complex make-believe
play
Mommy Daddy Baby
Deaf infants and toddlers seem to master
sign language in much the same way and
at about the same pace that hearing
children master spoken language.
‐ Deaf 10-month-olds often “babble” in signs:
they produce signs that are meaningless but
resemble the tempo and duration of real
signs
Speech Production
At 2 months, infants begin making
sounds that are language-based
‐ Starts with cooing
They begin by producing vowel-like
sounds, such as “ooooo” and “ahhhh”
At 5 to 6 months, infants begin
making speech-like sound that have
no meaning
‐ Cooing turns into babbling
“Baby Talk”
Babbling is the extended repetition
of certain single syllables, such as
“ma-ma-ma, da-da-da, ba-ba-ba”
that begins at 6-7 months of age.
Babbling is experience-expectant
learning
‐ All babies babble
‐ All babies gesture
‐ The sounds they make are similar
no matter what language their
parents speak
“Babbling”
Over the next few months, babbling
incorporates sounds from their native
language.
Even untrained listeners can distinguish
between babbling infants who have been
raised in cultures in which French, Arabic, or
Cantonese languages were spoken.
‐ Many cultures assign important meanings
to the sounds babies babble:
‐ “ma-ma-ma”, “da-da-da” and “pa-pa-pa”
are usually taken to apply to significant
people in the infant’s life
First Words
Holophrase
Infants first recognize words, then
they begin to comprehend words
At about 4 ½ months of age, infants
will listen longer to a tape repeating
their own name than to a tape of
different but similar name
At about 7-8 months of age, infants
readily learn to recognize new
words and remember them for
weeks
At 6 months – if an infant
hears either “mommy” or
“daddy”, they look toward
the appropriate person.
By their 1 birthday, infants
st
usually say their first words,
usually an extension of
babbling.
By the age of 2 most children have a
vocabulary of a few hundred words,
and by age 6 the vocabulary includes
over 10,000 words!
The rate of children’s
vocabulary development is
influenced by the amount of
talk they are exposed to
The more speech that is
addressed to a toddler, the
more rapidly the toddler will
learn new words
Example of Fast Mapping
In a preschool classroom, an experimenter
drew a child’s attention to two blocks –
asking the child to “get the celadon block
not the blue one”
From this simple contrast, the child inferred
that the name of the color of the requested
object was “celadon”
After a single exposure to this novel word,
about half the children showed some
knowledge of it a week later by correctly
picking the celadon color child from a bunch
of paint chips
Give Fast-Mapping a
try…
Answer the following questions on
you own.
1. This is a snurk. It walks on its flaxes. How many
flaxes does a snurk have?
2. Snurks have twice as many flaxes as ampolinks.
Where are the amopolinlks?
3. Snurks are covered with garslim. Garslim is like
__________?
4. Like dogs, snurks can wag their pangeers. Where
is the pangeer?
5. Do you think snurks can bispooche? Why or why
not?
These questions put you back
in toddlers shoes listening to
adults speak. Like toddlers,
you all must rely on context to
comprehend the strange
vocabulary to describe the
snurk.
In absence of adequate context,
comprehension is impossible (as
you experienced in question #5).
Early Errors in Language
One common inaccuracy is
underextension –using a word
too narrowly.
‐ Using the word “cat” to refer
only to the family cat
‐ Using the word “ball” to refer
only to a favorite toy ball
Sarah refers to the blanket
she sleeps with as
“blankie”. When Aunt Ethel
gives her a new blanket
Sarah refuses to call the
new one a “blankie” – she
restricts that word only to
her original blanket.
Overextension
The use a given word in a broader
context than is appropriate
‐ Common between 1 and 3 years of age
‐ More common than Underextension
Toddlers will apply the new word to
a group of similar experiences
‐ “Open” – for opening a door, peeling
fruit, or undoing shoelaces
Making Sentences
Most children begin to combine words into
simple sentences by 18 to 24 months of age
Children’s first sentences are two-word
combinations referred to as Telegraphic
speech
‐ Words directly relevant to meaning
Words not critical to the meaning are left out
– similar to the way telegrams were written
such as:
‐ Function words: a, the in
‐ Auxiliary words: is, was, will be
‐ Word endings: plurals, possessives, verb
tenses
These sentences are brief
and to the point, containing
only vital information
“More cookie”, “Mommy go”, “Daddy
juice”, “Sue dogs”
By about 2 ½ years of age, children
have the ability to produce more
complex sentences (four or more
words per sentence).
The longer sentences are filled with
grammatical morphemes (words or
endings of words that make sentences
more grammatical).
A 1 ½-year-old might say “kick ball”
but a 3-year-old would be more likely
to say “I am kicking the ball”
Between 3 and 6 Years of
Age
Children learn to use negation
‐ “That isn’t a butterfly”
Children learn to use embedded sentences
‐ “Jennifer thinks that Bill took the book”
Children begin to comprehend passive
voice as opposed to active voice
‐ “The ball was kicked by the girl” as opposed to
“The girl kicked the ball”
By the time most children enter
kindergarten, they use most of the
grammatical forms of their native
language with great skill
Think about a successful
conversation
What factors influence
effective
communication?
Using Language to
Communicate
For effective oral communication:
‐ People should take turns, alternating as
speaker and listener
‐ A speaker’s remarks should relate to
the topic and be understandable to the
listener
‐ A listener should play attention and let
the speaker know if his or her remarks
do not make sense
Taking Turns
Soon after 1-year-olds begin to speak,
parents encourage their children to
participate in conversational turn-taking
By age 2, spontaneous turn-taking is
common in conversations between
children and adults
By age 3, children have progressed to the
point that if a listener fails to reply
promptly, the child repeats his or her
remark in order to elicit a response
Thank you
