Natural and Hallmark of Language Development

Language serves a variety of purposes for the developing child. It facilitates interpersonal communication, helps organize thinking, and aids in learning. The development of communicative competence is an important part of children's language learning.

Language…

The traditional learning view holds that language development depends upon the principle of

reinforcement.

From the point of view of other learning theorist however primarily is learned through imitation.

THE ANTECEDENTS OF LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT

Not by Word Alone: Preverbal CommunicationInfants acquire early training in the give and take of conversation through "pseudo-dialogues" with their parents, and by the time they are 1 year old, they are highly skilled at nonverbal communication.

Using protodeclaratives and protoimperatives, young children can make statements about things and get other people to do things for them.

• Early Language ComprehensionInfants' capacity for receptive language begins as early as the first month of life, as demonstrated in their categorical speech perception, -the ability to discriminate among consonant sounds as well as their ability to recognize some vowel sounds by the age of 2 months.

• Some evidence indicates that infants may be able to segment speech and to recognize words in the context of ongoing speech earlier than we had thought.

Babbling and Other Early Sounds• Precursors to productive language

include cooing, babbling, and patterned speech.

• Babbling occurs in many cultures, and the babbling of deaf babies is very similar to that of hearing infants.

• Babbling has also been shown to resemble a child's first meaningful words, a finding that suggests its importance in the development of linguistic skills.

SEMANTIC DEVELOPMENT: THE POWER OF WORDS

How Children Acquire Words• Children's acquisition of vocabulary

proceeds in bursts, the first of these occurring at about a year and a half in the naming explosion.

• Other aids to rapid learning of new words include a number of constraints that allow children to make certain narrowing judgments about a new word, such as that it refers only to an object or that it is entirely different from other words they already know.

What Kinds of Words Do Children Learn First??

• Children may learn object or naming words first, although some research has suggested that such words make up only a third of early vocabularies.

Errors in Early Word Use• A common error is that

of overextension, in which a child uses a single word to mean many different things. In underextension, a child may restrict a word to only one representative of a category.