LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT

Language Development

• Allows children to think in words rather than images, to ask questions, communicate their needs and wants to others and to form concepts

Views of language• Early view – Skinnerian principles of

reinforcement• Social learning view – operant conditioning and

imitation• Noam Chomsky proposed a ‘language

acquisition device’ (LAD) – an innate “program” that contain a schema for human language. The children match the language they hear against this schema and, thus, language is developed

Language acquisition

Involves: • Phonological development - learning to

produce sounds of words• Semantic development - learning to

understand the meanings of words• Acquisition of grammar - the rules through

which words can be combined into sentences in a given language

Stages of language development

1) Cooing: around 2 months; vowel like sounds2) Babbling: around 6 months, adding consonant

sounds to the vowels to make babbling sound, which at times can almost sound like real speech

Stages of Language development

3) One-word speech: just before or around 1 yr, most children begin to say actual words. Typically nouns and may seem to represent an entire phrase of meaning (holophrases). E.g. “Milk!”

4) Telegraphic speech: around a year and a half, toddlers being to string words together to form short simple sentences using nouns, verbs and adjectives. “Mummy go”

Stages of Language development

5) Whole sentences: Moving through preschool years, they learn to use grammatical terms and increase words in their sentences. By age 6 or so, nearly as fluent as an adult although the number of words they know is still limited when compared to adult vocabulary.

Critical Periods

• Suggestion of a ‘critical period’ for language development during which children find it easiest to acquire various language components.

• Ends somewhere between 4 and 12• The Case of Genie…