Chapter 8
Things to think about before reading this Chapter
- What existing evidence supports the conclusion that children acquire receptive language skills earlier than expressive language skills?
- How do researchers studying language development use cases of errors and non-errors made by children as they acquire language?
- In what ways does use of item-based patterns to explain grammatical development account more for cultural variations in early language learning?
- In what ways does communicative development incorporate nonlinguistic features of parent–child interactions to facilitate language learning?
Chapter Outline
Introduction
What Develops? Components of Language and their Developmental Course
Components of Language
A Chronological Overview of Language Development
Phonological Development
Lexical Development
Morphosyntactic Development
Communicative Development
History, Theory, and Current Controversies
Roots and Branches of the Field
Major Issues
The Biological Bases of Language Development
The Brain and Language Development
Genes and Language Development
The Critical Period Hypothesis
Social, Perceptual and Cognitive Foundations of Language Development
Social-Cognitive Skills
Perceptual Biases and Skills
Computational Skills
Memory and Attentional Processes
Environmental Support for Language Acquisition
Information in Speech
Special Properties of Child-Directed Speech
The Role of Communicative Experience in Language Development
Effects of Environmental Variation on Individual and Group Differences in Language Development
Bilingual Development
Language Separation in Simultaneous Bilinguals
The Course and Rate of Language Development in Simultaneous Bilinguals
Sequential Bilingualism in Childhood
Why Language Development Is Important
Summary and Conclusions
Suggested Readings
Bavin, E. L. & Naigles, L. (in press). The Cambridge handbook of child language, 2nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Colombo, J., McCardle, P. & Freund, L. (Eds.). (2009). Infant pathways to language: Methods, models, and research directions. New York: Psychology Press Taylor and Francis Group.
Hoff, E. (Ed.). (2012). Research methods in child language: A practical guide. Wiley-Blackwell, Publishers.
Hoff, E. (2014). Language development, Fifth Edition. Belmont, California: Wadsworth/Cengage Learning.
Glossary
Academic language: The style of language used in schooling. It differs from language used in everyday communicative interaction. The vocabulary is more varied and abstract, the grammatical structures are more complex, and the structure of discourse is different.
Child-directed speech: The speech that adults and older children address to younger children. It differs from adult-directed speech in being slower, more clearly articulated, using a smaller vocabulary, shorter utterances, and more confined to talk about the here and now. It is also referred to as motherese.
Constructivist approach: An approach to studying language development based on the view that language is constructed by the children using inborn mental equipment that operates over information provided by the environment. (see also usage-based approach)
Communicative competence: The ability to use language to convey meaning in socially appropriate ways.
Communicative pointing: Pointing for the purpose of providing information to another person.
Contingency: In conversation, it is the relation of an utterance to prior utterances.
Critical Period Hypothesis: The hypothesis that language acquisition must begin before a certain age in order to be successful.
Decontextualized language: Language that refers to topics not present in the immediate situation.
Distributional learning: A type of statistical learning in which children calculate the central tendency and variability of stimuli, such as speech sounds that vary on some acoustic dimension.
Fast mapping: The initial mapping of a newly-encountered word onto a meaning. (see the mapping problem)
FOXP2: A gene that affects the development of the neuronal structures responsible for speech and language.
Generative approach: An approach to studying language acquisition that is guided by generativist theories of grammar and that assumes that language acquisition requires innate linguistic knowledge of grammatical rules and categories.
Generative grammar: A theory of the knowledge that underlies the human ability to produce and understand language. It attributes to the speaker-hearer mental representations of abstract categories (e.g., Noun, Verb) and rules that operate over those categories to form sentences.
Intention reading: The ability to interpret the communicative purpose of others’ behaviors and words.
Interlanguage: A systematic and rule-governed system that second language learners create based on their exposure to the new language but also influenced by their first language.
Joint attention: Shared focus of at least two individuals on a single object, incorporating both attention to the object and attention to the other individual(s).
Lexicon: The mental dictionary.
Linguistic competence: The ability to produce well-formed, meaningful sentences.
Mapping problem: The problem of determining what a newly encountered word refers to among the infinite possibilities offered by the nonlinguistic context of word use. Also referred to as the indeterminacy of meaning.
Mean Length of Utterance (MLU): The mean number of either words or morphemes per utterance.
Morphology: A system of rules for combining the smallest units of meaning (i.e., morphemes) into words. Inflectional morphology consists of rules for adding grammatical meanings such as tense and number (e.g., dancing and danced). Derivational morphology consists of rules for changing the part of speech of a word (e.g., dance and dancer).
Phonological Bootstrapping Hypothesis: Hypothesis that children use phonological cues to learn syntactic structure and to identify the syntactic categories of words.
Phonological memory: The ability to remember sequences of speech sounds.
Phonological processes: Rules that map sounds in the target language to sounds in young children’s limited production repertoires. Different children may have different processes, but processes that are common to many children give young children’s speech typical features, such as pronouncing r as w.
Phonology: The sound system of a language.
Poverty of the Stimulus: The argument that the speech children hear is an inadequate database for inducing the grammar of the language.
Pragmatics: Language use.
Productivity: The property of language that allows generation of an infinite number of sentences from a finite number of sounds.
Proficiency: Degree of linguistic competence or skill, including both amount of linguistic knowledge and speed or fluency of speech.
Prosodic Bootstrapping Hypothesis: Hypothesis that children use intonation, stress and rhythm as cues to grammar.
Simultaneous bilinguals: Bilinguals who were exposed to two languages from birth. Also known as bilingual first language learners.
Social gating: The hypothesis that infants’ language acquisition mechanisms are engaged only when speech is heard in the context of social interaction.
Sociolinguistic knowledge: Knowledge of the social rules that guide language use in different social situations.
Speech register: Style of speech used in specific social situations, such as formal and informal speech.
Speech segmentation: The process of identifying individual words in the continuous steam of speech.
Statistical learning: Learning patterns of stimuli, such as sounds in speech, including patterns of co-occurrence and distributional properties (see distributional learning).
Syntax: A system of rules for building phrases out of words and for building sentences out of phrases.
Telegraphic speech: A type of production characteristic of the early stages of combinatorial speech in which content words are combined but function words are omitted.
Tuning of speech perception: The changes in sensitivity to speech sound contrasts that occurs in infancy and results in children being better at discriminating between sounds that signal different meanings in their language and worse at discriminating sounds that do not mark a meaning contrast in their language.
Universal Grammar: The set of principles and parameters that describes the structure of all languages of the world; hypothesized by some to be part of the child’s innate knowledge.
Usage-based approach: The approach to studying language development that assumes grammatical knowledge is built by children on the basis of their experience with language, in contrast to the generative approach. See also Constructivist approach.
Voicing: A feature of speech sounds that has to do with when the vocal cords begin to vibrate in production of that sound. Voiced sounds, such as /z/, are those in which the vocal cords vibrate close to the beginning of sound articulation. Voiceless sounds, such as /s/, are those in which the onset of vocal cord vibration is later.
Word extension: The range of referents to which a word applies.