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 Appreciate precursors to language development

 Define different components of language
development
 Describe aspects of communication that develop
within each component of language
 Identify common linguistic inaccuracies in young
children

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 Cognitive
Visual and
development (e.g.,
auditory working memory,
perception semantic memory,
understanding of
relational concepts)

Physical Language
development development
and and use
functioning

Interactions with
family and other
social contexts
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 Piaget: language as an example of symbolic

representation

 Vygotsky: “private speech” supports skills

development through “talk to self” during
challenging problem-solving situations

 Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (1929): language

shapes ideas and choices of interpretation of
people’s experiences
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  “Symbolic representation” – the capacity to use
mental categories as substitutes for physical
objects and events – develops early in 2nd year
of life
 8-10 month-old infants use gestures to
communicate e.g., hand-waving for “goodbye”,
shaking head for “no”, and pointing to gain
attention
 Protodeclarative communication and protoimperative
communication

 Two subtypes of declaratives

▪ Declaratives as expressions: seeking to share an
attitude
▪ Declaratives as informatives: seeking to provide
information
 Imperatives as a continuum: ordering (forcing) –
suggesting (influencing choice)

 Infant pointing reflects three classes of social

intentions and motives: wanting others to (i) feel
things, (ii) know things, (iii) do things
Optional recommended reading: Tomasello, M., Carpenter, M., & Liszkowski, U. (2007).
A new look at infant pointing. Child Development, 78, 705-722. 6
 Comprehension (receptive language):
understanding communicative acts of others
 Production (expressive language): speaking
or signing to communicate to others

 Which of these develops earlier?

1. Production of sound:

Coos and grunts – 2 months;

babbling – ~4-6 months – strings of
vowels and consonants e.g., “babba”,
“gugugu”.

Emerges in both deaf and hearing infants

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2. Listening to others’ speech:
Infants are capable of distinguishing a wide
range of subtle contrasts in speech sounds
(phonemes). They can perceive the contrasts
of all human languages – suggests innate
perceptual mechanisms
 Approximately 200 phonemes used around the
world (English uses 45 phonemes)
▪ http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/course/chapter1/chapter1.html

▪ E.g., /θɪŋk/  think

 Children’s task: distinguish, recognise, and
reproduce phonemes 9

 Telling apart categories of different phonemes

 Identifying sounds from the same phoneme
category - E.g., different forms of “ba” vs. “pa”
 evident in 1-month-olds
▪ Examples of techniques used: (i) Infant-controlled high-amplitude
sucking method; (ii) head turn method
 Exposure to local language environment 
sensitivity to “irrelevant” phonemic contrasts in
non-native language declines by about 12 months

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 Werker and Tees (1984)
• Decline of infants’
ability to
discriminate
contrasts in Hindi
and Salish occurs
within the first year
of life

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1. consistent recognition and use of the word in the

same context
2. ability to conduct a phonetic analysis which
dissects complete words into component
phonemes (sounds) they are made up of
3. semantic ability which enables children to
recognise that all objects could have names
4. ability to analyse sentences or phrases to extract
words

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 the meanings of words or combinations of
words
 the child must learn to map combinations of
sounds to the things to which words refer E.g.,
objects, actions, description of relationships

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 the rules which dictate how words can be

combined (syntax)
 children are able to detect the regularity
of syntax within their language – E.g.
 English: I have a black cat.
 Japanese: Watashi wa kuro no neko ga
arimasu. [I – black cat – have.]
 French: J’ai un chat noir. [I have – a cat –
black.]
 children can create meaningful utterances
with little direct instruction
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  the rules for using language effectively and
appropriately according to social
conventions
 children learn the important sociocultural
dimension of pragmatics through
language acquisition

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 Involves attention to language and language

use
 Language as a medium and an object (Cazden,
1976)
 Reflected in the use of “language-focussed”
terms – e.g. say, ask, talk, read, write
 Different from pragmatic development
 Concerned with socialising one’s appropriate
language use
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 First Words
 Infants understand words before they can speak them
▪ Between 5-12 months of age, infants indicate first
understanding of words
▪ First words usually spoken between 10-15 months of age

 Common first words:

 Names of important people
 Familiar animals
 Vehicles and toys
 Food and body parts
 Clothes and household terms
 Greetings

 <18 months: 1-3 new words per month

 Between 18 to 24 months: up to 20 new words

per week

 Understanding 50 words: ~ 13 months

 Speaking 50 words: ~ 18 months; BUT…
speaking 200 words: ~ 2 years

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  the context in which the child hears words
spoken provides the key to their meanings 
understand a new word’s meaning after hearing
it only once
 E.g., labels for novel objects (“vuk”)

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 Holophrase (by ~ 15 months): one-word

utterances E.g., “Mama” = ???

 Telegraphic speech (around 2 years): children’s

two-word utterances which focus only on high-
content words E.g., “more food”

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 Young children engage in collective monologues
with their peers (Piaget, 1926)
 Longitudinal study from 21 to 36 months of age
(Bloom, Ricissano, & Hood, 1976): Proportion of
same-topic utterances increased from 20% to 40%
when conversing with adults

 Marks beginning of social speech

 prevalent from ~3 years; directed toward another
person
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 Turnabout (around 2 years onwards): speaker

comments and requests further response from
partner [E.g., What is Fluffy like?]
 Shading (around 5 years onwards): speaker
gradually modifies focus of conversation […
colours … yellow flower…]

 Understanding of intentions (around 3 years

onwards): being aware of the true meaning of an
utterance
 E.g., “How many times have I told you ___?”
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  comprehension monitoring
 communication that requires the speaker to
produce clear verbal messages and to evaluate
the effectiveness of others’ messages E.g.,
telephone conversations
 Children as young as 4 have some awareness of
referential communication
 Effectiveness of speech adjustment (to the
ability and/or knowledge of conversation
partner) improves with age – E.g., 1st vs. 5th
graders

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 Children’s self-directed speech:

 Piaget: “egocentric speech”
 Vygotsky: foundation for all higher cognitive processes

• Used for self-guidance, often following scaffolding

 Increases during challenging tasks
 Useful for reflecting on challenging situations to aide
problem solving
 Peaks around 4-7 years
 Becomes silent, inner speech with competence
 Language as a source of support for self-regulation
development?
  What changes? What is
stable? How is this
development related to
classroom behaviour?
 More partially internalised
private speech: better
social skills & fewer
externalising problems
 Task-irrelevant private
speech: poorer social skills
and goal-directed
classroom behaviour

Recommended reading: Winsler, A., de León, J. R., Wallace, B. A., Carlton, M. P., & Willson-Quayle, A. (2003). Private
speech in preschool children: Developmental stability and change, across-task consistency, and relations with
classroom behaviour. Journal of Child Language, 30, 583-608. DOI: 10.1017/s0305000903005671 25

 child’s tendency to have a broader range of

referents for a word than the conventional adult
meaning
 Example? “car” =

 Longitudinal research suggests toddlers use

overextension as an interim measure
 Toddlers’ overextended words are strikingly
similar across cultures

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  range of referents is much narrower than
for the adult word

 Example? “car” =

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 Inappropriate application of syntactic

rules to words that are exceptions

 E.g., paint  “I painted it.”

 eat
  “I eated it.”

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