PHYSICAL, COGNITIVE & LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT
Language development
What is language?
Form of communication, whether spoken, written, or signed, based on the
system of symbols.
Components of languages
1. Phonology- the sound system of a language. A phoneme is the
smallest sound unit in a language.
2. Morphology- the system of meaningful units involved in a word
formation.
3. Syntax- the system that involves the way words are involved to form
acceptable sentences.
4. Semantics- involves meaningful words and sentences.
5. Pragmatics- using appropriate conversations and knowledge of how to
effectively use language in a context.
How does language develop?
1. Infancy
Crying (from birth) first way the child communicates with the world
and has different cries for different situations.
Cooing (1-2 months) often produces vowel letters in response to the
caregiver. Expresses happiness through it.
Babbling (around 6 months) the child mixes consonants with vowels.
Gestures (8-12 months) or one-word stage often child speaks one
word at a time accompanied by gestures. Here the child could mean
many things.
The telegraphic stage (2yrs+) starts using 2 words sentences rather
than just one.
The first words come at 6 months.
Receptivity to language
Receptive language- ability to understand language.
Building blocks required to develop receptive language?
Attention & concentration: doing activities long enough without
distractions and holding on to the efforts until the work is done.
Pre-language skills: the way of communicating without words and
including things like gestures, eye contact, and imitation.
Social Skills: ability to engage and reciprocate to others,
compromise with others, and understand and fit in the social
norms as others.
Play skills: voluntary engagement in self-motivated activities which
are associated with pleasure but are not necessarily goal oriented.
Phonological Development
Children must organise the sounds into meaning or language.
Sounds are the beginning of a language.
Children will have to distinguish between segments to form
meaningful units.
Speech segmentation in difficult than printed words as spaces
don’t occur between spoken words.
Process used by children
Reduction: delete or eliminate sounds.
Coalescence: phonemes from different syllables are combined into
single syllable.
Assimilation: children change one sound to make it similar to another
sound.
Reduplication: syllable is repeated and used for multisyllabic word i.e.,
dada for daddy.
Semantic Development
It is the gradual process beginning just before the child says their first
word and includes a wide range of words.
2
Grammatical development
A set of rules on how words or a group of words can go together.
Pragmatic Development
The social side of language where one expresses effectively to or with
others.
Bilingualism
It is the ability of the child to develop an understanding of 2 languages by he
age of 11 months.
2. Early Childhood
Understanding phonology and morphology.
Children know morphological rules.
Plural and possessive rules.
3rd person singular and past-tense verbs.
Sometimes overgeneralize rules.
