Language

Development (Ch#9)
 What Is Language:
• Language is a form of communication—whether spoken, written,
or signed—that is based on a system of symbols. Language consists
of the words used by a community and the rules for varying and
combining them.
• All human languages have some common characteristics. These
include infinite generativity and organizational rules.
1. Infinite generativity is the ability to produce an endless number
of meaningful sentences using a finite set of words and rules.
2. When we say “rules,” we mean that language is orderly and that
rules describe the way language works.
 Language’s Rule Systems :
• When 19th-century American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson said,
“The world was built in order and the atoms march in tune,” he
must have had language in mind. Language is highly ordered and
organized.
• The organization involves five systems of rules:
1. Phonology
2. Morphology
3. Syntax
4. Semantics
5. Pragmatics
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How Develops Language:
 How Develops Language:
INFANCY:
• Infants all over the world follow a similar path in language
development.
Babbling and Other Vocalizations:
• Long before infants speak recognizable words, they
produce a number of vocalizations. The functions of these
early vocalizations are to practice making sounds, to
communicate, and to attract attention. Babies’ sounds go
through the following sequence during the first year:
 How Develops Language:
INFANCY:
1. Crying. Babies cry even at birth. Crying can signal distress, but as
we will discuss in Chapter 10, different types of cries signal
different things.
2. Cooing. Babies first coo at about 1 to 2 months. These are
gurgling sounds that are made in the back of the throat and usually
express pleasure during interaction with the caregiver.
3. Babbling. In the middle of the first year babies babble—that is,
they produce strings of consonant-vowel combinations, such as ba,
ba, ba, ba .
 How Develops Language:
INFANCY: Gestures
• Infants start using gestures, such as showing and pointing, at about 8 to
12 months of age.
• They may wave bye-bye, nod to mean “yes,” show an empty cup to want
more milk, and point to a dog to draw attention to it. Some early gestures
are symbolic, as when an infant smacks her lips to indicate food or drink.
• Pointing is considered by language experts to be an important index of the
social aspects of language, and it follows this developmental sequence: from
pointing without checking on adult gaze to pointing while looking back and
forth between an object and the adult.
• Lack of pointing is a significant indicator of problems in the infant’s
communication system. For example, failure to engage in pointing
characterizes many autistic children.
 How Develops Language:
INFANCY:
Recognizing Language Sounds:
• Long before infants begin to learn words, they can make fine distinctions
among the sounds of the language (Sachs, 2009).
 How Develops Language:
INFANCY:
Recognizing Language Sounds:
• Infants must fish out individual words from the nonstop stream of sound
that makes up ordinary speech. To do so, they must find the boundaries
between words, which is very difficult for infants because adults don’t pause
between words when they speak. Still, infants begin to detect word
boundaries by 8 months of age.
For example, in one study, 8-month-old infants listened to recorded stories that
contained unusual words, such as hornbill and python (Jusczyk & Hohne, 1997).
Two weeks later, the researchers tested the infants with two lists of words, one
made up of words in the stories, the other of new, unusual words that did not
appear in the stories. The infants listened to the familiar words for a second
longer, on average, than the new words.
 How Develops Language:
INFANCY:
Recognizing Language Sounds:
• Infants must fish out individual words from the nonstop stream of sound
that makes up ordinary speech. To do so, they must find the boundaries
between words, which is very difficult for infants because adults don’t pause
between words when they speak. Still, infants begin to detect word
boundaries by 8 months of age.
For example, in one study, 8-month-old infants listened to recorded stories that
contained unusual words, such as hornbill and python (Jusczyk & Hohne, 1997).
Two weeks later, the researchers tested the infants with two lists of words, one
made up of words in the stories, the other of new, unusual words that did not
appear in the stories. The infants listened to the familiar words for a second
longer, on average, than the new words.
Biological Influences of Language:
• The ability to speak and understand language requires a certain vocal
apparatus as well as a nervous system with certain capabilities.
• The nervous system and vocal apparatus of humanity’s predecessors
changed over hundreds of thousands or millions of years. With advances in
the nervous system and vocal structures, Homo sapiens went beyond the
grunting and shrieking of other animals to develop speech. Although
estimates vary, many experts believe that humans acquired language about
100,000 years ago, which in evolutionary time represents a very recent
acquisition. It gave humans an enormous edge over other animals and
increased the chances of human survival (Pinker, 1994).
Biological Influences of Language:
• There is evidence that particular regions of the brain are predisposed to be used for
language (Bortfeld, Fava, & Boas, 2009; Shafer & Garrido-Nag, 2010; Spocter & others,
2010). Two regions involved in language were first discovered in studies of brain-
damaged individuals: Broca’s area, an area in the left frontal lobe of the brain involved
in speech production and grammatical processing, and Wernicke’s area, a region of the
brain’s left hemisphere involved in language comprehension (see Figure 9.9).
• Damage to either of these areas produces types of aphasia, which is a loss or impairment
of language processing. Individuals with damage to Broca’s area have difficulty producing
words correctly; individuals with damage to Wernicke’s area have poor comprehension and
often produce fluent but incomprehensible speech.
 • Chomsky’s Language Acquisition Device (LAD)
• Linguist Noam Chomsky (1957) proposed that humans are biologically prewired
to learn language at a certain time and in a certain way.
• He said that children are born into the world with a language acquisition device
(LAD), a biological endowment that enables the child to detect certain features
and rules of language, including phonology, syntax, and semantics.
• Children are prepared by nature with the ability to detect the sounds of language,
for example, and follow rules such as how to form plurals and ask questions.
• Chomsky’s LAD is a theoretical construct, not a physical part of the brain.
• Is there evidence for the existence of a LAD? Supporters of the LAD concept
cite the uniformity of language milestones across languages and cultures,
evidence that children create language even in the absence of well-formed input,
and biological substrates of language. But as we will see, critics argue that even if
infants have something like a LAD, it cannot explain the whole story of language
acquisition.