Early Childhood Cognition
Language
Theories, Foundations and
Development
Theories
Theories
• Learning theorists (Skinner)
• Nativist theorists (Chomsky)
• Interactionists (Tomasello)
Theories, cont’d
• Traditional Debate Between Behaviorists
(Skinner) and Nativists (Chomsky)
– Is language acquired through reinforcement and
principles of operant conditioning?
– Is there is a universal, innate grammatical
structure?
Theories, cont’d
• Contemporary views based on an old idea
• Vygotsky
– complex cognitive abilities like language emerge
first in the context of social interaction, secondly
at the individual level
– Mature members of culture scaffold development
Theories, cont’d
• Bruner applies the Vygotskian insights
– Children first learn about language in the highly
organized play routines of early infancy
– Infants already making perceptual distinctions and
categories
– Language consists of learning how to express
communicatively about a world that is already
organized in a non-linguistic way
Theoretical Issues to be Explained
• Reference
– How does the human child come to derive
meaning from abstract sounds
• Grammar and Recursion
– How does the child come to apply grammatical
rules without being explicitly taught these rules
Foundations
Biological Foundations
• Categorical perception of speech sounds
(Eimas, Werker, Kuhn research)
• Universal Categorical speech perception
(Werker)
• Preference for infant directed speech
(Werker and McLeod)
• Ability to imitate sounds of speech (Melzoff
and Kuhn)
Evidence for Social Foundations
• Contingency
– Trevarthan
• Primary and secondary intersubjectivity
– Bigelow
• Contingency detected at 4 mos
• Preference for same level of contingency as Mothers
Evidence for Social Foundations
Joint Attention
• Tomasello
– Joint Attention
• Tomasello & Farrar (83)
• Baldwin
– Gaze following
• Baldwin (91)
• Callaghan
– Joint Attention and visual symbols
• Callaghan and Rankin (02)
Evidence for Social Foundations
Intentional Understanding
• Understanding that actions are goal-directed
– Woodward
– Baldwin
• Understanding that actions are intentional
– Meltzoff
– Tomasello
• Understanding communicative intentions
– Tomasello
Evidence for Social Foundations
Intentional Understanding
• Growth of intentionality (9-24 mos)
– Both members of the dyad interact with the
intention to influence the other
• Greater flexibility of attentional capacity (12
mos)
– Moving from dyadic to triadic interactions
• Ability to use symbols
(12-36 mos)
– Crossing the divide between the perceptual world
to the conceptual world
Evidence for Social Foundations
Sharing
• Topic Sharing
– First communications occur in dyad around 4-6
mos (primary intersubjectivity)
– At 5-6 mos infant develops the manual skills to
explore objects and directs attention to objects
more than people: attn to mom at 6 wks is 70%, at
26 wks is 30% (Fogel)
– At 9-10 mos infant begins to be able to coordinate
attention to objects with a communicative partner
(secondary intersubjectivity or joint attention)
Developmental Progression
Precursors to Verbal Communication
• Gestures
– Pointing-for-self
• Prior to 9 months
– Pointing-for-others
• 9 months
– Symbolic pointing and other gestures
• 1 to 2 years
• deceases as verbal language increases
Early Milestones of Language Production
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2 m Social smile, cooing
4 m Laughs, squeals, yells
7 m Canonical babbling
9 m comprehends a word
11 m Variegated babbling, comprehends 10 words
12 m pointing, gesturing
13 m produces first word, comprehends 50 words
15 m produces 10 words
20 m produces 50 words
21 m produces word combinations
Systems of Language
• Phonemes (the sounds of language)
– Categorical perception at birth
• complete mastery takes years (e.g., b vs. v etc)
• Words (meaning units)
– Morphemes are the meaning units of language
• e.g., cat vs. dog, cat vs. cats,
• acquisition helped by adults taking referential stance toward language
with infants and children
• Using language to communicate meaning = symbolic communication
• Phrases (complex meaning units)
– More complex meaning carried
• combine words by 21 mos
• Syntax (meaning through order)
– Word order denotes meaning
• overgeneralizations indicating rule based learning begin in 2nd yr
Vocabulary Development
• Basic task is acquiring word meaning and
refining the precise meaning of words
• Earliest wds names for objects child can act on
like ball vs stove (Nelson), or wds referring to
change of state like ‘allgone’
• Joint attention facilitates acquisition of novel
nouns (Tomasello research)
• Research suggests understanding intentions
helps to disambiguate meaning of action words
such as verbs (Tomasello & Akhtar)
Vocabulary Development, cont’d
• Fast mapping occurs around 18 mos when
children acquire up to to 10 new words per
day after only a single exposure
– Fast mapping occurs mostly for wds referring
to objects child knows a lot about (cup), actions
they perform (run, spill), or modifiers that are
distinctive (big, hot)
Vocabulary Development, cont’d
• Constraints on Meaning Acquisition in Infancy
– Principle of mutual exclusivity :Markman (92)
suggests children avoid applying more than one label
to same object
• Evidence that children will accept more than one label,
they are flexible (Mervis et al, 94)
– Whole Object : Researchers suggest children restrict
novel words to whole objects rather than parts
• Evidence that children ‘s language is related to their
perceptual organization and categorization of the world,
basic level words acquired first (Rosch & Mervis, 76)
Vocabulary Development, cont’d
• Children show creative construction of language in
their overgeneralizations (Snoopy for all dogs) and
undergeneralizations (dog only for their dog)
invention of words (crayoner), and metaphoric use of
words (‘Daddy’s growling’ - for snoring)
• Tomasello argues that the constraints view doesn’t fit
with the view that children actively attempt to derive
and create meaning in the ongoing richness of
communication with others. They acquire words in
contexts that they know a lot about and this helps
them to disambiguate the meaning of words.
Development of Grammar
• Chomskian view is that grammar and syntax are
innately programmed in the LAD
• Bruner suggests that the social context of language
explains the rapid acquisition of language LASS
• Issue is how children come to be sensitive to the
changes in nuance of meaning that are coded in
word order (syntax) and inflections (plural, tense,
prepositions etc)
Development of Grammar, cont’d
• Early English grammar conforms to
subj-verb-obj common order
• Inflections acquired in order of conceptual
difficulty, complex constructions acquired
throughout childhood
• At 3.5 yrs children produce creative word
orders and inflections indicating that they
have a ‘theory’ of grammar
Facilitation of Early Language
• Social interaction with skilled speakers
consistently found to facilitate
• Helping to clarify what child means helps,
correcting errors does not (little evidence)
• Feedback on grammar given through expansions
and recastings
• Not enough cross-cultural research to determine
whether these scaffoldings are universal, which
would suggest they are necessary, or merely a help
Language Sample
• C. My teacher holded the baby rabbits and we
patted them.
• M. Did you say your teacher held the baby rabbits?
• C. Yes.
• M. What did you say she did?
• C. She holded the baby rabbits and we patted them.
• M. Did you say she held them tightly?
• C. No, she holded them loosely.
Conclusions
• Language and Thought
– Thinking changes dramatically once language is
acquired (Environmental-Learning)
– Language reflects, but does not cause, conceptual
understanding (Piagetian)
– There is an interdependence of language and thought,
as well as modularity of language (Nativists)
– Independent early in development, interdependent later
(Cultural-Context)
Conclusions, cont’d
• To understand language and the essential
problem of reference we need to consider
social context
• The development of grammar relies on both
biological (LAD) predispositions and social
(LASS) supports
• There is much refinement of language
beyond the preschool period