Week 8 Lecture
Toddler Language and Thinking
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Representation
Language Components of Language
Sound Patterns of language
Speech perception
Productive and Receptive skills
First words
Vocabulary growth
Under and over extension
Morphological rules and overregularization
Syntax
Language in Social Settings—pragmatics
Theories of language development
Child directed speech/motherese
Pretend play
Gestures
Representational Skills
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Skills for thinking about, manipulating,
and communicating to others about
absent objects, past events, abstract
thoughts.
These skills emerge in toddlerhood but
continue to develop for years to come.
Children's
representational
abilities become
obvious in their
development of
language.
Language:
An abstract, rule-governed system of arbitrary
symbols that can be combined in countless
ways to communicate information.
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Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.
The Components of Language
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Phonology - sounds of a language.
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Semantics - meanings of words.
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Morphology - grammatical endings.
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Syntax - sentence structure.
Pragmatics – rules for using language
The Components of Language
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Every language has its own set of
phonemes, speech sounds that contrast
with one another and can change the
meaning of a word.
The smallest meaningful units in a
language are called morphemes.
Pragmatics is the set of rules governing
conversation and the social use of
language.
Productive & Receptive Skills
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Children need both productive skills
and receptive skills to carry on a
conversation.
The development of receptive skills tends
to run slightly ahead of the development
of productive skills.
Productive skills: Language skills used to put ideas into words.
Receptive skills: Language skills used to
understand what other people are saying.
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Learning the Sound Patterns of a Language
The early period of prelinguistic
vocalization during the first year of
life can be divided into five stages:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
crying
cooing
vocal play
canonical babbling
conversation babbling (jargon)
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Learning the Sound Patterns of a Language
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Two things are needed to prepare
children to begin speaking:
1.
2.
Must gain control over their speech
apparatus to produce speech sounds
intentionally.
Must learn the phonemes of their particular
language by paying close attention to the
speech sounds they hear and begin
imitating them.
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Variation in VOT
VOT frequency histograms of voicing categories across
six languages (Lisker & Abramson, 1964)
English identification functions for VOT stimuli
superimposed on VOT frequency histograms
English discrimination functions for VOT stimuli
Thai identification functions for VOT stimuli
superimposed on Thai VOT frequency histograms
Thai discrimination functions for VOT stimuli
Learning the Sound Patterns of a Language
Between 10-12 months, most children start
to make the transition from babbling to
true speech.
Protowords:
Vocalizations that seem to
have consistent meanings
for a child and are used in
attempts to communicate,
but do not closely
resemble adults words in
sound or meaning.
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Learning Words & Their Meanings
First Words
First words usually refer to:
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familiar persons
body parts
animals
objects
“Mama”
“Nose”
“Doggie”
“Ball”
First words may also express:
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feelings
movement
social commands not
words
“Goodboy”
“Up”
broken down into their component
“Gimme!”
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Learning Words & Their Meanings
First Words
Children differ in the purposes for which they use their
first words.
Referential style:
Words primarily refer to
objects and events.
Expressive style:
Words primarily express
social routines.
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Learning Words & Their Meanings
Vocabulary Growth
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Average vocabulary for 18-month-olds is 50 words, then there is
a dramatic vocabulary increase.
Referential children have more obvious vocabulary spurts.
Vocabulary spurt:
A sudden increase in word acquisition at about 18 months of age.
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Average productive vocabulary = 8,000 to 14,000 words for the
average 6-year-old.
Children's receptive vocabularies are considerably larger than
their productive vocabularies.
Between ages 1 and 6, the average child is learning an average
of 5.5 new words per day (40,000 words by age 10 or 11).
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Learning Words & Their Meanings
Processes of Word Learning
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Not until around the vocabulary spurt do children start using
categorical words for people, objects, & events.
A milestone comes when the child discovers everything has a name.
Children's first task in learning words is to extract them from the
stream of speech they hear, which leads to some segmentation
errors (e.g., “readit the book” ).
Segmentation errors:
Mistakes in detecting boundaries between words in a sentence.
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Wildwood Flower
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Oh, I'll twine with my mingles and waving black hair
With the rose so red and the lilies so fair
And the mirltes so bright with the emerald dew
The pale and the leader and eyes look like blue
I'll twine 'mid the ringlets Of my raven black hair,
The lilies so pale And the roses so fair,
The myrtle so bright With an emerald hue,
And the pale aronatus With eyes of bright blue.
I will twine, I will mingle my raven black hair
With the roses so red and the lilies so fair
And the myrtle so bright with it's emerald hue
The pale emanita and the hyssop so blue
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Learning Words & Their Meanings
Processes of Word Learning
Even before age 2, children can use fast mapping, which
is helped by joint attention.
Fast mapping:
A young child uses
context cues to make
quick & reasonably
accurate guess about
the meaning of an
unfamiliar word.
Joint attention:
Tendency for language-learning children and adult
conversation partners to share a focus of attention.
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Learning Words & Their Meanings
Errors in Early Word Learning
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A common semantic mistake involves errors of
underextension.
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too restricted use of a word
example: calling toy trucks “truck” but not full-sized
trucks on the road
Another common error involves overextension
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too global of a word use
example: calling a bus “truck”
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Learning Morphological Rules
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Children's first words are usually single morphemes.
A language's grammatical morphemes (units of
language that change the meanings of words and
sentences) are gradually added.
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Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.
Learning Morphological Rules
Order of Acquisition
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First children add -s to nouns and -ing to
form present participles.
Later they used -ed to form past tense verbs
and -s to form the third person singular.
The last to appear are those for contractions
of the verb to be.
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Learning Morphological Rules
Productivity & Overregularization
Morphological development provides clear evidence
that language development involves rule learning.
Overregularization:
Language errors in which a child applies a morphological
rule to a word that is an exception to the rule.
• example: “mouses” for mice
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October14, 2014
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Online training for new students
From words to sentences
Syntax
Question asking
Passive voice
Language in Social Settings—pragmatics
Theories of language development
Child directed speech/motherese
Bilingualism
Pretend play
Gestures
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Online training for new students
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Understanding Sexual Assault (45 min)
AlcoholEdu (90 min)
http://www.sjsu.edu/wellness/
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Learning to Form Sentences
In any system of syntax, individual words belong
to particular form classes, such as nouns,
verbs, and adjectives.
Form class:
A category of words in a language that can fill
similar syntactic roles in forming phrases and
sentences.
Syntactic rules specify how words belonging to
various form classes can be combined to make
phrases, clauses, and sentences.
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Syntax
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Study of the rules by which words are
organized into phrases or sentences in a
particular language.
Referred to as the grammar of the
language and allows for more complex
expression of thoughts and ideas by
making references to past and future
events.
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The One-Word Stage
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When children first begin to speak, they use only
one word at a time.
When these words are used to communicate a
more complex meaning, they are said to
function as holophrases.
Holophrase: A single word that conveys
the meaning of a phrase or sentence.
“Mama” = “Here is Mama.”
 “Mama” = “I want my Mama.”
“Mama” = “This belongs to Mama.”
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First Sentences
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At 18-24 months, toddlers start to put two
words together, tied into the appearance of
verbs in the child’s vocabulary.
When true two-word sentences appear, they
usually take the form of telegraphic speech.
Telegraphic speech:
A toddler speech style in
which words not essential to
the meaning of a sentence
(articles, conjunctions,
prepositions) are omitted.
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Further Syntactic Development
Brown’s Stages of Early Syntactic Development
based on length of utterances
I.
Express simple semantic & syntactic relationships (1-2 morphemes).
“See teddy.”
II.
Acquire basic grammatical morphemes (2-2.5 morphemes).
“See teddies.”
III.
Variations on simple sentences, incl. questions (2.5-3 morphemes).
“Where’s Mommy?” “You can’t come.”
IV.
Subordinate clauses (3-3.5 morphemes).
“I want you to do it.”
V.
Join simple sentences to form compound sentences (3.5-4).
“I had cake and Daddy had ice cream.”
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Question Asking
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Inflection
Changes in word order and addition of
words
Two types of questions:
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Yes/no questions: Are you going to school?
Wh questions: Where are you going?
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Yes/No Questions
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Inflection
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Tag questions
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The tree died?
The tree died, didn’t it?
Word order and addition
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Did the tree die?
Learning to ask Wh questions
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phase one
Children will make two word questions
ex.Where kitty?
Phase two
Children will add helping verbs to the
question but willl often reverse
them. ex.Where kitty is going?
Phase three
Children will form proper questions.
ex.Where is the kitty going?
Asking Why Questions
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You went to the store, why?
Why you went to the store?
Why did you go to the store?
Negation
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Phase one
Children will put a negation in front of the word they
want to negate.ex. No kitty.
Phase two
children will put the negative word into their
sentences.ex. That not kitty.
Phase three
Children will be able to add a negative into a sentence
correctly ex. That isn't a kitty.
Asking negative questions
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You are going to the store.
Are you going to the store?
You aren’t going to the store.
Aren’t you going to the store?
Native speakers understand these
constructions, but even for adults they
are hard to explain.
Active and Passive Voice
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Non-reversible passives
 The boy kicked the ball
 The ball was kicked by the boy
Reversible passives
 The boy kicked the girl
 The girl was kicked by the boy
Before age 4– semantic strategy and first noun is the
subject hueristic
Age 4 to 6 –rigid word order, first noun is the subject
After age 6 – correct understanding of passive
construction, although very rare in production
Learning to Use Language Socially
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Children also acquire linguistic and
communicative competence.
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Linguistic competence involves syntactically
and semantically correct use of a language.
Communicative competence involves being
able to carry on conversations, repair
breakdowns in communications, and to use
language in socially appropriate ways (as
determined by culture).
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How can children learn a language in such a
short time?
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Environment theories stress environmental
factors in language acquisition, including:
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the language the child hears
structure of social interactions
physical environment
Nativist theories stress inborn, biologically
based factors in language acquisition.
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Chomsky argued that all languages share
structural characteristics because language and
the human brain evolved together.
Language acquisition device:
Chomsky’s term for innate capacities of the
human brain that make language possible.
• assumed that part of the brain is specially
adapted for language learning
• ignored social contexts in which language
acquisition occurs
Most current researchers agree both inborn & environmental
factors contribute to language development.
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What the Child Brings
to Language Acquisition
Evidence For Biological Underpinnings
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Apparent sensitive period early in life
Hemispheric specialization
Brain changes at 8-9 months of age
Species-specific nature of language
Inborn abilities & constraints
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The Environment of
Language Learning
Child-directed speech (CDS) = motherese:
The modifications adults make in their speech
when talking to young children.
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simpler grammatically
includes fewer grammatical errors
higher pitch
clauses & boundaries more clearly marked by pauses,
intonation
focus more on objects and present tense events
quite redundant
includes many questions about objects & events
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The Environment of
Language Learning
Impact of Child-Directed Speech (CDS)
 Simplifies input.
 Makes clear connections between words and
what they refer to.
 Provides chances for linguistic practice.
 Serves attentional & affective functions in
parent-infant interaction.
 Does not necessarily improve language
development.
Bilingualism
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Initially words learned in two languages may not be
separated by language.
As children learn grammatical morphemes, auxiliary
verbs, and other features of syntax, the languages
become separate systems.
Vocabulary development in each language may be
slower than for monolinguals, but the total vocabulary
may be larger.
Explicit knowledge of syntax is greater for bilinguals.
Cognitive executive functioning and cognitive flexibility
is greater for bilinguals.
Lexical access is slower for bilinguals.
Toddlers’ Pretend Play
14-19 months
Pretend play with replica objects (dolls, toy horses,
toy cars) increases.
19-24 months
Use of substitute objects (using pillow to represent
a baby, a block to represent a car) increases.
by 24 months
Most children can use one substitute object in a
pretend scenario (using block to feed a baby doll).
later
sensorimotor
Double substitutions (using a block for a bottle and
a pillow as a baby) will appear.
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Toddlers’ Use of Gestures
around 9 months
Simple communicative gestures (such as pointing)
normally emerge.
9-12 months
Conventional social gestures (like waving bye-bye,
nodding yes, shaking the head no) usually appear.
12-18 months
Toddlers begin producing symbolic gestures,
representing some object or action.
10-18 months
Children gradually use more gestures.
around 18 months
Frequency of gesture use declines.
around 24 months
Frequency of gesture use levels off.
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Toddlers’ Understanding of Iconic Symbols
Iconic symbols:
Symbols that closely resemble the things they represent.
9 months old
Babies seem confused by pictures.
They try to grasp objects portrayed in them.
20 months old Babies seem to understand objects in pictures are
not physically present.
2 years old
When shown a picture of where a toy is hidden,
they are rarely able to find it.
2-and-a-half
years old
When shown a picture of where a toy is hidden,
children find it 80% of the time.
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