The development of comprehension
Fetuses and Speech Input
-Mother’s speech sounds were found to be able to reach the ear of the fetus above the background
sounds.
-Infants tend to do something that oriented to his/her mother more in order to activate the tape with
their mother’s voice than to hear the voice of another woman.
-Research showed that infants could distinguish the sound of their mother’s voice and other woman.
-The learning of the mother’s voice may actually have occurred.
-If a fetus could hear sounds from the outside world, those sounds would have to be through a
medium of a liquid in the fetal sac. So that, speech sounds are virtually indistinguishable.
Newborns (Neonates) and Speech Input
-Infants may even prefer their native language at birth.
-The neonates chose to listen to French, the language their mother spoke while pregnant.
-Children born to mother who did not speak French did not demonstrate the ability to discriminate
between the 2 languages.
-Newborn could have done their learning after birth since testing was done when the infants were
already 4 days old.
-Whether language perception begins in the womb is still unanswered.
-Conclusion, newborns are so responsive to sounds within such a short time of birth. They are ready
for speech sounds.
Speech Comprehension Occurs without Speech Production
-Mute but hearing can develop the ability to comprehend speech without their being able to produce
speech.
-Mute persons developed a grammar. A mental grammar is based on speech comprehension that
enabled them to understand the speech to which they were exposed.
Example Christopher Nolan: Irish writer. Had little control over the muscles of his body; swallowing
food as well. Couldn’t sit up by himself, cannot utter recognizable speech sounds. However, his
intelligence was not impaired and his hearing was normal. He learned to understand speech as a
young child. When he reached 10 years he had learned to read. Through his unicorn manner he
produced an entire book of poems and short stories when he was 16 yrs old.
Q1 Refer to two more examples examples like Nolan’s?
In Normal Children Speech Comprehension Develops in Advance of Speech Production
-If children did not first learn to understand the meaning of words and sentences, they would not be
able to use words or sentences in a meaningful way.
-Comprehension of a language precedes production does not mean a child must understand all of
the language before being able to produce something.
-The system of comprehension and production do not develop separately for the normal child.
-Child will then try to figure how to use it in production.
-The child attempts to coordinate production to confirm to the system that has been developed for
comprehension.
v Pre-speech normal infants
-Baby can recognize words as early as 6 months of age.
-The comprehension and production processes develop in a parallel mode with production always
trying to keep up with comprehension.
v The Huttenlocher study
-He found that children (10-13years old) were able to comprehend speech at a level beyond that to
which they had progressed in production.
-Children were able to select familiar objects such as ‘bottle’ or ‘diaper’ which were named for them
and were able to respond appropriately.
v The Sachs and Truswell Study
-They found that children could only produce single word utterances. Nevertheless, could
comprehend syntactic structures composed of more than one word.
-Conclusion, the children’s level of speech comprehension was well in advance of their level of
speech production.
Relative Paucity of Comprehension Study
-Production studies are easier to do.
-Speech production can directly observe while the product of comprehension cannot.
-Comprehension can only be inferred on the basis of relevant behaviour.
THE RELATIONSHIP OF SPEECH PRODUCTION, SPEECH COMPREHENSION AND THOUGHT
Speech Comprehension Necessarily Precedes Speech Production
-The child must first able to comprehend the meaning of the language before they themselves can
produce it.
-The basic of all language is meaning and without that, children could not begin to produce language
meaningfully.
-Children need to be exposed to utterances with a clear connection to articles referred to before they
themselves can begin sat such utterances.
-They will not learn language if all that they are exposed to is speech sound, no matter how many
times it is uttered.
-The sound form of a word must be associated with something that gives a clue as to its meaning.
-Without a sound meaning association, the mere utterance of the sound form is of little
communicative significance.
-They sometimes repeat words or phrases they hear, but this is not evidence for learning unless the
sounds are used in a meaningful context that is suitable for those sound forms.
-Unimaginable for a person to have the ability to produce speech without having the ability to
comprehend speech.
-This is because, a learner must first hear speech sounds before the person knows what sounds to
make. A learner must hear the speech sounds in coordination with the experience of objects or the
minds b4 the person can assign a meaning to the speech sounds.
Thought as the Basis of Speech Comprehension
-The meanings that underlie SC are the concepts that are in a person’s mind.
-Speech does not provide such concepts.
-The contents of thought are provided by the child’s experience of the environment.
-Without contents of thought, child would have nothing to assign as the meanings of words and
sentences.
-Thought necessarily precedes language.
-We cannot find cases of persons who have language but no thought.
-Thought is independent of language.
-Thought provides the basis for speech comprehension, which in turn provides the basis for speech
production.
LEARNING ABSTRACT WORDS
-Complex hypothesizing needs to be employed for learning the words for feelings and concepts
since these are not in the physical environment for the child to directly observe.
-Child make inferences from what people say and on the basis of what happens in the environment
and the mind.
MEMORY AND LOGIC IN LANGUAGE LEARNING
Memory
-Child must remember a multitude of particular words, phrases and sentences along with the
contexts, both physical and mental, in which they occurred.
-Such data provide the basis for structural analyses and the acquisition of vocabulary.
-If not they would have little basis for discovering abstracts meanings and rules.
-Without a good memory, language learning would not be possible.
-Children as young as 8 months begin to remember words.
-There are 2 types of memory operate in language learning.
-Associative learning is where a connection is formed between an object and the sound form name
of that object.
-Episodic learning where whole events or situation are remembered along with phrases and
sentences that others have spoken.
Logic
v Children uses inductive logic
-This is use even in early grammatical phase of learning basic morphemes.
-E.g: Plural, children must scan the sentences uttered by mature speakers and then note that a
suffix is added when 2 or more objects are being talked about.
-It showed that 1) there is a search for characteristics in speech and 2) those characteristics are
related to objects and etc. It represents the essence of the use of the inductive logic.
v Young Children use deductive logic
-This reflects a great deal of conceptualization and thinking on the part of the child.