CH 5 & 6 Language Development

Importance of play

- Play is a child's work -Ideal vehicle for language acquisition -3 ways is helps: -Play is not goal-oriented so pressure and frustration from the interactive process is removed. It's fun -Attention and the semantic domain are shared by the interactive partners, so topics are shared -Games, like conversations, contain turn-taking

Newborns pre-wired for communcation

- Visual perception - 8 inch focus which is on mother's face if infant is in mother's lap. Prefers faces - Optimal hearing for human voice frequency (pitch level)- prefer voices

Clustering

- use predictable units within words to synthesize words because we use predictable phoneme structures in words (e.g., In English, a word never begins with "dg")

Extension

-A semantically related comment or reply about a topic established by the child -More conversational - Provides more semantic information C: Mommy eat A: Yes, mommy is hungry

Joint action

-During first year - caregiver and infant develop shared behaviors in familiar contexts -Infant begins to learn the conventions of human communication -Includes game playing (e.g. peekaboo) and routines (e.g. bathing and dressing)

Socialization and early communication Birth to 6 months

-Interactional sequences - infant gazes, vocalizes -Social smiles by 3 wks -Cooing -"Developmental dance" infant and mothers behaviors affected by each other -Protoconversations- 3 mths - initial elements of conversations -Interactional exchange between infant and caregiver- more deliberate exchanges -Caregiver smiles and talks - infant smiles and vocalizes

4 phases of joint attention

-Mastering joint attention (0-6 months) Mastery of joint attention by initially face-to-face techniques and then objects, infant's name -Intention to communicate (7-8 mos.) Infant begins reaching, objects become focus of attention -Gestures and vocalization (8-12 months) -Naming/ topicalizing (12 months +)

Expansion

-More mature version of child's utterance that preserves its word order e.g. C: Mommy eat A: Yes,mommy is eating -30% of mother's responses to young children are expansions -Children perceive them as a cue to imitate

Modeling ("Parentese")

-Parent modifies behavior to require more child participation - More time allotted to joint attention -the larger the size of child's vocabulary - Rules and utterances of young children mirror patterns used by their parent - By middle of second year, parent is labeling and requesting labels at approximately equal rates and dialogue is fully established

Joint action

-Routine actions to establish turn taking and conversational skills -Learning through experiences -Game playing (e.g., peek- a- boo) -Ritualized behaviors with very consistent maternal behaviors to hold infants attention

Four expressive strategies a child uses

1. Evocative utterances - child names/parent confirms or negates 2.Hypothesis testing - child names with a rising intonation/parent confirms or negates 3. Interrogative utterance - Baby says, "what's that?" - parent responds with label 4. Selective imitation - Mother says, "Do you want juice" Baby says "juice"

Stages of linguistic rules

1. No linguistic marking - boy walk 2. Appropriate marking in a small number of cases - boy walked 3. Overgeneralization of marking - boy eated 4. Adultlike system - boy walked and ate

4 examples of universal principles that preschools use to learn the syntax of language

1. Pay attention to the end of words (learn endings (s, ing, etc.) before beginning (un-, pre-) 2. Phonological forms can be systematically modified (learn that vary pronunciation (e.g. walked sounds like a 't') 3.Pay attention to the order of words and morphemes (e.g. in English - adjective before noun, charmingly, not charmlying) 4. Avoid exceptions - children overgeneralize linguistic rules `

Illocutionary-

8- 12 months -Conventional vocalizations and gestures to communicate different intentions -Common gestures: Showing object, giving (release object), pointing, and requesting Two functions: -Protoimperatives- requests -Protodeclaratives- maintain/ share joint attention -Use of phonetically consistent forms consistent vocal patterns - e.g. 'ca ca' for blanket

Comprehension uses 2 things

Bracketing and clustering

Prompting

Includes any parental behaviors that require a child response Three common types of prompting: - Fill-ins This is a _______ - Elicited imitations Say X - Questions Is this a ball? What's that

Maternal Communcation behaviors

Infant and caregiver participate in "dialogue" or communicative "dance" Infant- elicited social behaviors are caregiver's response "Baby talk"- (same as 'motherese', but directed to infants, whereas motherese is directed to toddlers in this book)

Factors which may influence rate of learning:

Intelligence Birth order and family structure Learning styles and personality Caregiver stimulation Ethnicity, language used in the home Socioeconomic factors

Adult "teaching" techniques to toddlers

Modeling Prompting Responding behavior

Motherese (parentese)

Mother makes speech modifications that compared to adult-adult speech exhibit Greater pitch range Lexical simplification Shorter, less complex utterances More paraphrasing and repetition Limited, concrete vocabulary More contextual support More directives and questions

Production of first 50 words

Nominals (nouns) Specific 11% General 50% Action (verbs) 19% Modifiers (adject/adverbs) 10% Personal-social (Bye-bye) 10%

What is communication intentionality

Occurs around 8-9 months child begins to encode message for someone else Starts to consider audience

Responding behaviors

Parents do not directly reinforce the syntactic correctness of toddlers' utterances (less than 10% are followed by verbal approval of sentence structure). Instead - use 2 responses: 1. Expansion 2. Extension

3 stages of development of intentionality

Perlocutionary Illocutionary Locutionary

Importance of play

Starts with explicit props (phone, car) and then gets more imaginative Blocks that represent other entities Language learning is enhanced by songs, rhymes, and finger plays

Receptive strategies for toddlers to learn words

Toddlers assume 1. People use words to refer to entities ("cup' means the object cup") 2. Words are extendable (cup can be yours or the one your sister is using) 3. A given word refers to the whole entity, not its parts (table - not legs, etc.)

Perlocutionary stage of intentionality

birth to 9 months Initially does not signal specific intentions, except those behaviors that sustain an interaction (e.g. cries, coos) Intention is interpreted by adult - e.g. different cries (hunger, pain)

Locutionary

first meaningful word

Bracketing-

use of prosody to detect divisions between clauses and phrases spaces between sentences