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Language Development - Y2 - Coggle Diagram
Language Development - Y2
Features of language
4 features of language -
Semantics - meanings
Syntax and morphology - grammar; arrangement and inflections
Pragmatics - how to use language / social use of language
Phonology - perception of speech sounds
Continuous variation in the speech continuum is perceived as discrete categories (categorical perception)
Phonemes are the smallest unit of sound
Sharp phoneme boundary
Eimas et al, 1971 - high amplitude sucking to measure habituation
-> /b/ and /p/ continuum
-> 2 month old infants dishabituate when VOT (voice onset time) crosses the boundary 20-40ms but not within a category (0-20ms)
-> Infants display categorical perception of phonetics
Jusczyk (1995)
-> Can discriminate non-native speech sounds before 10 months
-> Japanse infants can discriminate /r/ v /l/ but adults find this harder - suggests that categorization is more distinct in development for learning purposes
-> Head Turn procedure - babies are trained with rewarding stimuli, to turn their heads when they hear a change in the sound being presented
-> Infants have an innate ability / foundation for learning language, and what they are exposed to specifies this; can recognise any phoneme difference
-> Perceptual narrowing - after a while, they can only concentrate on their relevant phonemes to learn language; reinforcement of the synapses for these language tools; precursor to fluency
-> Explains plasticity difference in language learning
Production of speech sounds - how sounds are organised in a language:
Phonological representation - abstract / mental representations of sounds / combinations of sounds that make words
English has 44 phonemes
Children learn to speak systematically -
Phonotation stage (2 months) - quasi-vowels - unintentional sounds (vocal cord vibration without articulation)
Primitive articulation (2-3 months) - gooing
Expansion stage (4-5 months) - full vowels
Canonical stage - well formed syllable (baba), reduplicated sequences - parental response reinforces
Canonical babbling - Ollers et al, 1999 - should occur by 10 months; can happen between 7 and 16 months
If not achieved, can be signal of atypical development
Deaf children > 10 months
Sounds like own language
Compared children who do not engage in canonical babling by 10 months - late onset - with controls
No difference in receptive vocabulary
It is also a risk for developmental delay if not developed
Semantics - understanding words
Knowing a word = sound form and meaning
Headturn preference procedure - measuring listening times to frequent v infrequent/nonwords
Recognise own name - 4.5 months (Mandel, Jusczyk and Pisoni, 1995)
Halle and Boysson-Bardies (1994)
-> 11/12 month old French infants
-> Biberon (baby-bottle) v busard (harrier)
-> Longer listening times to familiar/frequent words
-> infants familiar with words through their listening experience
Semantics - using words -
1st word - 1 year
200 words - 2 years
1000 words - 3 years, basic conversation - spurt in vocabulary or gradual learners
Common errors -
Over-extensions - many members of a category are referred to by a single term (cow for cow and horses)
Under extensions - may use word in a narrower sense (shoe for sandal)
Holophrases - single word sentences
Over-regulation - goed, runned, tooths, mans
Grammar -
Morphology - case marking inflections - English - suffixes and prefixes
Verb Island Hypothesis (Tomasello)
-> Verb specific structures -> generalisation and abstraction of rules -> verb categories (linguistic schemas)
-> Environment and linguistic input contribute to the generalisation and abstraction of rules
Syntax - word order
Languages are SVO, VSO or SOV
-> Subject-verb-object - English and Chinese
-> Verb-subject-order - Irish
-> Subject-object-verb - Japanese/Urdu
Ahktar (1999) - data driven learning - infants match the sentences to the order, and remodel to their language incorrect ones
Language is important as it allows us to express our internal state
It also contributes to survival and attachment / social relationships
It can also aid recall
Speaking and listening, and understanding others - conflict resolution
Explaining things to other people
Preverbal communication -
Crying (from birth)
Turn taking - reciprocity (from birth)
Gestures (6 months) - pointing (explanation seeking) and protoimperative (I want that)
Joint attention - attending to the same thing
Speech perception (before birth)
-> Foetus auditory system functioning by 7 months
-> Attuned to prosody of own language - rhythm, intonation and stress
Melher et al, 1988 -
-> High amplitude sucking (habituation)
-> French / Russian
-> 4 month old French infants dishabituate at swtich
DeCasper and Fifer (1980) - infants prefer the mother's voice
DeCasper and Spence (1986) - read 2x a day in last 6 weeks of pregnanct
-> Infants prefer familiar story
High amplitude sucking -
Infants given a pacifier to suck; measure sucking rate
Infants suck to hear sound (preference); sucking rate slows or stops when bored (habituation)
When infants notice a new / different sound, they will start sucking again (dishabituation)
Theories of language development
Is language innate or learned?
Nature - our genes determine our behaviour, and we have a genetic predisposition for skills and abilities, personality traits and physical characteristics inherited from our parents
Nativist view - Chomsky (innateness)
-> Behaviouralist views are too simple
-> Poverty of stimulus
-> Common errors e.g. overgeneralisations
-> innate predisposition to acquire language and abstract grammatical rules
Nativists - Chomsky and Pinker -
Language Acquistion Device (LAD):
-> Parameters are set by early input
-> Processes regularities
-> Generate hypotheses and generalise
-> Poverty of stimulus - knowledge is not always available from input
-> Explains speed of language acquisition
-> All humans languages have common principles - form hypotheses based on their language to determine all the rules and test them
-> Specific knowledge about language
Universal grammar -
-> innate grammar - universal = specialised
-> All languages shared several properties
-> Language learners converge on the same grammar despite variable input
-> Critical age hypothesis for learning grammar
Pinker - studied pidgin languages which lack grammatical resources to convey complex messages:
Pidgin languages have been transformed into full languages (Creole) by children learning and changing them
Impoverished language input children receive - adults do not always speak correctly grammatically, and they only hear small language samples
He argued that children have an inborn faculty for language acquisition - biologically determined process
Neural circuits contain linguistic information at birth
Predisposition to learn language is triggered by hearing speech and the child’s brain is able to interpret what what they hear according to underlying principles it contains
Additions - mechanism for working out language rules (Slobin)
Apply mechanisms to the input to specify universals to their language (Russell, 2001)
Evaluation -
Evidence to support -
-> Human anatomy is adapted to productive of speech - vocal tract, Broca and Wernicke’s areas
--> Stroke victims validate these language function areas
--> Apes do not show the same grammatical competence (Pinker, 1944)
-> Creole varieties of English are the result of the LAD at work
-> Studies of sign language have shown they are complex, grammatical languages in their own right - exists in several dialects, and children learning sign as a first language pass through similar stages to spoken language
--> Deprived of speech, the urge to communicate is realised through a manual system which fulfils the same function
Limitations -
-> Theoretical - relies on children being exposed to language but does not account for interactions with the caregiver
-> A case study (Bard and Sachs, 1977) showed that simple exposure was not enough - children had to work with other people and with language to learn it
Nurture - our environment, upbringing and life experiences influence our development and determine our behaviour
Behaviouralist view - Skinner -
-> Language is learned by association, repetition and reinforcement
-> Language capacity is innate, actual learned language is environmental - interactionists
Children imitate the language of their parents and carers, learning through positive and negative reinforcement
Successful attempts are rewarded because an adult who recognises a word spoken by a child will praise the child, and give them what they are asking for - successful utterances are reinforced and wrong ones are forgotten
Limitations - Language is based on structure and rules which could not be determined solely by imitation
Mistakes show that children apply rules, not just imitate speech
Mistakes are from over-application, under-application, over-regulation and holophrases, and virtuous errors
Children go through developmental milestones - sequence does not appear to be affected by environment, but information for them is learned from it
Children are often unable to repeat what adults say
Few children receive much explicit grammatical correction, and parents are more interested in politeness and truthfulness (Lowe and Graham, 1998)
Critical period for language acquisition - if not achieved by 7, will never catch up - if behaviourist, they should be able to learn at any point
Other theories
Cognitive theories:
Piaget - have to understand a concept before finding the word form to express it - seriation is an example, as children could not learn to compare objects by saying ‘bigger’ and ‘smaller’ without doing the task first
Objective permanence - large increase in vocabulary at similar time to this being achieved, suggesting labelling of objects links to object learning
Limitations -
It is hard to find the links between language and intellect - some fluent speaking despite abnormal mental development; syntax especially does not reply on cognition
Input or interactionist theories:
Importance of the language input children receive from their care-givers
Language exists for the purpose of communication and can only be learned in the context of interaction with people you want to communicate with
Child directed speech is an example of a specific acquisition tool - scaffolding for the child’s learning
Language acquisition support system to replace the LAD
Turn taking structure of conversation is developed through games and non-verbal communication before words are uttered
Limitations -
These theories are a useful corrective to Chomsky’s early position and seems likely a child learns with more frequent interaction - however, all cultures pass through same stages of language acquisition, and some cultures do not use CDS, so the scaffolding might not be necessary
Bruner - children learn language out of a desire to communicate with people in the world around them (use non-words as a control for experience and puppets)
Lanugage emerges from, and is dependent on, social interaction
The linguistic environment effects how well and how quickly children learn to talk
Language acquisition support system -
Social interactions with adults and older children which aids learning
-> Child directed speech (CDS) is adapted to faciliate language learning
-> Turn-taking structure of conversation is developed through games and non-verbal communication between babies and caregivers before they start to talk
Learning language
Learning new words -
Fast-mapping (Carey and Bartlett, 1978)
Naturalistic learning experiment - 3;0 and 3;10
Bring the chromium cup, not the red one
Pragmatic inference
New lexical entry after very few exposures
Ellen Markman -
Whole-object (Hansen and Markman, 2009)
Mutual-exclusivity (Markman, 1991)
Syntactic bootstrapping - explains fast mapping
Gletiman (1990) - 2 year olds have ability to infer meanings of unfamiliar words from grammatical cues
-> Big bird is gorping with cookie monster - intransitive - subject no object
--> looked more at video of puppets rotating next to each other
-> Big bird is gorping cookie monster - transitive - subject and object
--> Looked more at video of one puppet rotating the other
Shared rhythms -
From the age of 1 month, babies produce the ‘o’ vowel which grows out of pleasurable interactions, and pass on information through crying patterns
Stern (1998) - motherhood constellation; safety and wellbeing, with the constellation creating an emotional environment in which the mother and baby have a mutually satisfying interaction
-> Emphasis on exaggerated facial expressions, repetition and eye contact for children
-> Echolalia and babbling are key indicators of early language (canonical phase)
Cognitive functional linguistics (Tomasello) -
Acquisition of language is gradual, and is influenced socially and pragmatically
-> Comprehend communicative intention and joint attention
Akhtar, Carpenter and Tomasello (1996) - parent and child (2 years) play with 3 unfamiliar objects, and a 4th novel object is added whilst the child is distracted
-> Exp - parent says 'look a modi! I see modi'
-> Control - parent says 'look there, look at that!'
-> Test - give me the modi
-> Only cue is novelty of items - adult do not point or look at object
Schemerse, Liven and Tomasello (2015)
-> Control - child shown objects
-> Exp - researcher and child play with an object and then tidy it away
-> Test - pass 'a' or 'the' spoon
-> 3 year olds but not 2 year olds made the correct pragmatic inference i.e. passed the object they were previously playing with
Child-directed speech (CDS) - Birth babies prefer A-C speech over A-A speech
Fernald (1985) - headturn preference procedure
Shorter MLU - slower
Clear pronunciation
Exaggerated intonations - higher pitch
Few abstract and function words
More concrete nouns - these are all universal
Conversational hypothesis (Snow, 1985) - adjusted to child's ability (age)
Nature of CDS varies by SES - socioeconomic status (Hoff, 2003) - correlates with later vocab development
Children’s conversations with others and social contexts build language
Equipped with cognitive resources to learn quickly as indicated by gaze-following, pointing, social referencing and the myriad meaningful interactions
Further debate over whether the child’s language is domain general (reflects changing representations of concepts, categories, events and scripts across cognitive domains) or domain specific (child’s linguistic processes are specialised and arise out of domain-specific processing systems)
Children do not directly imitate language of adults, and adults do not always use reinforcement for speaking - the presence of involved adults and other children who use discourse adapted to the child’s provide a language environment to flourish in
Developmental Language Disorder (DLD): Language impairment, specific language disorder and language disorder - DLD recommended after international consensus exercise (Bishop et al, 2016; 2017)
Difficulties with receptive (understanding of language) and or expressive (use of language and ability to use, construct and apply such as vocabulary etc) language
Less than 2 children in every classroom (prevalence - 7.5%; Norbury et al, 2016)
Persistent and stable (Norbury et al, 2017)
No known cause - but can run in families - Bishop, 2006
-> Deficit in grammar
-> impaired processing / procedural learning
Functional impact - relationships, attainment, behaviour, social-emotional mental health, employment etc
SLT / language interventions can help
Testing language skills -
Standard score of 90 or above indicates that a child’s language skills are not a cause of concern
Standard score of between 82 and 89 suggests a child may benefit from support in developing their language skills / further monitoring
Standard score 81 or below (10th percentile or 1.25 SD below mean) suggests a child definitely needs support in developing their language skills
OxED - Language screen; app-based language test
-> Expressive vocabulary - assesses the ability to name pictures and retrieve words when they are needed
-> Listening comprehension - assesses the ability to understand spoken stories; measures literal and inferential language comprehension and excessive language skills
-> Receptive vocabulary - assesses the ability to match spoken words to pictures; vocabulary understanding
-> Sentence repetition - assesses the ability to repeat sentences; measures language comprehension and production skills, sensitive to grammatical difficulties
Shavlik et al (2021) - the link between SES and language skills is the word-learning environment - cross-sectional and longitudinal
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32881178/
Intervention about SES and language - Frizelle et al, 2021
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34322955/
Helping children early with this intervention shows significant effects with both teacher and student cooperation
Griffiths et al, 2024 -
Special educational needs provision and academic outcomes for children with teacher reported language difficulties at school entry
Strength of association between teacher-rated language at reception level, loaded onto a phonics in Year 1, reading, writing and maths in KS1 and KS2, and association was similar for monolinguals and those with English as an additional language - associations for up to 7 years after reception prediction
Despite this need, half of the children with SLCN (Speech, Language and Communication Need) in Year 6 have no SEN registration in secondary school
-> Support has to continue throughout schooling
Having a diagnosis is the strongest predictor of SEN registry
Children’s language skills can be improved (Hulme et al, 2020):
Language interventions can generalise to produce improvements in reading comprehension
Language interventions can improve oral language, and high quality implementation shows further effectiveness
Curriculum should reflect getting everyone to the same language level - socioemotional skills and language are also linked, and interventions should focus on these to evaluate language in relation to behaviour
Barrett’s multi-route model -
Early lexical development model that explains the interactions between the timing of acquisition, the child’s linguistic experience and the cognitive representational abilities
Two classes of early words -
Context-bound words that are only used in specific behavioural contexts
Referential words that are used in a variety of behavioural contexts
These follow two different routes in order to reach adult conversational meaning
-> Context bound words are mapped onto holistic event representations, and referential words are mapped onto a mental representations of specific objects and actions
-> Late infancy children hold holistic mental representations of the events, and these underlying context bound words are then analysed into components
-> Maternal impact has a key role in helping children establish word uses, and then children use their own cognitive processing to establish subsequent use of words
Dyslexia - Problems with writing, spelling, word recognition, reading comprehension and speaking
Core phonological deficit model (Bradley and Bryant, 1983; Snowling, 2002) - language-based disability in which individuals struggle with phonological coding, and they struggle with how words sound so when they try to link the phoneme with the grapheme, they make mistakes
-> Identifiable by issues with alliteration and rhyming, and have missed the stage of playing with words which most children naturally have
-> As the single most accurate predictor of early reading skills was the development of letter knowledge in the years before formal schooling, this hypothesis is well supported (Lyytinen et al, 2007)
Nicolson and Fawcett (1990, 1996) - dyslexia is due to early articulation problems, which has been found to be slower and more erroneous in dyslexia - children rely on their contextual cues to support decoding processes
Articulation issues lead to later phonological issues and segmentation problems, as well as grapheme-phoneme correspondence and struggle with achieving expertise in these skills
They invest too many resources in coping with basic skills, leading to less resources for new information
However, family studies have shown that phonological skills are only part of the issue - some children with this risk do not develop reading deficits (Snowling et al, 2002)
Reading deficits are not linked to phonological problems, but rather cause problems in visual and language skills
Delayed motor milestones also lead to issues with word, nonsense word and text reading
SES, gender differences and learning languages - key studies
Hart and Risley, 1995:
One hour per week of every word spoken at home between parent and child in 42 families over a 3 year period
7 months - 36 months of age
Typing, coding and analysing 30,000 pages of transcripts
Amount of speaking -> amount of quality features affecting vocabulary learning -> vocabulary size and growth
Those with lower SES exposed to 50% fewer words than higher SES - educational differences in parents, differential accents or slang
-> issues with social desirability in parents e.g. over or under speaking
-> Vocab measure is confounded by social desirability
The Word Gap - Hartshone, 2018
-> ‘The Word Gap’ - children living in disadvantaged areas are more likely to have poorer language development
-> Child language is key to social mobility
-> Different levels of reciprocity in low SES families compared to high SES families
-> Gap persists throughout school without intervention
Rowe (2012) - quality over quantity -
Children aged 18, 30 and 42 months old
Vocabulary assessed at 30, 42, 54 months (PPVT - Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test)
Everyday activities videotaped for 90 minutes
Coded speech - tokens (number of words in a corpus regardless of repetition), vocabulary diversity (types - different words used), rare words, decontextualised (explanation, narrative)
Affected by SES, birth order and gender -
-> SES - related to quantity, quality and PPVT
-> Vocab at 30 months predicted by SES (29%) and tokens (5%)
-> Vocab at 42 months predicted by SES and PPVT (52%), types (9%) and rare words (6%)
-> Vocab at 54 months predicted by SES, child vocab at 42 months (72%), tokens (2%) and narrative / explanations (5%)
Piot et al (2021) - meta-analysis -
Association between SES and children's language environment measured with LENA (22 studies - N = 1538)
R = .186 - small effect of SES on children's language experiences (AWC and CTC -> CVC)
-> Adult word count, conversational word count and child vocalisation count
Relationship between SES and children's language experiences is there but small when measured in unobtrusive way - minimal observer effects
McGillion et al, 2017 - contingent talk -
Caregiver talks about what is in the infant's current focus of attention
Social gradient in language appears by 18 months (Fernald et al, 2013)
More contingent talk -> larger vocabularies
Lower SES mothers tend to engage in less topic continuing talk (Qualitative difference in CDS - Hoff, 2003)
N = 142, 11 months old
Randomised control trial - contingent talk and dental hygiene (Control)
Social gradient in contingent talk
Intervention parents engaged in more contingent talk than controls
Low SES parents reported more child words post-test
Those parents who used contigent talk saw more social gradient - promoting this in low SES parents therefore helps vocabulary growth
Anderson et al (2021) - meta-analysis - against these factors:
Pooled effect size for association (correlation) between parent linguistic input and child language
-> Quality (vocb diversity, syntactic complexity) - r = .33
-> Quantity (number of words / tokens / utterances) - r = .20
Moderators of the association -
-> Qual and quant - task type (naturalistic context > free play)
-> Qual - age (older > younger) and length of observation (longer > shorter)
SES and gender were not moderators
Gender difference in language - Eriksson et al, 2012 -
13,738 European children (.08-2.6 years)
Synthesis of studies using MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories
-> Austrian-German, Basque, Croatian, Danish, Estonian, French, Galician, Slovene, Spanish and Swedish
Girls performed better than boys on -
-> Communicative gestures, productive vocab and combining words
Differences increased with age
Universal gender difference - social role theory (Eagly et al, 2000)
-> Different types of toys and play
Small effect size (<1%) - implications for screening
Screen time and language development
Brushe et al, 2024 -
220 families - data collected at 12, 18, 24, 30 and 36 months
Mean screen time 88-172 mins
Developmental increases in parent-child talk variables
Negative associations between screen time measures of parent-child talk
-> For every additional minute of screen time, children heard fewer adult words, spoke fewer vocalisations and engaged in fewer back and forth interactions
Technoference -
-> Children's exposure to screen time may interfere in their opportunities to talk and interact at home
Exposure to screens and children’s language development in the EDEN mother-child cohort (Martinot et al, 2021):
Daily screen time was not associated with language scores, except in a cross-sectional at age 2 years, where higher scores on the Communicative Development Inventory were observed for intermediate screen time
Exposure to TV during family meals was consistently associated with lower language scores, and TV always on (v never) was associated at 2 with lower verbal IQ
Public health policies should better account for the context of screen watching, not only its amount
Transition to literacy -
Pre Reading and writing skills -
-> By age of 6 and 7, they are learning to read and write
-> These skills, combined with perception and discrimination, allow understanding of reading, concepts of stories, awareness of rhyming and alliteration
-> Multimodal skill - involves vision, sound and sense of words - perceptual skills can be sharpened by encouraging observation of specific aspects of the environment
--> Training in visual discrimination can be done through games etc
--> Bryant and Bradley (1985) - young children’s awareness of rhyming and alliteration indicates a skill in analysing word sounds which is essential for reading
-> Children also communicate through narratives to understand their own and others perspectives, and these narratives are central for developmental processes:
--> Autobiographical memory
--> Integration into a particular socio-cultural context
--> The capacity for self-awareness and emotional organisation
--> Capacity to view interpersonal situations from multiple perspectives
--> Capacity to use the self as having multiple sides or narrative voices
Learning to read:
Major method - learning of phonetic devices - recognition of individual letters can then extend to learning full words and phrases
-> Logical progression - phonological awareness underpins learning to read
-> Snowling (2002) - argues that understanding meaning and semantics are more important, and words are better learned in the context of large texts than broken up sounds