Application Assignment 1

Now that you have a basic understanding of the connections between communication, speech, hearing, and language, as well as the five areas of language. We will spend some time discussing these building blocks of language in more depth. This presentation will address specifics about each of these areas of language and what typical development in each area entails. We'll start with phonology. Recall that phonology relates to the system of sounds and language. Because we're focusing on language now and not speech production. Keep in mind that phenology is not referring to the physical or motor production of speech sounds, but rather the system of rules needed to produce a message in a given language. In other words, remember speech is largely a motor process. While language and all five components of language involve cognitive processes. Phonological development involves the acquisition of that rule system that governs the sounds used in a language. This includes rules about what sounds are used, where they can be used in words, how they can be combined in words, and the overall sound structure of words in a language. So for example, in English, there are rules about how syllables can be structured. You may hear someone talking about syllables in terms of consonants and vowels. So they may refer to CV or CVC, where C, CVC syllables, these are syllable structures used in language. Having knowledge of this rule system is having phonological knowledge. So phonological knowledge relates to knowledge of the way in which sounds are organized, recognized, and understood. We are born with this knowledge. We develop it over time. So let's talk a bit now about how this phonological development occurs. Phonological representations are the mental imprints we have created and stored in our mind for the speech sounds we use. This is a rather abstract concept. So let's take a look at an example to make this more concrete. Take for example, the words pat and bat. First. Let's remove the aspect of spelling for a moment and just focus on the spoken words. Pat, bat. How do you know when you hear someone say these two words that they are not the same. If you watched someone say these words without hearing any sound, you likely wouldn't see a difference in production of these two words. Let's assume you are able to hear the words and you therefore can hear the difference in sound at the beginning of each word. How do you recognize that there is a difference? You're able to differentiate between these two spoken words because you are fully equipped to process the sounds in the language or languages you speak, in this case, English. You can do this by using phonological knowledge that you have for each of these speech sounds, which is stored in your brain. Therefore. You have phonological representations of each sound in your brain. When the phonological information we need for a given language is completely developed in the brain. We don't need to consciously think about whether the sounds and there are different when hearing these words. Because the phonological system is able to do that for us. That ability to detect a single difference in sound is an important result of phonological development. It begins to develop at birth and continues into early childhood. Many children develop this ability without experiencing much difficulty, but some children do have trouble developing the phonological rules of their native language. And this may lead to a phonological disorder. Why is it important for us to develop this ability to distinguish or recognize the difference between speech sounds in our language. Well, in spoken words, one small change in sound has the capacity to result in a change in meaning, as in the words pat and bat. A fully developed phonological system will recognize that these words are not the same. And underdeveloped phonological system may not. A child who does not have fully develop phonological representations may have difficulty distinguishing between words like this. And they may also have a difficult time producing words. For example, they may produce one sound for many different sounds. And this would obviously reduce their chance of being understood by others. Note again, that I'm not talking about a child having difficulty producing speech sounds due to structural or motor difficulties, but rather due to their lack of mental representation of certain sounds or their lack of understanding of how sounds work and the phonological system. So let's return to the meaning of the word phoning for a minute. Remember a phoneme is a smallest unit of a sound that signals meaning when I say the word Pat, and then change the first sound to the meaning of the word will change. While a phonemes such as or, but isn't meaningful on its own, does serve to signal meaning differences within words. When two words differ by a single speech sound, we call those words minimal pairs. Pat and bat, or minimal pairs because they differ by only the first sound. Pack and pack are minimal pairs because they differ only by the last sound. Pat and pit are also minimal pairs because they differ only by the medial sound. We need to know about minimal pairs because a person who hasn't developed phonological representations for all of the sounds and their language may not notice a difference between certain words that differ by only one sound. Likewise, there production of words that differ by a single sound may also be affected. And this is likely to result in the inability of listeners to understand their spoken message or reduced intelligibility. Speech language pathologists use minimal pairs to help in certain aspects of diagnosis and treatment of individuals with phonological disorders. So now that I've explained the basic concepts related to phonological development, we can turn to a broad discussion of how this phonological system develops. As I mentioned already, this system begins developing at birth. In the early phases, infants have no concept of speech sounds. They begin to acquire this knowledge through exposure to language. Your textbook refers to prosodic and font attack to cues. Prosity is the rhythm and inflection of voice during speech. It involves tone of voice and pausing. It is what makes our speech sound human and natural, as opposed to robotic. Phone a tactics you should recall relate to the ways in which sounds can be combined within words in a language. Together, prosodic and phone atactic aspects of language provides some of the earliest information about language to infants. They start to recognize and take cues from these aspects of language. With more exposure, they can begin to recognize the patterns of language. And this can help them develop important early phonological milestones, such as recognizing word boundaries during the speech stream. In addition, as infants begin vocalizing and playing with sounds, they begin to produce speech sounds. Vowel sounds are used first during typical development, and eventually consonant sounds are added to the phonemic inventory. Continents develop much more gradually, and the order of acquisition of consonant sounds will vary depending largely on the functional load of the sound or the frequency of the child's exposure to consonant sounds in the words they hear. So given this information, think about the following. Your textbook indicates that the sound develops before the sound. In English. The authors ask, why do you think would emerge early and would emerge later in English? Pause and take a moment to think about why this would be. Children are likely to be exposed to and to use words with the sound much more frequently than the sound. The sound that is associated with the letter M has a greater functional load in English, and children are likely exposed to more words with that sound. In addition, difficulty involved in physically producing sounds may also play a role. Although in this case, isn't particularly difficult to produce for most children. You'll find a version of this chart in your textbook. And this is also provided by Usha. This chart is commonly used as a standard for normal or perhaps more appropriately, typical development of consonant sound production in young children. The black bar for each sound represents the age range when children are typically developing the sound. The age level across the top of the chart is in years. So let's look at the age of development for the sound. For example. Now this can be interpreted is that children may develop the sound before or after the age of two. But the average age that children begin to develop this sound is 290% of children tend to have this sound by the age of four in their phonological inventory. Therefore, a child who has not yet developed the sound at one year of age, or 1.5 or even 3.5 is not developing atypically. However, if the child has not developed the sound by the age of four years and three months. This would be considered delayed development of this sound using these standards. Moving on from phenology, we will now explore the development of morphology. Recall morphology involve some rules that govern the structure of words. To understand morphology, you must understand the concept of the morpheme, which I explained in the last module. But to refresh your memory, a morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit of language. Every single word we use can be explained in terms of its morphemes. Some words contain only one morpheme, while others may contain two or more. In the previous module, I explain the difference between free unbound morphemes. Think about how I defined these terms. It may help to recall the example I provided first. What is a free morpheme? What other examples of a free morpheme can you think of? What is a bound morpheme? Pause this presentation to see if you can answer these questions and come up with a few examples of your own. A free morpheme will stand alone and convey meaning. While a bound morpheme can only convey meaning when added to other morphemes. In the last module, I use the word book as an example of a free morpheme. When you add the plural es to the end of the word book than that plural marker S is a bound morpheme. Plural S only carries meaning when it's attached to the end of a noun, marking plurality. Here are some examples of morphemes that stand alone and convey meaning. Sometimes determining if a word is a free morpheme can be a little challenging because English adopts many of its words from other languages, including Greek and Latin. Both which provide many routes as well as other word parts. But for now, just know that many English words contain a single free morpheme. In English, bound morphemes serve two primary purposes. They either change the part of speech or the meaning of a word, or they modify or word. Derivational morphemes changed the part of speech or the meaning. Inflectional morphemes modify the word by adding additional meaning. So as an example of a derivational morpheme that changes the part of speech. If I add L-Y to the end of the word quick, I changed the adjective quick to the adverb quickly. As an example of a derivational morpheme that changes word meaning. If I add this to the beginning of the verb, like the new word retains the same part of speech. It's still a verb, but it has a completely different meaning. Dislike. As an example of an inflectional morpheme that modifies a word. If I add ED to the end of the verb cook, only modify the word cook to indicate that the action happened in the past. Likewise, if I add ES to the end of the noun dish, I modify the word to indicate more than one dish, but I don't change the part of speech or the central meaning of the word dish. Your textbook also discusses the term grammatical morphemes. All inflectional morphemes are grammatical morphemes, and some free morphemes are grammatical morphemes as well. Examples would be the Xi, An. So with all of these definitions and examples in mind, morphological development is important in early language development as it involves the acquisition of these and many other morphological rules. It's important to understand these basic but critical aspects. Research has shown that children tend to acquire the rules of morphology in a similar way. The work of Brown resulted in the stages of development provided on page 39 of your textbook. This table on page 39 shows you the typical order, an age at which the earliest grammatical morphemes develop, starting with the inflectional ending ING and moving to plural S. Various prepositions and past tense forms. This table is instrumental in helping speech language pathologists and others in the field of early childhood gauge a child's developmental milestones in morphological development. When children do not develop the rules of word structure in this predictable way, it may be the result of a few factors. First, children who are exposed to a different language May 1 have more difficulty learning morphological rules in a second language. Second, children who have specific language impairment often have the most difficulty with this aspect of language. So this could be an early sign of SLI for some children. Now let's talk for a few minutes about syntactic development. Hopefully, you will recall that syntax involves the structure of lager units of language. Generally speaking, syntax relates to the rules of sentence structure. This is commonly referred to as grammar. So syntactic development involves the acquisition of rules that govern how words are organized into sentences in a given language. This development of sentence structure occurs in a progression from very simple sentence structure to increasingly more complex structure in children. It's important to recognize that with typical language development, children have an amazing capacity to learn syntactic rules without the need for anyone to explicitly teach them. By six years of age, most children's utterances are about as long as adults utterances, demonstrating the rapid nature of this linguistic growth. One factor that has an enormous impact on syntactic development in children is the linguistic environment. The direct interactions children have with other more mature speakers of their language will set the stage for their language growth. The complexity of language use during direct interactions with children is likely to impact the complexity of language they develop. Children with specific and secondary language impairments tend to struggle with this aspect of language development, just as they do with the morphological aspect of language. Children with language impairments often produce shorter and less complex sentences and have trouble with verbs. So both of these areas are often the target of assessment and intervention. And children experiencing language difficulties. Also individuals who have acquired a language disorder later in life due to brain damage from a stroke will sometimes have difficulties in the area of syntax. Sentences serve various purposes. Typically, children use declarative negative, an interrogative sentence types during emerging language. A declarative sentence just involves making a statement. By three years of age, children have often mastered the most basic declarative sentence structures. They may even add complexity to these statements with the addition of clauses. Negative sentences obviously express negation and include words like no, not, can't, don't, and won't. Initially a child will create negation by putting no at the beginning of an utterance. They become more sophisticated in sentence building. They learn to move the negative word to the appropriate place within the sentence. Interrogative sentences involve asking questions. Early emerging interrogative sentences use W-H words, such as what, where and why. During the preschool years, this expands to the use of who, whose, when, which, and how. Yes and no questions are also interrogative sentences. Compound and complex sentences contain more than one clause and are joined by special words called conjunctions. Coordinating conjunction joins independent clauses or sentences. Examples are the words and, but and or. Subordinating conjunctions introduce a subordinate clause and use words such as Although or because. More complex sentences also develop through the emergence of phrasal development of phrases, a cluster of words organized or imbedded around a nucleus. I think your textbook cause this ahead. The nucleus of the phrase determines what kind of phrase it is. There are noun phrases, prepositional phrases, adjectival phrases, and verb phrases. Around the age of three, children can begin to master sentences with conjoined in embedded clauses. Mean length of utterance or MLU, is a measure of the average number of morphemes a child uses per an utterance. Emily, you is widely used in fields related to early childhood development to estimate Syntactic Complexity. And it is often used to determine whether a child is developing as expected in this area of language. To calculate the mean length of utterance for a child, what you first need to do is obtain a language sample. This is often done by talking and playing with a child and recording their utterances or their use of language. You want to have a substantial sample to calculate Emily, you. So it's recommended that you obtain a sample of at least 50 utterances. Once you have your sample, you must transcribe the utterances. Then you count the number of morphemes the child uses in each utterance, and divide that number by the total number of utterances included in the sample. This will give you a mean or average number of morphemes per utterance. This number is then compared to a set of norms that have been developed by Brown and are widely used and can be found in a table on page 47 of your textbook. You will learn more about determining MLU later in this course and will have the opportunity to calculate it as well using a language sample. For now, just become familiar with the method and the basic concept. In this presentation, we have covered basics in the development of three of the five components of language, phonology, morphology, and syntax. These components make up the domain of form or the structure of language. From this presentation in the chapter, you should be building a stronger understanding of these areas of language, as well as the systems that must be developed for an individual to be skilled in each of these areas. This is a good point for you to take a break and reflect on the information presented so far in this module, I will provide a second presentation that cover semantic and pragmatic development.