week three
Chapter 5
Language and Cognitive Growth
Brain anatomy.
Science Photo Library/SuperStock
Learning Objectives
By the end of this chapter, you will be able to accomplish the following objectives:
Describe the basic stages of brain development, and explain how it affects language development.
Describe the role of language in the formation of concepts and categories.
Explain the role of language in memory growth.
Explain how language development affects learning, and identify characteristics of children's early learning.
Ch. 5 Introduction
By the time Katya's mother, Martine, knew that she was pregnant, Katya's brain was already starting to develop. When Katya was born, her brain weighed approximately 2 pounds, or a quarter of her birth weight. While her brain had all the capacity to develop into an organ of near-infinite learning, her environment would greatly influence the course of that development. Martine and Katya's father, Jeffrey, were not focused on brain development per se, but everything they did for their newborn served to build the neural pathways essential to brain growth. Healthy food, sleep in a quiet environment, and a home filled with music, games, and brightly colored objects—all served to stimulate the brain growth necessary for cognitive development. This chapter describes how the infant brain develops, beginning before birth, and its role in cognitive and linguistic development in infants and toddlers. After examining the interrelationship between language and cognitive development, we go on to identify six characteristics of children's preschool learning that serve as guidelines for planning curriculum for early childhood education.
Cognitive development refers to the way in which thought processes develop in the brain. Long before they begin to speak or even appear to understand language, children have begun to develop cognitively. Cognitive growth and linguistic growth are tandem processes—some would even say "codependent" or "interdependent" processes. As children gain experience of the world around them, they begin to develop a larger memory capacity and to organize their world into categories that will eventually become concepts. Words and concepts are closely related. When a child learns the word dog, the name of an object, she has a tool for learning what things are included or excluded from the category dog. If she uses dog to refer to a cat, someone will correct her, and she will have one more piece of information for building her concept. So it is with all word learning. From the time children begin to acquire language, their ability to conceptualize is enhanced, as is their memory capacity. Words, and language in general, provide convenient tags that allow young children to store and retrieve information. Being able to conceptualize and to store and recall those concepts are essential to learning.
Before we can talk sensibly about cognition, though, it is necessary to consider the development of the organ that makes it possible—the brain.
5.1 Brain Development
Development of a fetus's brain. This illustration shows the three major stages of brain development in a fetus.
Dorling Kindersley RF/Thinkstock
At birth, the infant brain is about 25% of its eventual adult weight. It has already grown in utero from a tiny plate, which by the fourth week after conception has closed into a neural tube to form the brain and the spinal cord. First to form are the brain stem structures that will control reflexes and basic motor coordination—the eventual ability to crawl and to stand, for example (See Sequence of Brain Development). At this point, the brain is forming brain cells, or neurons, at the rate of 250,000 per minute. At 5 weeks gestation, the two lobes have formed, and the brain continues to form neurons. By the time a child is born, most of the neurons are already in place. Brain development, however, also requires the creation of neural connectors, or synapses, and most of these are formed after birth. At birth, there are approximately 2,500 synapses per neuron, but by the age of 2 or 3, it is around 15,000 per neuron, more than the brain will ever use. Therefore, another aspect of brain development is the pruning of unneeded synapses and cells. Pruning refers to the discarding of unused cells and continues to some degree throughout life.
Sequence of Brain Development
The human brain develops from bottom to top—from brainstem (1), which develops in utero, to the midbrain at the top of the brain stem (2), followed by the limbic brain, which is the inner central portion of the brain (3). Finally, the outer layer of the brain, the cortex (4), develops. These areas are identified in Figure 5.1.
The least complex functions—breathing, most reflexes, and most sensory capabilities—are the responsibility of the brain stem. The cortex is responsible for the higher cognitive functions. Much of human brain development occurs after birth over the course of many years. This longer period of development means that the cortex has many years to grow, hence its greater volume. The cortex can also be influenced by more environmental factors.
Figure 5.1: The structure and functions of the human brain
Illustration of the structure and functions of the human brain. This figure shows all of the major areas of the brain and their functions. Which ones do you think contribute to language development?
The Critical Period
Although brain development continues through adulthood, the major difference between brain development in a child and an adult is a matter of degree. The child's brain is far more impressionable, or "plastic," in early life than in adulthood. This plasticity means that young children's brains are far more susceptible to enriching influences and to learning than are adults', but it also means that they are more vulnerable to the influences of unfavorable circumstances—poor nutrition, lack of sleep, or lack of mental stimulation and emotional security. This time when the brain is most impressionable, before the plasticity ends, is often referred to as the critical period for brain development. In fact, it would be more accurate to refer to critical periods or windows of opportunity since different areas and functions of the brain appear to develop at different times. For example, there is a critical period for the development of normal vision. From the time they are born, infants need normal visual input in order to develop acuity, or the perception of fine detail, and binocular vision, or the coordinated use of both eyes, which is necessary to develop depth perception. If a child is born with a strabismus, more commonly known as "lazy" eye, or with crossed eyes and the condition is not corrected early, the ability to develop depth perception is threatened.
There is little doubt that environment is extremely important during the first year of life. A British team studying Romanian children adopted into English families before the age of 4 concluded that they showed significant intellectual gains after adoption, although those who showed the most improvement were adopted before the age of 6 months (Rutter et al., 1998). Not all researchers have reported such encouraging results, but all have shown improvement once children were adopted out of the impoverished environment.
Children napping at a Russian orphanage. Children who have spent time in orphanages may experience slower cognitive development, although good care can help to overcome early deficits.
Gideon Mendel/Corbis
A long-term study done at the University of North Carolina adds further evidence that the infant brain is extremely susceptible to environmental influences. Researchers demonstrated that early intervention with children deemed at-risk, as defined by the mothers' low income and education levels, could have a measurable impact on the IQ of these children. The five-year intervention began in the first few months after birth. The experimental group received a program of full-day year-round childcare, nutrition counseling, and parent involvement activities. The control group received only formula and diapers. After 3 years, the impact of the researchers measured the IQ of both groups. The results were startling: The average IQ score of children who had received the additional stimulation through greater parent involvement was 105 while the average IQ of the children who had received only formula and diapers was 85. What is more significant is that the higher IQ held over time—at age 21 the experimental group still displayed a significant intellectual advantage over the control group (Ramey, Campbell, & Blair, 1998). Long-term effects are less obvious when the intervention starts at age 4, but it may also be that the long-term effects are difficult to assess because such precise data are unavailable for government-supported programs such as Head Start. What data are available do suggest some benefit, however, and since we know that the young brain remains highly receptive until age 5 or so, we cannot dismiss the importance of environmental enrichment and stimulation up to that age and beyond.
Critical Period
Brain plasticity is at its peak during the critical period, when input shapes the brain without us having to learn from it. It is a passive period of brain development. Why is a child's physical environment important during this period?
We learned in Chapter 3 that the critical period for language development likely extends to puberty, although some capacities are diminished after the age of 5. Because language and cognitive development are so closely related, as we find out later in the chapter, some impairment is likely to result if a child is not exposed to language before the age of 5. Children are born with the capacity to acquire language—the human brain is prewired, so to speak. At 3 months old, a baby can distinguish several hundred different sounds, far more than are required to learn any one native language. At this point, the brain is capable of acquiring any human language at all. But over the next several months, the infant's brain adapts to the sounds of the language, or languages, spoken around him and ignores and loses those that are not. Young children's brains retain the plasticity needed to relearn any of those earlier sounds, but that ability begins to atrophy at around age 5, and after the onset of puberty, the ability to acquire the sounds of another language is greatly reduced. Hence people who learn a new language before puberty are more likely to sound like native speakers than those who learn it later.
Family at the dinner table. Positive interactions with adults that include casual conversation and a variety of experiences help young children to develop both cognitively and linguistically.
Creatas/Thinkstock
There is also strong evidence that the development of social skills and emotional well-being depend on positive, nurturing attachments being formed during the first year of life, and that emotional security is necessary for intellectual development as well. Child psychologists know very well that there is a straightforward relationship between emotional well-being and brain development. Babies cry when they need something, whether food, sleep, a dry diaper, or another blanket. During the first months of life, babies are busily assessing the effectiveness of their crying. If someone responds to the cries and provides what is needed, babies will be more likely to develop a sense of security and safety with that person. When they no longer have to concern themselves with safety, their brains can focus on the objects and activities that surround them. On the other hand, if their cries do not bring what they need, then that sense of safety does not develop, and their focus is on ensuring that their basic needs are met (Hawley, 2000; Lieberman & Zeanah, 1995).
Over the past two decades, research literature and the popular media have reported much anecdotal data from children reared in Romanian government-run orphanages. A Canadian study of Romanian adoptees showed that these children experienced severe attachment problems (Chisolm, 1995). Experience of adoptive parents and experts who have studied these children supports what to most of us is common sense: Infants need nurturing to grow emotionally strong and able to learn.
What happens in the first three years is especially critical to which neural connections get strengthened and which are discarded. The first three years are thus critical to the brain's development and to children's ability to learn.
Growing a Healthy Brain
Many educators of young children ask, what can we do to help children to develop into well-adjusted, successful learners? Most early childhood educators do not encounter their young pupils until they are well past the 6-month stage. That 6-month stage is critical to developing strong emotional attachments and security.
But there is still much brain development that occurs after this point, and so there is much that we can do. The popular media have reported many stories in recent years about the extraordinary measures that some parents have put into place for stimulating brain growth—playing opera or classical music for the growing fetus, teaching sign language to infants under a year old, purchasing video and audio stimulation kits intended to provide brain stimulation activities that will lead to advanced brain development. Despite the popularity of these interventions, there is no scientific evidence that such measures are any more effective than a normal environment that includes interaction with other people, affection, adequate nutrition and sleep, as well as audio and visual stimulation that comes as a part of regular daily activities. Providing well-fed babies with a variety of things to look at, different voices, and different songs during the waking hours will get most children off to a good start.
Let's take a closer look at the environment and activities that foster brain development in the first five years and that ensure children are ready for learning in school. Preschool children need the following things for optimal brain development:
Adequate nutrition and sleep. Especially in the first year when the brain is actively creating neural connections, or synapses, children require adequate amounts of protein, fats, and vitamins in their diets. They also need adequate sleep. Both good nutrition and sleep help to create these synapses.
Loving interactions with caring adults. Young children need a sense of security so that they can turn their focus away from acquiring what they need to the task of learning. When basic needs are met, then interactions with caring adults "strongly stimulate a child's brain, causing synapses to grow and existing connections to get stronger. Connections that are used become permanent. If a child receives little stimulation early on, the synapses will not develop, and the brain will make fewer connections" (Graham, 2001, revised by Forstadt, 2011).
Exposure to casual conversations, rhymes, songs, reading, and stories. Many of the synapses being formed are those that will soon make language possible. Young children need to hear language and experience language in a variety of contexts so that they will make the neural connections needed for using language appropriately in those contexts.
Visual stimulation. Young children need a variety of visual stimuli, not only to aid in the development of vision but in order to stimulate brain growth in general. Colorful objects of different sizes and shapes are especially important because they catch the baby's attention, and caregivers need to pay attention to how well the baby's eyes are focusing and tracking moving objects.
A variety of experiences. If neural connections are not used or are rarely used, they will atrophy. We learned in Chapter 3 how language learning was impaired when a child was not exposed to language during the first years of life. It is therefore very important to encourage children to explore and to play in safe environments.
Routines. Children need a variety of experiences, but they also need routines and repeated experiences in order to preserve the neural connections they form in the first year. Routines keep the neural pathways open for all future learning.
The absence of any of these factors can lead to stress, which, if prolonged, can have a damaging effect on brain development (see The Effect of Stress on Brain Development). The majority of brain development that occurs after birth is in the cortex, the outer layer of the brain responsible for most cognitive functioning and language. In the sections that follow, we will look briefly at the areas of the brain involved in language. Then, we consider how cognition and language are intertwined, particularly in the development of memory and conceptual development.
The Effect of Stress on Brain Development
Traumatic life experiences such as neglect, abuse, or poverty can be toxic to a child's brain development, especially if there is no caring, supportive adult to provide balance. A caring adult who supports the child's experiences and finds ways of decreasing the stresses can make the stress tolerable and reduce the impact on brain development. For example, a child can tolerate the stressors such as the death of a loved one or a serious illness when there is a caring adult to help him adapt.
Not all stress has a negative effect; in fact, some smaller amounts of stress such as the kinds that occur when a playmate breaks a playdate or a favorite toy goes missing cause no long-term damage. In these cases, the system returns to a calm state fairly quickly. But more serious stress, such as physical or emotional stress or trauma, causes the hormone cortisol to be released.
High levels of cortisol can cause brain cells to die and reduces the connections between the cells in certain areas of the brain, harming the vital brain circuits. The connections in the brain can be severely damaged or miswired if a child is exposed to repeated and longtime stress without the assistance of a caring adult. Babies with strong, positive emotional bonds to their caregivers show consistently lower levels of cortisol in their brains. (Graham & Forstadt, 2000, 2011)
Graham, J., & Forstadt, L. A. (2000, 2011). Children and brain development: What we know about how children learn. University of Maine: Cooperative Extension Publications #4356. Retrieved from http://umaine.edu/publications/4356e/
The Brain and Language
Researchers are a long way from understanding how language is organized in the cortex. For many years, scientists believed that language was a function of the left hemisphere (in right-handed people, but reversed in left-handers). That belief is now seen as simplistic if not erroneous. In fact, there is evidence that the right hemisphere does play a role in language processing and that it even takes over the functioning of the left hemisphere in patients who have damage to the left hemisphere before the age of 5.
The Ability to Recover Language
Michael had the left side of his brain removed at a young age, but eventually regained the ability to produce and process language. What does the recovery of these functions imply about plasticity and language? Do you feel Michael's case supports or refutes the innatist argument?
Child undergoing electroencephalogram (EEG). Scientists are using an electroencephalograph to gather data needed to construct a map of this child's brain.
Phanie/SuperStock
To some degree, it is possible to identify areas of the brain that are primarily associated with language. We know, for example, that in roughly 98% of right-handed people, the language processing center is located in the left hemisphere, but the ability to understand the emotional intent of language is located in the right (Stennes, Burch, Sen, & Bauer, 2005; Segalowitz, 1983; Mihalicek & Wilson, 2011). We also know that specific areas of the brain accomplish particular tasks in language. Wernicke's area, or that region in the upper back part of the temporal lobe, is the area responsible for comprehension while Broca's area, located in the lower back part of the frontal lobe is responsible for oral fluency (more about this in Chapter 7). Surgeons, however, operating on patients with brain tumors cannot work on such general descriptions. When they are removing brain tumors, they must do so with no or minimal damage to the patient's language functioning. To achieve the goal, they require a precise "map" of the brain, showing where language functions reside in each patient.
In recent years, surgeons have mapped the language areas of the brain through "negative" mapping, or by finding out which areas of the brain had no language functioning. In this way, they established that language functions are less centralized in the brain than was once believed. There are many areas of the brain involved in language, and the good news about what surgeons and therapists have learned is that if one language area of the brain is damaged or removed, another undamaged area can often learn the "job" of the other area. As educators, our principal concern is not with brain development per se but with the product of that development: the child's growing mind, especially language and cognition. Let's turn to the role language plays in memory development and in early conceptualization.
5.2 Language and Conceptual Development
If the mind were to treat each object and experience as unique and store it as such, it would be a very cluttered place. What really happens as children see, touch, and hear the objects and events in their lives is that they try to make sense of it all, and the way they do that is to discover links between similar experiences and to group them together. That is the way a concept, a general idea that is produced by combining several separate elements or attributes into a single entity, is formed. In order to form concepts, children have to be able to identify the similarities between experiences, and that is the task of categorization. A category is a grouping of similar attributes—things that fly, words that begin with b, fruits with rinds, and so forth. Concepts rely on categories being formed, but they are not exactly the same. Take the concept of flying: To understand what the concept entails, it is necessary to know some of the things that fly as well as some of the things that do not, but the concept is more abstract than the category. The ability to find commonalities and establish categories is foundational to conceptualization, so both categories and concepts are the essential building blocks of cognitive development. We are able to make sense of the world because we possess an extensive and varied system of categories.
How Children Form Categories and Concepts
As adults, when we encounter a new object or event, we can usually turn to a companion and ask, "What's that?" Two-year-olds do that, too. It is the quickest way to learn, but it is not quite that simple. What do they do with the answer? If, for example, a 2-year-old sees a cruise ship docked in the harbor and asks, "What's that?" a helpful adult says, "That is a ship." The child likely repeats "ship," but where does she store it? Initially, it is a unique occurrence, a category with a membership of one. Later, she sees the ship sailing into open water. She might ask for confirmation, "Ship?" When the adult says yes, the child has two important pieces of information: Ships move and they travel on water. She has also stored some of the visual characteristics of ships.
But what about the infant who does not have the words to ask or to use as "tags" or "labels" for things? How does she gather the information she needs to begin to organize her world into categories and concepts? There is evidence that very young infants group things together and form mental representations of categories well before they have words to help them do so, and that they group things together based on the perceptual features of the object. Perceptual categories are based on the visual attributes of objects, such as shape and color. As they grow older, infants refine their groupings, using less obvious features of objects to determine their category membership. These features will be more abstract and may include the function of the object, and the categories could be "things that move on wheels," "things to play with," or "things with four legs that do not move." This more abstract categorization is necessary for forming concepts. Conceptual categories can also include information that comes from other people, such as the names for objects or descriptions of what they do. This is where we begin to see the interaction between learning words and learning concepts. (See How do Infants Categorize?)
How Do Infants Categorize?
Researchers have developed techniques for determining that infants as young as 3 to 4 months are able to categorize (Arterberry & Bornstein, 2001; Bomba & Siqueland, 1983; Fantz, 1963). These techniques commonly involve three stages:
Stage 1: Infant is shown a set of stimuli on a computer monitor, one after the other:
Figure 5.2: First set of stimuli
Figure showing four different four-sided shapes.
Stage 2: Infant is shown two additional stimuli:
Figure 5.3: Second set of stimuli
Figure showing a four-sided shape and a three-sided shape.
Stage 3: Researcher measures length of time infant stares at each of the new exemplars.
Which exemplar would you expect the infant to stare at longest? What does this tell you about how the infant is categorizing the shapes? (Remember that infants are generally more interested in things they haven't seen before, and in this case, they haven't seen either shape before.)
Experiments such as these confirm that infants are processing two kinds of information: (1) They treat the four-sided figure as a member of the same category they have previously seen even though they have never seen that particular figure before. They have, thus, internalized a category and recognized a member of it, even though they haven't seen it before; and (2) they recognize that the triangle does not belong to this category.
Word Learning Versus Concept Formation
When we examine the relationship between word learning and concept formation, it is the same as exploring the relationship between categorization and early language development. Young infants create a rich store of categories before they are able to speak (Quinn & Oates, 2004). When a child begins to use the word bottle or wheel, she must have a mental representation of a bottle, for example, in order to use it appropriately—the child has "matched" the real-world object with some mental representation that has been given the label, bottle or wheel. If this is the case, there should be a correspondence between spurts of vocabulary growth (see Figure 5.4) and high levels of ability to categorize. Experiments have borne out this relationship (Quinn & Oates, 2004, pp. 54–55). In other words, children need to form categories in order to begin to learn words, but once that learning begins, they can use the information gained in the process of learning words to form increasingly additional accurate category representations. Does the vocabulary spurt cause the improvement in conceptualization? Or does the greater ability to form more abstract conceptual categories fuel the growth spurt? Scientists do not know the answer to these questions, but it is clear that the two processes are somehow symbiotic and interactive.
Figure 5.4: Growth in vocabulary comprehension in boys and girls
Graph showing growth in vocabulary comprehension in boys and girls What factors contribute to the increase in girls' ability to acquire language quicker than boys?
Source: Adapted from data from Burman et al. (2008); Galsworthy et al. (2000); Goldfield et al. (1990); Heinrichs et al. (2010).
Young boys playing with toy cars. Children's first words are grounded in their immediate experience. This boy has learned the names and colors for the toys he plays with, and he understands even more than he produces.
Gulf Images/SuperStock
The data in Figure 5.4 raise important questions about gender differences in language acquisition. The graph does not show that the apparent advantage that girls have appears to extend to about the age of 7. While there may be social factors at play—adults tend to treat male and female children differently—what is also likely is that the differences in male and female brains mean that boys and girls process language differently. Some of these differences include the following:
Language processing is more abstract in girls and more sensory in boys.
Areas of the left brain associated with language work harder in girls during language use than they do in boys.
In reading or being read to, the visual and auditory areas of the brain are more active in boys than in girls.
Boys show more aggressive development in the right hemisphere development, which governs large motor activities and spatial reasoning, while girls show more aggressive development in the left, which directs most language and fine motor skills. (Burman, Bitan, & Booth, 2008)
The differences in how male and female brains process language account for some developmental differences but generally do not affect the sequence of language learning. In word learning, for example, boys and girls will proceed through the same stages, although possibly at a different rate.
When parents talk about their children's word learning, they usually refer to the number or the kinds of words they use. There is a great deal of variation in the particular words infants learn first, and there are also individual differences in the rate at which words are learned. What is less variable, however, is the progression, or stages, involved in word learning. These stages may vary in length, but the order is consistent across cultures—comprehension always precedes production, for example.
Comprehension
The first stage in word learning is comprehension. Comprehension precedes word production (speech) because a baby has to draw on a greater number of abilities—controlling the musculature of the lower jaw as well as the tongue and vocal tract—to create an intelligible representation of a word. It isn't just that the infant hasn't learned to use the vocal apparatus to make words though. The infant vocal tract is not a miniature of the adult's. Until the age of 3 months or so, the larynx is positioned higher and the tongue is proportionally larger in the infant's mouth than the adult's, which is why an infant is much better at comprehending words in the first year than speaking them.
The earliest stages of word learning, therefore, involve comprehension. The first task is to figure out what constitutes a word. As we learned in Chapters 2 and 3, there is not actually any silence between words in normal speech, so an infant has to figure out where the boundaries are. Babies are especially sensitive to the prosodic qualities of speech—the rhythm and the rise and fall in speech, and can distinguish between two languages on this basis alone (Harris, 2004). It is likely, then, that they rely on stress patterns and other prosodic features of speech (Johnson & Jusczyk, 2001). They may also rely on certain properties of individual sounds. In Chapter 2, for example, we learned that the sounds /p, t, and k/ are aspirated, meaning that there is a small puff of air that accompanies them when they occur at the beginning of a word. This is a subtle clue, but it is the kind of thing that infants use to determine where the word boundary is. A third cue comes from the context and the frequency they hear adults use the word. For example, children hear adults using the word dog in sentences such as
There's the dog.
Where's the dog?
That dog needs a bath!
After hearing dog in these different contexts, children eventually conclude that dog is a word, and they also have a good idea what it means, particularly if the parents have provided an additional clue by pointing. Word comprehension begins around 7 months and progresses slowly at first.
Word Production
The second stage is early word production. In most infants, the first sounds are ma, ba, da, and sometimes ga, which usually appear in their first words at between 10 and 13 months. Some children do not produce words with reliable meanings until closer to age 2 years, and as long as their hearing is normal and they exhibit ability to comprehend, this is not usually indicative of a problem. While children will always understand more words than they produce, in most children there is a predictable relationship between the two. Notice in Figure 5.4 that except for a time around 11 months when there is rapid growth in comprehension, for girls, the lines showing growth in comprehension and production are almost parallel.
Many of children's early words are context-specific; that is, when they first appear, they refer only to a particular person, object, or action. Some children, for example, use the word blankie or bankie to refer only to a particular blanket or quilt used at naptime. In general, more than half of the words that children use before the vocabulary spurt (Figure 5.4) are object names. Not all early words are context-specific, however. Researchers have found that among children's earliest words are many that are contextually flexible, meaning that children used them in more than one situation (Bates, Bretherton, & Snyder, 1988, cited in Harris, 2004). Two very common contextually flexible words that children use at a very young age are more and no. In their first 50 words, children demonstrate a great deal of variety not only in the rate at which they add new words to their vocabularies but also in the content of these words.
Many children adopt a referential strategy, meaning that their early words refer mostly to objects; others adopt an expressive style, meaning that they use more action words and people's names. Girls are slightly more likely to adopt the referential strategy, and boys are slightly more likely to adopt an expressive strategy. These early words are largely dependent on children's experiences, in the sense that children have heard them many times before using them. As they get older, they are able to add words that they have heard less often. They are able to do so because their ability to categorize has improved and their memory capacity has also improved.
5.3 Language and Memory
We know that as children grow, they become better at remembering. How does this happen and what role does language play? Sometimes, it plays very little—we navigate the rooms in our house and reach for things in our kitchen cupboards without using words, either mentally or out loud. But for much of the cognitive activity in which we engage, we routinely use language to facilitate recall. Imagine a grocery shopping list without words. Conversely, it is impossible to engage in a conversation without being able to remember what has been said. Language provides us with both a means of encoding experience and with a means of recalling that experience. An experiment conducted many decades ago demonstrated clearly how important language is:
A simple experiment reported by Carmichael, Hogan, and Walter (1932) demonstrated how inextricably linked they can be. In reproducing line drawings they had been asked to remember, subjects in the study routinely distorted them in a way consistent with additional verbal information they had received. (Piper, 2007, p. 242)
What this means is that the language the subjects heard altered their recall of the object shapes they had seen.
Simply put, as children grow, their memories improve. There are several possible explanations for how this happens:
Their basic capacity increases; in other words, the physical and physiological mechanisms needed for memory expand—the connections that form between brain cells grow and become stronger.
Their memory strategies improve. Through practice, they simply get better at storage and retrieval of information.
They learn more about how memory works, and they use this information to manage their own memory.
As they grow older, they know more about the content they need to remember, so they have a better basis for remembering new material (Piper, 2007).
In all likelihood, memory growth involves all four explanations, and language is involved in each.
Language and Basic Memory Capacity
The basic capacities of memory include recognition, association, storage, and retrieval, and these are governed in large part by the neural connections, or synapses, which you will learn more about in Chapter 6. What is important here is how language is involved in the development of each.
Recognition is at the heart of memory and all cognition. This phenomenon is very well developed at birth. Newborns are remarkably good at visual and auditory recognition. They are able to recognize their mother's voice, and by one month are capable of recognizing differences between speech sounds such as /p/ and /b/, suggesting that there is some innate mechanism at work (remember our discussions in Chapter 3). Around 6 months, infants can distinguish between phonetic sounds in their own language or other languages they happen to hear. Researchers discovered, however,
by 10 to 12 months, . . . monolingual babies were no longer detecting sounds in the second language, only in the language they usually heard. . . . The researchers suggested that this represents a process of 'neural commitment' in which the infant brain wires itself to understand one language and its sounds." (Klass, 2011)
Bilingual babies followed a different course of brain development. Unlike the monolingual infants, at between 6 and 9 months, they were unable to detect phonetic sounds in either of the languages to which they were exposed. At 10 to 12 months, however, "they were able to discriminate sounds in both" (Klass, 2011). Research, summarized in Table 5.1, offers evidence that the fact that bilingual babies are exposed to more linguistic diversity means that their perception of linguistic sounds does not narrow as early as that of monolingual children. It offers powerful support for the notion that experience helps to shape the brain.
Table 5.1: Monolingual and bilingual brain development
Age Skill or ability Monolingual infants Bilingual infants
In utero Distinguish rhythms of speech from other rhythms Yes Yes
At birth Show preference for the language(s) they have heard before. Yes Yes
Able to distinguish between their two languages Yes
4 months Distinguish different languages visually (i.e., by watching a silent video of speakers switching languages) Yes Yes
6 months (up to 9 months) Distinguish between phonetic sounds in any language they hear Yes No
8 months Distinguish different languages visually (i.e., by watching a silent video of speakers switching languages) No Yes
10–12 months Distinguish between phonetic sounds in either language they hear No Yes
Sources: Byers-Heinlein, Burns, & Werker (2010); Weikum et al. (2007); Garcia-Sierra et al. (2011); Bialystok (2001).
Grandmother and Granddaughter With Quilt This grandmother is telling her granddaughter family stories associated with the quilt. When the granddaughter retells the story, she will rely on her memory of the stories rather than the events themselves.
Radius/SuperStock
Association, or the ability to link certain stimuli with certain responses, is also present at birth, to some degree. For example, if a rattle is placed in an infant's hand, he quickly learns that moving that hand causes the rattle to make noise. As they get older and acquire language, children are able to make an entirely new set of associations, and with these verbal associations, their memory and learning capacity increase.
In terms of storage and retrieval, the role of language is even clearer. The phenomenon of infant amnesia, or the inability of adults to recall what happened in the first few months of their lives is likely related to the lack of language at that age. The length of time that has passed cannot account for this inability because we are able to recall events that happened many years earlier, often in great detail. What is more likely is that we remember best those events that are also encoded with language. We see this as adults—we verbally "rehearse" the directions to a location even though we may have driven there many times. It is entirely possible that our failure to remember what happened when we were 4 or 5 months old is because we are trying to recall with words things that were never stored as words. This mismatch between the way an event was stored and the way we try to retrieve it points us to the importance of language in building memory capacity: As children grow older, they have language as part of their experience and thus available as a means for encoding that experience while infants do not.
Language and Memory Strategies
Memory strategies include those conscious activities we employ in the hope of improving our chances of remembering. Occurring at some time between the event we want to remember and the attempt to recall it, memory strategies include rehearsal, organization, and elaboration. In the previous section, we saw how rehearsal works. Organization is another key memory strategy. Read the following list of words and then cover up the list so that you can't see it. How many words from this list can you remember?
dog
computer
robin
desk
radish
watermelon
printer
telephone
steak
cat
bookshelf
horse
pencil
mustard
Now, look at the reorganized list:
dog
cat
robin
horse
computer
desk
printer
telephone
bookshelf
pencil
radish
watermelon
steak
mustard
Does it make it easier to remember the 14 items once you see them as a list of four living creatures, six items of office equipment, and four edibles? The ability to categorize is greatly simplified by having language and is a highly effective memory strategy.
Finally, elaboration is another strategy assisted by language. Elaboration also involves making connections between items or events, but it can occur even when there is no categorization involved. Using mnemonics is a commonly used elaboration strategy for remembering. For example, phrases such as, "Rhythm helps your two hips move," may help you recall the spelling of rhythm. Clearly, the existence of language makes this kind of elaboration possible and thus creates another memory strategy.
Memory and Bilingualism
If language is critical to the development of memory strategies, what is the impact of having two languages? Kormi-Nouri and associates (2003) studied the effect of bilingualism on memory in children between the ages of 7.9 and 13.3. They examined their recall for specific events (episodic memory) as well as their memory for general information and facts (semantic memory). Comparing 60 monolingual and 60 bilingual children, the researchers found that the bilinguals did better. Another positive benefit of bilingualism where memory is concerned occurs later in life. Researchers have recently discovered that the onset of Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia occurs, on average, four years later in bilinguals than in monolinguals, if the bilingual continues to speak (as opposed to read and write) two languages later in life (Craik, Bialystok, & Freedman, 2010; Bialystok, Craik, & Freedman, 2007). While children do not have to be concerned about dementia, the fact that bilingualism appears to confer some protection against memory loss argues for the relevance of language acquisition to brain development.
Language and Metamemory
Shopping list People make shopping lists because they know the limitation of memory. This awareness of how memory works (or doesn't) constitutes metamemory.
age fotostock/SuperStock
Metamemory refers to the knowledge or awareness that we have about how memory works that assists us in improving our ability to remember. Suppose that you are in a lecture and at the same time texting your friend about plans for after class. For the most part, you are successful at both tasks, but then suddenly you realize that what the lecturer is saying does not make sense to you, that you have missed something crucial. What you will likely do is to stop texting and listen more attentively, trying to find clues to what you have missed. It is the decision to employ this strategy (stop texting, listen, find clues to what you missed) that constitutes metamemory. As children grow older, they gradually learn that there are limitations on their ability to remember. This awareness leads them to develop a sense of what is hard to remember and to begin to monitor their own ability and create strategies for remembering.
The relationship between metamemory and language is through self-monitoring. From the time they are 2 years old, children are able to correct many of their own language errors. The fact that they can do so means that they are able to compare their utterances with some mental representation of what they know about language. They monitor pronunciation, word choice, and to some extent grammar. They are also able to monitor what they hear. Consider the following exchange:
Quy: Dat fuhfly.
Mother: Yes, that's a fuhfly.
Quy: No! Dat fuhfly.
Mother: Oh, a butterfly?
Quy: Yes.
Quy has rejected his mother's infantile pronunciation because it does not match what he knows the word should sound like, even though he is unable to pronounce it correctly himself. Later, when children begin to read, they develop the ability to monitor their reading, eventually developing the ability to monitor their own comprehension and intervene, by re-reading or asking a question, when it is lacking. This ability to monitor one's own comprehension marks a significant difference between good and poor readers. Self-monitoring begins with language, and as language ability improves, so does memory.
Content knowledge is another factor in the parallel development of language and memory because it affects how much information is stored and how it is recalled. Consider the experience of two women attending a cooking demonstration. Clara is an experienced cook and avid connoisseur of gourmet magazines and television shows. Margaret heats frozen dinners in the microwave and makes dinner reservations. After the cooking demonstration, Margaret explained that she watched a man make thin pancakes and fill them with shrimp and sauce. Clara explained that the chef demonstrated how to make whole wheat crepes, which he filled with shellfish that had been poached in wine and then stirred into a sherry-flavored béchamel. Clara's knowledge of cooking and the language for talking about it have obviously influenced what she recalled and the amount of detail. This is similar with children: The more they know about the world, the easier it is for them to categorize their experiences; the more language they know, the easier it is to label those categories, and as we have seen, the ability to form categories is critical to concept formation.
What are children actually doing while the basic capacities, memory strategies, and metamemory develop? How do their activities contribute? Generally speaking, they are interacting with the adults in their lives, possibly with other siblings, engaging in a variety of language activities. Long before they can speak, they hear and attend to language being addressed to them, and in that way they learn that language is purposeful, communicative, and meaningful, and, we hope, associated with pleasurable events. As children learn the labels for objects, they are not worried about increasing their memory capacity or vocabulary size—they are merely consumed by an eager and lively curiosity that they are trying to satisfy. Whether babbling or producing rhymes or telling stories, they engage in language because it is fun. Children don't realize that they are also developing elaboration strategies to help with memory, yet they are very much in charge of their own learning. They can be prompted through social interactions, but the speed and the sequence in which they learn is up to them. Other than providing a rich language environment, adults do not control the pace of development. What they do control is the environment, and here they play a critical role. Language is central to the growth of memory, which is, in turn, central to children's overall cognitive development, and it is a principal means by which children come to understand and to organize their experience. It is, therefore, incumbent on adults to provide a variety of play and other opportunities for language and thus cognition to grow and to thrive.
Although from the perspective of young children, their "job" during the first few years of life is to figure out how their world is organized and how they relate to others in it, what is happening largely without their awareness is that they are preparing for schooling. They are getting ready, with help, to read and to write as the basis for everything else they need to learn in school. In the final section of the chapter, we examine the role of language in the development of early academic skills.
5.4 Language and Early Academic Learning
Father and daughter reading books in library. This father and daughter are reading a book about the alphabet, thereby, laying the foundation for academic learning when she goes to school.
Blend Images/SuperStock
Although we tend to think of children's academic thinking ability as developing during the school years, the fact is that the foundations are laid much earlier. Researchers have estimated that at least a third of children's academic skills are acquired before the age of 6 years (Yardley, 1973; Piper, 2007). That means that it is especially important that early childhood educators understand the role that language plays in creating these early skills. Before going deeper into this topic, it is necessary to make one thing clear: The kind of language that helps children to learn is not necessarily the adult telling them how to do something. That kind of intervention often deprives children of the opportunity to learn something on their own. In the process of learning on their own, children also learn more about how to learn. The language that is helpful is the kind that prompts children or subtly directs them toward finding the solution themselves. Fortunately, there are abundant opportunities in the early years for children to learn and to develop strategies for learning more (see Learning in Preschool). Much of this learning will help them with the subjects they will later encounter in school because their parents have actively taught them—the ABC song, for example, or how to count to 10, or they have watched educational television or videos, or they have found their own resources for learning, perhaps by observing older children. The three areas that we will examine here are reading, writing, and arithmetic, generally considered to be the building blocks of a good education.
Learning in Preschool
The learning that occurs in the first five years happens at home and, for many children, in preschool and daycare settings. Wherever it occurs, it is important because research has shown that the quality of preschool experience has a measurable effect on children's later cognitive performance.
Researchers observing 4-year-olds in preschool classrooms in 10 countries found compelling evidence that the children's scores on tests at age 7 were positively influenced by their preschool experience. In particular, they found that cognitive performance was associated with their having spent more time in small-group activities and having a greater number and variety of toys and objects to play with. They found that language development was enhanced by having more activities that children chose for themselves rather than by the teacher and by having better educated teachers. In countries where the norm was for the children to spend most of their time working or playing individually, more interaction with teachers was linked to better language development.
On the other hand, in countries where teacher-centered classrooms were the norm, better language learning was associated with less interaction with teachers. These findings underscore "the importance of active exploration for young children's concept learning and the importance of active speaking for their language learning" (Bardige, 2009, p. 147).
Early Learning and Arithmetic
Most children know how to solve simple addition problems with sums smaller than 10 before they enter first grade. One of the strategies they use to do this is to choose the larger of the two numbers to be added and then count upward from it the number of times indicated by the smaller number. Sometimes, fingers are involved! So a child adding two and four will begin with four and count up two—five, six—to arrive at the right answer. Language and memory are required for this simple task; a child has to be able to remember the strategy to use and keep in mind the starting place and the number of places to count ahead. Most 5-year-olds can do this, many 4-year-olds can, but it is still beyond the ability of a 2- or even most 3-year-olds. Children apply the same strategy in reverse for subtraction, counting backward. This is not the only strategy children employ to figure out the answers to arithmetic problems. Whether they are counting forward or counting backward, children cannot count at all without language.
During the early childhood years, there are abundant opportunities for children to learn numeracy. From the time that a baby notices that all the bananas have been eaten and says, "All gone," and then follows up with a request, "More," we can see that the foundations for numeracy are in place. Later, as a child plays with blocks or finger puppets or small cars, she begins to count them, add and take away, the opportunity arises for parents or teachers to encourage the child by probing with questions such as, "And now how many are there?" and perhaps counting along with the child. In such a way, they assist children to learn not only basic arithmetic but the language for doing it.
Mathematics and Bilinguals
Researchers have further demonstrated the close relationship between language and mathematics skills by studying bilingual children. A team of British researchers analyzed primary school children using two languages in mathematics and English lessons. They found that having two languages was not at all confusing but appeared to deepen their understanding of key concepts. It appeared, for example, that children who were allowed to use their mother tongue as well as English grasped division and multiplication more easily than monolinguals (British Broadcasting Corporation [BBC] News, 2007).
Early Learning and Reading
The earliest learning associated with reading occurs when children develop concepts about books. In other words, they figure out what a book does or what it is for. As they are read to, or as they observe others reading, they begin to attend to print. They learn that there is a connection between those marks on the page and oral language and that they have meaning to the person reading them. By the time they get to kindergarten, some children will already have learned to read, meaning that they can not only identify a number of words correctly but that they are able to read printed text and understand its meaning, whether that text be a sign, a book, or a billboard. In simple terms, what happens is that children hear stories being read to them, they show an interest in "decoding" the printed text by pointing to text and asking, "What's that?" by watching children's educational television or video, or through more direct intervention such as a parent showing them flashcards or writing down words for them. Early readers excel at the decoding stage and quickly move on to more advanced strategies such as predicting, and they are able to do so because they have had a great deal of exposure to reading and stories. In short, they know that the task of text is to tell a story or convey a message, and they set themselves the task of figuring out how to extract that meaning.
Among children who do not learn to read before they get to school, most know a great deal about the reading process anyway. They have begun to learn that words are different from drawings and that not all squiggles and lines are the same. Making these distinctions is a complex perceptual task; it requires that children learn which curved, horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines are meaningful and which are not. An interesting question arises here: Does learning to name the letters (e.g., recite the alphabet) help children learn to read? My older son, who was able to read simple children's stories by his 3rd birthday, saw no point to the exercise at all. When he was 4, he told his teacher that learning to say the ABCs was "silly because you just mix them all up anyway." On the one hand, there is some indication that children's ability to identify and name letters predicts their early reading achievement (deHirsch, Jansky, & Langford, 1966; Walsh, Price, & Gillingham, 1988; cited in Piper, 2007). It would be a mistake to assume, however, that simply teaching young children to name letters will improve reading ability, because the association may not be direct. What is more likely is that knowing the names of letters means that a child has been exposed to a stimulating print-rich environment that has not only allowed her to learn the names of letters but has helped her to a greater awareness of what reading entails and a rich set of oral language skills. While teaching young children the alphabet will probably be helpful, it is equally important to help children develop strong oral language skills.
In order to become proficient readers, children must acquire more than letter perception and identification skills. They also have to make the connection between letter and phoneme (Chapter 2) and learn to identify words. But ultimately, what they must do to become true readers is to re-create meaning from printed text. In other words, they must acquire comprehension skills. Reading comprehension is one of the most active and complex cognitive activities in which we engage, even as adults. It is also an important skill children must acquire to succeed in school and to develop and pursue a wide range of interests for the rest of their lives. A full description of what is involved in reading comprehension, or listening comprehension, is beyond the scope of this book. We can examine the process in general terms with the following example.
The high wind blew the chairs into the pool.
What is involved in extracting the meaning from this sentence? The reader must accomplish the following:
Have some kind of recognition and retrieval system to match the words on the printed page with the words in memory.
Select the appropriate meaning for words with more than one meaning (e.g., high and pool).
Discern all of the meaning propositions present in the sentence. In this sentence, those include the following:
There was a wind blowing.
The wind was strong (high).
There were chairs outside.
There was a pool.
The chairs were near the pool.
The chairs went into the pool.
Integrate all of the meaning propositions into a single sentence to store in memory. When readers integrate, they combine all the propositions, and they do so according to the rules of English syntax.
Mother reading to her young daughters. These girls do not yet know how to read, but because their mother reads to them regularly, they show an interest in reading and have learned how stories are structured.
Alaska Stock Images/National Geographic Stock
Asked to recall this sentence several days later, a reader might remember There was a high wind and it blew some chairs into the swimming pool. This is not the sentence he read, but it does include all the meaning propositions and capture the writer's intent. This is the essence of reading comprehension—not memorizing what the words were, but remembering what was communicated.
One further skill that children need to develop if they are to become successful readers is to monitor their own comprehension. Readers of all ages are more proficient if they are able to monitor their understanding of the text they are reading and adopt strategies for dealing with any problems they encounter. Different kinds of texts require different strategies—most of us can read a novel in a busy airport or with music or television blaring. We probably would be less successful reading a graduate-level text on astrophysics in those environments. The reason is that the strategies we use for comprehending different kinds of text depend on our purpose, on how the material is structured, and the knowledge and experience we bring to the task. In the child's world, some texts will be easier to comprehend than others. Children who have heard many stories know how stories are structured and, to some degree, what to expect. If they have not had those experiences, then they might experience a little more difficulty working out a reading strategy. In this case, teaching the child word-recognition skills won't help much. Certainly, that is a first step, but an even more important step is to build up the child's oral language experience with stories and narratives in which the child can participate. None of this would be possible, of course, without language and, specifically, without oral language. Oral language (or sign language in deaf children) is the foundation for all future reading and writing abilities.
Reading in Bilinguals
With bilinguals, progress toward literacy will depend on a number of factors including the language to which they are first introduced to print. In some instances, children are introduced to print in both their languages. With Isabelle, the bilingual French-English child we met in earlier chapters, her mother read to her in French and her father in English. Isabelle learned to read first in English—the language which she used more often—the summer before she began attending a French-language kindergarten. Her reading ability transferred easily to French, and now in first grade, she is able to read both languages at grade level. Isabelle had a strong oral basis in English, learned to read in English, and then transferred the reading skill to French. Not all bilingual children are in this situation. "The progress in acquiring literacy by bilingual children will depend in part on social, political and educational factors that define the child's environment at the time that literacy is introduced" (Bialystok, 2001; Chapter 6, para. 4). Sometimes, children have to learn to read in the majority language (English) even though their oral language skills are stronger in the minority language. This situation places an additional burden on bilingual children who have not yet acquired reading skills to transfer but who must first master the cognitive skills necessary for reading in a less-familiar language. But despite the many differences, "Children must ultimately learn how to read texts, and this is a cognitive problem" (Bialystok, 2001, Chapter 6, para. 8). They go through three stages as they move toward independent literacy:
Preliteracy. At this stage, children learn that print represents language and the basics of the writing system.
Early reading. At this stage, they learn the rules for matching the print symbols to language sounds.
Fluent reading. At this stage, the meaning of the text takes priority. Children begin to read and to write to get and to transmit ideas or information that they did not have before.
These are the same stages through which monolingual children progress and what precedes all of them is oral language.
Early Learning and Writing
Writing is the language skill that causes more problems for more people than any other. Everyone learns to speak and understand oral language, most people eventually learn to read, with varying degrees of proficiency. But even people who are extremely well read profess to having difficulty with writing. It would seem that reading and writing should involve the same processes in reverse, and if that were the case, proficiency in reading should lead to proficiency in writing. Certainly, most competent writers are also very competent readers, but many competent readers are only marginally successful writers. Why? We don't actually know why writing is so hard to remediate. We know a great deal more about what is involved in learning to speak and in both aural and written comprehension than we do about learning to write. What we do know about young children learning to write involves a complex network of interactive processes. The first task is organizing what it is that the writer wants to say. Many of us have faced the tyranny of the blank page and know that having a topic given to us is only slightly better than having to find one. But let's consider a 6-year-old faced with the challenge of writing a story. What is involved?
The obvious first step is having something to say. Sometimes, teachers consider that they are offering sufficient guidance when they ask children to "write a story." But that is difficult even for an adult. We do not—or should not—begin to write until we have something to say, so the experienced teacher knows to help children do some prewriting by talking through the story or the experience they will write. In order to do that, writers have to retrieve the information relevant to the topic from long-term memory. The next task is to organize it. Our memory of an event does not always provide us with the best structure for writing it down. This paragraph, written by a 7-year-old child, illustrates the problem:
The ocean was cold. We went to visit my uncle Josh. We went swimming. The water was salty and also cold and that's because Uncle Josh lives in Oregon. Oregon is colder than California.
Toddler drawing in notepad. Although it appears that this boy simply puts scribbles on a page, he is actually showing signs of language awareness.
age fotostock/SuperStock
This child has simply put down everything he could recall about the trip to his uncle's. With guidance, though, this child could be talked through the story and re-create it chronologically. In order to do this, the writer has to formulate a plan for the story and keep it in mind long enough to write it down. Until late in the third-grade year or even the fourth-grade year, children have difficulty in this kind of mental advance planning. That is why oral language is such an important part of developing skills. The more familiar children are with hearing and telling stories, the easier it is to organize them in their minds and then on paper. To get the story on paper, the writer must manage the mechanics, whether with pencil, pen, or keyboard. Often, with 5- and 6-year olds, the physical demands of writing down their thoughts require so much of their attention that they have little to devote to organization. It is extremely helpful for teachers (or parents or older children) to serve as scribes, writing down the stories children tell (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1982; Kirk, 1999). They will create better quality stories than they otherwise would, but more importantly, they have built a skill that will transfer when they are older and better able to cope with the physical demands of writing. Once again, we see the importance of oral language to children's learning of a skill that will not only be necessary in school but will serve them for the rest of their lives.
The process of learning to write begins at the same time as learning to read, although it takes a different course. In the preschool through primary years, the process involves four stages:
Beginning writing, which describes the stage at which children use their drawings to represent their meanings and pretend-read aloud the story they convey. Their writing at this stage may follow a left to right orientation and may consist of scribbles. They are essentially mimicking what they have seen older children and adults do.
Early emergent writing, which describes the stage during which children typically demonstrate their awareness that print represents sounds. For example, they may draw a picture and then write some of the letters associated with the picture.
Emergent writing, which describes the stage at which children begin to create more identifiable letters with spaces between them, may begin to use sequences of letters, and make letters over and over to practice the way they are formed. Children at this stage may begin to write their own names.
Early writing is the stage in which children demonstrate increased awareness of sound/symbol correspondence by creating their own spellings. They begin to use capital and lowercase letters and to space words more consistently. Many children at this stage practice by copying letters, words, or even sentences. (Adapted from Welton, 2010)
Six Characteristics of Early Learning
It is not an overstatement to say that almost all the learning we will do during a lifetime is based in language. True, there are certain mechanical acts that we learn independent of language before we have language, but once we acquire the ability to speak and to think in language, we use it to teach ourselves and to learn. This is true of children in the preschool years, a time in which their learning has certain identifiable characteristics, six of which are especially important to preschool teachers.
Learning Proceeds According to Degree of Readiness
Language itself is a good example of how this is true. It does no good to try to teach a 2-month old baby to say Mama or milk or any other word. Physically and cognitively, the baby is not yet able to do so. In a few months, he will be able to do that, but even when he's 8 months old, he won't be able to produce meaningful three-word sentences. When I asked my granddaughter Isabelle what she wanted for her 5th birthday, she told me, "Nana, I really, really want to learn to read." I had tried to interest her in the task a few months earlier, noting her intense interest in books, but I failed. After her birthday, we spent a month on the task, and Isabelle became a reader.
Children are in Charge of Their Own Learning
They might not know they are in charge, but they are. Their decisions are governed in large part by maturity but also by their curiosity about the world around them. Sometimes it happens that children's wish to learn something is in advance of their ability to do so, and this can be very powerful. Alberto could put together simple wooden puzzles intended for 3–4 year olds before his second birthday. He appeared to be motivated by a desire to see the completed picture, but it was also the case that he had watched older children do it and wanted to be able to do it himself. His younger brother Juan had no interest in puzzles, but he wanted to learn to count and would practice counting with anything he could find to count. Juan eventually learned to do puzzles, and Alberto learned to count, but in each case, the brothers determined, what, when, and how they would learn.
Much Learning Happens While Children Play
Girl playing with potato head toys. Play is serious business for children; it helps them to develop cognitively, linguistically, and socially. Here, Isabelle plays and learns with her potato head toys.
Stephanie Hull
Play is the work of childhood. It serves to foster motor and cognitive development, and its importance cannot be underestimated. Playing on swings, monkey bars, or just running after a dog or a ball will help them to acquire gross motor skills. Playing with puzzles and building blocks will help to develop fine motor skills, and when they play rhyming games or play games counting red cars and blue cars on a road trip, they are not only learning but they are learning how to learn.
The Role of Adults Is to Facilitate Rather Than to Teach
It follows that if children are really in charge of their own learning and that if play is central to that learning, that adults should not worry about teaching as much as providing opportunities for learning. For parents, perhaps the most important role they play is to be partners in daily interaction. Whether they are engaged in routines such as the washing of hands or getting ready for bed, or in special activities such as decorating a gingerbread house at Christmas or dressing up for a birthday party, the dialogues that occur between parents and children are the means through which children learn. In school, it is very similar. Teachers talk children through the routines of the classroom and special events, they demonstrate when necessary, and they provide an environment that is rich with learning opportunities. At home and at school, conversation between adults and children should be a collaborative event with the adult adapting speech as necessary to children's maturity level. Parents and teachers who understand that their own knowledge cannot be transmitted directly also understand that their job is to guide gently.
Learning Is Essential to Children's Language Acquisition
We have seen through these five chapters that language is not something children learn as a mental exercise but in order to communicate, to engage in meaningful interaction with the people who surround them. We don't have to teach children to talk, but we do have to provide them with the opportunities to do so, and not just to talk, but to listen, to experience language used for many purposes, and eventually to read and to write. It begins with birth. An infant cannot understand what his mother is saying or singing, but the fact that she does so is critical to the infant developing a sense of security, a knowledge of what language does, and cognitive skills. When a father takes the time to explain to his 3-year-old son what he is doing as he changes the oil in his car, the father knows that some of the language and concepts are beyond his son's ability to understand. But the dialogue is important because the boy will understand some of it, he will likely learn some new vocabulary, and his interest will be piqued—in language and possibly in cars and how they work. The child's understandings at this point will be imperfect, but the seeds are there and, with attention, will grow.
Dialogues between adults and children provide opportunities for learning, but the dialogue has to be real, that is, the adult has to learn to listen to the child. It isn't always easy—young children do not always have the language they need to express what they want to say, or they may say it differently. Adults, and especially teachers, need to pay attention to what is being said and ask questions or offer interpretations to help them out. An absent-minded, "Oh, good," or even "Wow" in response to a child's utterance doesn't count as dialogue. Children catch on very quickly if the adult is not paying attention or is only partly attending. If that happens often, the child may conclude that there's no point to trying to make him or herself understood.
Learning Is Embedded in the Process of Socialization
The life of a preschooler is an integrated whole of experiences. The day does not even slightly resemble a school curriculum. The day is not divided into blocks of time—a half hour for hygiene, an hour for motor development, an hour for cognitive learning, half an hour for socialization, and so forth. The experiences all relate in some way to the process of attaining full membership in the family and the larger society in which the family lives. Children's early learning is directed toward achieving membership in a group—family, extended family, neighborhood, et cetera. They don't learn words because their biological clocks say it is time to do so (although they can't learn them before that) but because they are trying to connect with other people. From our perspective as educators, we see the abundance of learning that takes place during the preschool years—children learn thousands of words, develop concepts, and acquire the foundations for all the academic learning that will follow. That is not, however, the perspective of preschool children—what they are doing is learning to become like the people around them. They are learning to belong.
Ch. 5 Conclusion
During the years before children reach school age, they are building the foundations for a lifetime of learning. The brain is much more "plastic" during these years, making this a time during which environmental influences have a tremendous impact.
There are several critical periods for learning, depending on what is being learned. The window of opportunity for acquiring native-speaker-like control of language, for example, begins to close around the age of 5 and is almost entirely diminished by the onset of puberty. Cognitive development occurs in tandem with language development. Word learning is inextricably linked with the ability to categorize and conceptualize, and language plays an important role in the development of memory.
We also explored the relationship between language and early learning of arithmetic and literacy skills. To a large extent, children are the architects of their own learning. Nevertheless, most children follow the same developmental sequence, as we will discover in Chapter 6.
Categories and Concepts
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Ch. 6 Introduction
On his first day of kindergarten, Kai is afraid. He hasn't been to preschool, and he's lived in the United States for only a year. He doesn't know what will be expected of him, and he is nervous about being able to speak well enough to get by. Even though many children in the school he will attend speak his language, Mandarin, Kai doesn't yet know this. His parents are worried that they have not prepared him for his new life in an American school. His language skills are good; he can read and write his own name and those of his family members in both his languages, and he has already picked up a lot of English in the community. Still, they worry. What will the school expect of him? Will he understand? Will he succeed?
As long as Kai has had a relatively normal environment, there is no cause for concern. We learned in Chapter 5 that much of cognitive development occurs before children are able to use language. Once they begin to acquire language, that growth is accelerated because language and cognition are intricately linked. Although most of the academic skills children need to succeed in school are acquired during the school years, about a third of those skills are acquired before the age of 6. Understanding the course of that development is necessary so teachers can create appropriate learning activities based on children's developmental stages. Every child is unique, yet in the development of language, there are more similarities than differences between children. In infancy, most children babble by the time they are 6 months old (Chapter 3). The first identifiable words usually appear before the first birthday (Chapter 5). Continued development generally follows a predictable course as well, although it would be a mistake to assume any child will follow an exact schedule. It is important to note, however, that although children reach different stages at different times, the order in which they progress through the stages varies very little. This consistency is due to the biological "equipment" that children bring to the task of learning language and to the interrelationship between language and cognitive development.
In this chapter, we will look at developmental milestones in a child's life from birth until 5 years. With examples from Kai and other children, we look broadly at physical, cognitive, and language development during this period. The exact age for any particular developmental achievement is somewhat arbitrary. The ages used here represent general tendencies across all children rather than a calendar or schedule for development. In each period, we begin with a general overview of physical, cognitive, and linguistic development before examining linguistic development in more detail.
Children's Language Development: A Portrait of the Process
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6.1 From Birth to 6 Months
On the day he was born, Kai weighed 7 pounds, 4 ounces, and was 21 inches long. He cried loudly, without any tears, and although his parents showered him with attention, he appeared oblivious to their attempts to comfort him. Over the next few weeks, however, they began to notice that he attempted to focus on their faces when they talked to him, and his mother was certain that his crying differed as he attempted to express different needs. The development changes that occurred during Kai's first 6 months might have appeared to be minimal to a casual observer. But Kai was following the same course of development as every other normally developing human child. Changes occurring during the first 6 months of life aren't easily observed, but there are very significant developments:
Infants develop binocular vision, meaning that their eyes begin to move together in unison. This is especially important for their ability to see and form visual perceptions.
They will produce tears when crying (newborns typically cry without forming tears).
The swallowing reflex, which moves food from the front to the back of the tongue, is still immature until the latter weeks of this period; the same tongue movements will be important for language later.
The Landau reflex will appear at around 3 months. This reflex is an instinctive reaction in which infants held in a face-down position will lift their heads and fully extend their legs. It is useful to keep a baby from smothering when placed face down. It disappears once the child has developed sufficient muscular control to no longer need it, usually around the first birthday. This reflex helps the child to strengthen muscle tone and refine motor skills necessary for sitting, crawling, and walking. Without this reflex, a baby placed on a blanket would only be able to move her head from side to side. Unable to raise her head, she would have a limited field of vision and be unaware of anything occurring above the level of the blanket; thus, her range of perception would be greatly reduced.
Woman playing with baby A game of peek-a-boo with Mom is not only fun but is helping this baby learn the concept of object permanence.
Brand X Pictures/Thinkstock
Although cognitive development is difficult to observe or measure during this period, there are certain indicators of what is happening. For example, Kai loved to play peek-a-boo, as do most infants. It is a way for them to begin to learn object permanence (i.e., that an object does not cease to exist when it disappears from view), and most cultures have their version of peek-a-boo. In Japanese, for example, it is called inai inai ba. Between 4 and 6 months old, babies begin to realize that crying gets adult attention, and babies will begin to develop other ways of gaining attention—squealing or wiggling, for example. Some infants appear to know their names by 6 months, turning toward the person who says it. They also begin to differentiate between familiar faces and strangers. In terms of language, the behavior at this point is not linguistic per se, but infants do exhibit behaviors indicating important prerequisites to language learning. These are the precursory behaviors discussed next.
Precursors to Language
We tend to think of language acquisition as starting when the child clearly understands words—by pointing at an object named by an adult, for example. But language learning begins much earlier than that. Some researchers argue that language learning begins before birth (see Precursory Language Behavior), and to some degree this is true. As we learned in previous chapters, there is an innate predisposition to learn language, and that is formed in the brain before birth. Also, some evidence indicates that children become accustomed to the rhythms of their mothers' speech while in utero. Newborns' crying has been found to mimic the prosodic features of their own language (Cross, 2009). However, crying is not language per se, nor is babbling. Both are precursors to language, and they are important because they are prerequisites to language learning. Their absence could signal auditory or cognitive problems that should be assessed by a physician.
Precursory Language Behavior
The capacity to acquire language is innate, and evidence shows that language development begins in utero. The fetus hears the distinct cadences, intonations, and pitches of his mother's voice and, to some degree, other sounds in the environment. Evidence that fetal learning takes place includes the following:
The newborn infant recognizes and shows a preference for the human voice above other sounds.
The newborn will also show strong preference for the mother's voice over other female voices.
Researchers at the University of South Carolina studied the behavior of children of mothers who had been instructed to read Dr. Seuss out loud while pregnant. In particular, they tested to see whether infants recognized Dr. Seuss stories and whether they were able to recognize their mother's voice against other readers. Infants were able to do both, picking up on the vocal patterns they'd become familiar with in utero (DeCasper & Spence, 1986).
British researchers discovered that infants born to mothers who had routinely watched a particular soap opera during pregnancy were attentive to the theme music of the soap opera after birth while children whose mothers had not watched the program did not exhibit such behavior (Hepper, 1988).
What other kinds of behavior would you consider as evidence for fetal language learning?
Newborns in nursery Although these newborns cannot yet speak or even babble, they can distinguish the human voice from other sounds. They can also communicate their needs vocally. Such vocalizations are a precursor to true language.
age fotostock/SuperStock
Babies are born with brains primed to acquire language. They have the capacity to distinguish human speech from other sounds, to figure out which sounds are significant and which are not, where word boundaries are, and how words get strung together to make meaningful sentences. During the first few months of life, infants perceive and produce sounds. They also learn about events, objects, and relationships as they interact with the people around them. From birth, infants can hear the full spectrum of sounds produced around them. In terms of language learning, their task in the first months is to work out which ones are significant and which ones can be ignored. Eventually, they will learn to pay attention and to produce the distinctive ones—the phonemes—of the language or languages they hear (Chapter 2).
Babies do not lie silently in their cribs working out the sound system in silence, though. They cry when wet, tired, or hungry; they coo or smile when happy or amused; and these are forms of communication. These are precursory language behaviors which differ from language in two important ways. First, during these early vocalizations, they do not use any of the conventions of language in these communications. The second difference has to do with intent. During the first 6 to 10 months, infants' vocalizations reflect states of being—discomfort or pleasure. These early vocalizations are related to language learning and share characteristics of the language the children hear around them (Cross, 2009; Mampe, Friederici, Christophe, & Wermke, 2009). They represent affect (feelings or emotion) and changes in affect. Later with language, children begin to communicate intentionally (i.e., they are aware of and intend to communicate a particular meaning).
Precursors to Language
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Early Vocalizations
Crying begins at the moment of birth and is the child's earliest vocalization. Crying is not language, but it is important to note that crying appears to be differentiated in a similar way that language is—different cries serve different purposes, even if the infant may not be aware of the distinction. Cooing begins at around 6 weeks of age, and it is at this time that the vowel sounds ahh, ee, and oo begin to appear. Cooing behavior serves as a rehearsal of the tongue movements that will later be necessary for speech. The earliest vocalizations—crying, cooing, and seemingly random acts of vocal noisemaking—can be thought of as warm-up sessions. At 2 to 3 months, the cooing and noisemaking appears to be random, but gradually this gives way to babbling with a more rhythmic or sing-song quality. By around 5 months, infants begin to make more complex and more organized sounds. They have begun to babble.
6.2 From 6 Months to 1 Year
This is a very active time in children's development; it is the "doing" stage in which many changes occur. Physically, they grow rapidly and begin to develop mobility. Typically, babies during this period will
Baby crawling Crawling is an important developmental stage; it helps infants develop muscular strength and large motor skills. It also provides a way of expanding their experiences.
Pixland/Thinkstock
begin to roll over and crawl;
sit up, first with support and then by themselves;
pull themselves up to a standing position;
walk while holding onto furniture or a person's hand;
cut the first teeth;
triple their birth weight (by the end of this period); and
begin to assert self by resisting dressing or undressing and feeding.
Babies during this stage also exhibit behavior that demonstrates their cognitive growth. They begin to
imitate sounds and actions;
recognize words and simple phrases;
attempt to say a few words;
look for familiar objects that have disappeared from view;
respond to their own names;
point to familiar objects;
enjoy stacking things and putting things into containers;
show evidence that they remember familiar objects and people; and
anticipate routines, thereby also exhibiting memory.
At birth, crying is the principal vocalization that babies engage in. Gradually, however, their vocalizations become more language-like.
Babbling
If the earliest vocalizations are the warm-up, babbling can be thought of as "dress rehearsal" for language (see The Importance of Babbling). "Although precisely how babbling relates to language development is not yet clearly understood, psychologists and linguists have suggested that babbling serves at least two functions: as practice for later speech and as a social reward" (Mihalicek & Wilson, 2011, p. 324). At first, infants' babbling may sound like random noises with only a few of the sounds resembling language, but gradually the noises start to take on the characteristics of the language or languages around them. In fact, over the next months and extending into the stage when first words appear, it is possible to see steady growth toward real words.
By the time they are 6 months old, babies begin to produce recognizable syllables such as ba, ma, and da. Within 2 months, most babies will begin to reduplicate these sounds, creating baba, mama, and dada. Many parents will hear these combinations of sounds as words, but it is unlikely at this point that babies intend any meaning. Rather, they are rehearsing the sounds they hear and are beginning to differentiate those that correspond to the language around them from those that do not. During the final stage of babbling, babies begin to create two-syllable utterances (some of which may be words) by adding one syllable to an entirely different one, thus producing forms such as ma me. In most children, this final stage of babbling occurs around 10 months and is coincident with first words.
The Importance of Babbling
Although it is hard to say with any precision exactly how babbling relates to later language development, much of what we know about babbling in infants constitutes evidence that it does play an important role. We know that
babbling gives babies practice in using the articulatory system—especially the mouth, tongue, and lips—that they will eventually use to talk;
early babbling sounds pretty much the same all over the world;
children who are deaf do babble, but they tend to start a little later. If their parents sign to them, they may start to "babble" with gestures; and
one of the first identifiable speech sounds is m, a sound that a contented baby can make while nursing.
To hear different kinds of babbling sounds, go to the Weblinks section at the end of the chapter and find the link under "Babbling."
Babbling
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First Words
Babbling is articulatory practice for producing real words, but using real words intentionally to express meaning is a result of the categorization and concept development that has been going on since birth, as we learned in Chapter 5. The age at which children begin to produce real, intentional words varies, but it is usually around 1 year, although there is no cause for concern if the first words do not appear until 16 or even 18 months. Some infants simply take a longer time with warm-up and rehearsal, and there is undoubtedly a great deal of categorization conceptualization going on as well, learning that is important to language acquisition but which is unobservable. Whatever language the child speaks, the first words will be concrete content words (mama, cookie, doggy). That is because children's first words tend to grow directly out of their experience.
Woman teaching baby to walk Eager to learn to walk, this child gets some assistance from an adult. Walking and talking are similar in this way—a little assistance is useful but not required.
Blue Jean Images/SuperStock
Researcher Margaret Harris and colleagues (Harris, 2009) studied four children from the age of 6 months until 2 years old to determine how their first words were used and, in particular, the degree to which they reflected their mothers' use of the words. They asked parents to keep a word diary for each child, recording the use and context of each word. The researchers also filmed interactions between the mothers and children at 2-week intervals. Once they were sure that a child was using a word and not just babbling, they examined the mother's utterances over the previous month to discover how many times the mother had used the word and the context in which she had done so. Studying a total of 40 words, they discovered that in 33 instances, the child's use was identical to the mother's, and in only 3 instances out of the 40 did the child's use bear no resemblance at all to the mother's. In an earlier study, Harris had concluded that "78 per cent of maternal utterances to 16-month-old infants referred to objects on which the child was currently focusing attention" (Harris, 2009). Therefore, it is not surprising that children's first words are so firmly rooted in their interaction with the world around them. These words are usually the names of familiar objects or persons—mama, daddy, nana, cookie, and jump. At this stage, the sounds of those words may be imperfect, as we saw in Chapter 3. Isabelle, for example, could articulate mama and daddy almost perfectly, but nana (for banana) left off the first syllable. Cookie was pronounced "kookoo" and jump was "yum."
When children begin to use a word, often they will use it only in a single context. Margaret Harris gives the example of a child named James who "initially used the word mummy only when he was handing a toy to his mother and there only when pointing up to a picture on a frieze" (Harris, 2009, p. 85). Not all early words are used in limited contexts, however. One of the most common examples is the word more, which children often use in a variety of contexts—to request another cookie, more milk, or the repeat of an activity.
6.3 From 1 to 2 Years
The second year of life is a period of rapid cognitive growth. Children love to play hide-the-object games, and at the beginning, they will always look in the same place. They learn to pass an object from one hand to the other when offered a second object, and this ability, called crossing the midline, is considered to be a significant neurological development. Perhaps the most impressive growth of all, however, comes in the toddler's developing language.
12 to 18 Months: Vocabulary Expansion
Language lies quietly in wait during the first twelve to eighteen months of a child's life. Though you can see only the merest hints of it in infancy, it grows like an air bubble submerged deep in the sea, rising and expanding until finally, somewhere in the middle of the second year, it explodes at the surface for all to hear. (Eliot, 1999, p. 168)
Mother with talking girl Language production and learning typically pick up during the 12–18 month stage, especially in girls.
Tetra Images/Corbis
From the first birthday onward, word learning proceeds rapidly in both boys and girls, although as we saw in Chapter 5, the growth spurt usually happens about 2 months earlier in girls. Girls seem to understand and to produce more words than boys and do it faster. In later years, the boys will catch up, and they are busy acquiring other kinds of cognitive advantages at the same time. Not all boys will exhibit slower word acquisition, nor will all girls excel; there is a wide range of normal.
At 16 months, Janet had a productive vocabulary of 24 words. By the time she was 18 months old, she could say more than 60. After that, her mother reports, Janet added words so fast that she gave up counting. During the 2 months in which she more than doubled her vocabulary, Janet was doing much more. Table 6.1 illustrates some of the changes that were occurring in Janet's language. At 16 months, she showed a strong preference for open syllables (consonant-vowel CV), and her principle means of producing two syllable words was reduplication (the repetition of a sound segment, particularly a syllable). We see that process in bottle, Mummy, Daddy, bubbles, and cookie, although not in window. By 18 months, however, this process almost entirely disappeared, and her pronunciation more closely resembled adult forms.
Table 6.1: Changes in Janet's use of selected words, 16–18 months
Word Pronunciation at 16 months Changes at 18 months
wheel wee-oh wee/wee-oh
bottle ba-ba bac-doh
Gurgles (her teddy bear's name) ga-ga gur-goh
Mummy mum-mum-mum mum- mum
juice doo doos
no no no
Daddy da-da daddy
bird buh buh
cat da (/dæ/) ka (/kæ/)
more mo more
go doe go
stop bop/top top
street dee teet
bubbles/water buh-buh buh-boo
window/door wee-moo win-oe (/wino/)
shoe doo soo
pie/cake/pudding by by
Janet da (/dæ/) shanet
cup guh gup
diaper dye dye-puh
cookie koo-koo cookie
Matthew (her brother) du ma-du
In this short 2-month period, Janet's overgeneralization of words such as pie, bubbles, and window had disappeared as she refined the concepts those words represented. Other changes occurred during this period: Her vocabulary more than doubled, and her pronunciation became less infantile. She added a number of verbs such as jump, see, and go, and her pronunciation of her brother's name changed from a single syllable to two, more closely approximating the adult pronunciation. At this point, it was possible to get an accurate measure of Janet's vocabulary because her mother kept complete records of the words she used and appeared to understand. See How Adults Help Children Learn to Communicate for a description of how vocabulary size is estimated in young children.
How Adults Help Children Learn to Communicate
Different kinds of interactions are useful at different stages in a child's development. Look at Table 6.2 and explain what each interaction helps the child learn.
Table 6.2: Children's interactions, 0–3 years
Age Type of Interaction
0–6 months
Respond to crying and other vocalization with language.
Talk face-to-face so that baby can see facial expressions.
Talk frequently during baby's waking hours, describing what is happening as the child is being fed and dressed.
Name and describe common objects.
Respond to the baby's expressions—laugh when the baby laughs and express concern when he cries.
Recite rhymes and sing songs.
Hang photographs where the infant can see them, and describe what is pictured.
Use both languages if either parent is bilingual.
6–18 months
Continue to respond to nonverbal vocalizations with language.
Continue to talk frequently in a conversational tone.
Continue to talk face-to-face so that baby can see expression.
Continue to name common objects.
Identify actions with verbs—running, walking, etc.
Point out attributes of objects—the big blue truck or the ball is round.
Introduce the notion of same and different and the appropriate language—See, this cup is the same as this one. This Princess fork is different from the Mickey fork.
Label and discuss feelings—I know you feel sad because Nana went home; Are you sleepy?
Read short simple children's books at bedtime and other times, if possible.
Encourage baby to turn the pages of books being read to him.
Concentrate on rhyming stories and games.
Encourage child to play with building blocks and other small objects, thus helping to build hand-eye coordination and fine motor coordination needed later for writing.
Ask baby to point to real-world objects pictured in books, on cards, or in photographs.
Read the same story repeatedly.
Read aloud in an expressive manner.
Continue using two languages if bilingual.
18 months–3 years
Continue to talk frequently in a conversational tone.
Continue to talk face-to-face so that baby can see expression.
Expand the names of objects that are identified—light switch, garage door, necklace, etc.
Continue to identify actions with verbs—running, walking, etc. and expand to include adverbs—running fast, walking slowly, jumping high.
Point out attributes of objects—the big blue truck or the ball is round—and expand the adjectives used—skinny dog, fluffy bear.
Ask child what the attributes are—is the bear big or little?
Deliberately use comparatives—Is this ball bigger than that one? or Which boy is taller?
Continue to label and discuss feelings—I know you feel sad because Nana went home; Are you sleepy?
Read children's books with rhymes or short memorable stories, and good colorful illustrations.
Use books with one or two sentences per page and continue to encourage child to turn the pages.
Continue to read favorite books and stories, but try to introduce a new one each week.
Encourage child to participate in reading process by asking, "What do you think the Princess will say?" or "And then what happens?" This also helps to develop memory.
Be attentive to what the child wants to talk about, listen and engage in conversation meaningful to him.
Janet's language development was typical of children her age, although it would be a mistake to assume that every child learns in exactly the same way. For example, most children prefer the CV syllable during this stage, but VC syllables are not uncommon. As shown in Table 6.1, children during the 16–18 month period begin to produce words that are more recognizable as they refine the sound system. They also begin to refine the meanings so that they, too, conform more closely to adult usage.
18 to 24 Months: More Words and Beginning Sentences
Girl (18-24 months old) coloring One of the most significant language developments of the 18–24 month stage is the emergence of sentences.
Exactostock/SuperStock
For most children, and especially girls, the period from 18 months to 2 years is marked by very rapid vocabulary expansion. The words they learn will more closely resemble adult pronunciations, although there will still be many developmental forms, or those imperfect pronunciations produced by children in the process of learning the sound system.
Perhaps the most notable change during this period, however, is the emergence of sentences. Janet, the child represented in Table 6.1, produced her first two-word sentence at 18 months when she said "no nap." In general, the sentences children create during this time are of five types, although not all children will produce all five types during this period:
agent performing an act
action affecting an object
location of object
person or object described
negative, plus action or object
Table 6.3 illustrates these five kinds of sentences with exemplars produced by Juan at 22 months.
Table 6.3: Juan's first sentences, 22 months
Agent performing an action Action affecting an object Location of object Person or object described Negative, plus action or object
Doggie eat. Kick ball. Cookie there. Juan cold. No go.
Mommy jump. Hit ball. Doggie there. Doggie hungry. No Cheerio.
Baby cry. Get Teddy. Daddy home.
Drink milk.
Read book.
A man reads to his children in bed. Meaningful interactions with people that expose children to language—like story time—provide motivation for toddlers' earliest sentences.
Joel Sartore/National Geographic Stock
Although the first two-word utterances tend to be of the type shown in Table 6.3, some children will begin to use two-word noun phrases in expressions such as bad doggie or big boom.
Usually, by 18 months, and almost always by the age of 2, most children will have a productive vocabulary of about 60 words, and many will have more. They will also have begun to combine them into sentences such as those in Tables 6.1 and 6.3. What about those who do not?
Language Delay
As discussed earlier in the chapter, Harris and her colleagues' research revealed the concrete nature of mothers' language with their children. In a follow-up study, the researchers compared mothers' speech with their children whose language was developing typically. These children's speech was compared with the speech used by mothers with 2-year-old children who appeared to be language-delayed. Language delay refers to language that is developing in the normal sequence but slower than expected. In a 2-year-old, language delay is assessed mostly on the basis of words produced, and is referred to as speech delay (see Speech Versus Language Delay). In mothers of children deemed to be developing normally, mothers' speech referred to concrete objects that the child was attending to 78% of the time. In contrast, in the speech of mothers of children deemed to be language delayed, less than 50% of their speech referred to objects to which their children were attending. When the researchers took a closer look at the way the mothers of children with typical language development referred to the objects, nearly half of the mothers' utterances contained at least one specific object name. Mothers of children with language delay, however, made specific object references only 25% of the time. Moreover, these mothers were more likely to refer to these objects using generic names such as one or thing rather than specific names such as teddy or truck (Harris, 2009; Harris et al., 1988). So is there a direct relationship between the mothers' speech and children's language development?
Speech Versus Language Delay
When a child is not speaking by the second birthday, parents may begin to worry that the toddler has a speech or language delay. If they have another child who had begun speaking earlier, they are especially concerned. At that point, they might not know which, if either is causing the child's failure to produce words. But there is a difference between a speech delay and a language delay.
Speech delay refers to a delay caused by a developmental problem with the speech mechanism—lungs, vocal cords, tongue, teeth, lips. Tracy, at age 4, could not accurately reproduce all the consonants of English. Shoe sounded like Sue but might also be confused with zoo or juice. In all other ways, though, she seemed normal. Her comprehension was excellent; she appeared to know a great many words and became frustrated when she was misunderstood or when people corrected her. When her parents took her for an evaluation, the speech therapist examined her mouth and determined that there was a simple physical reason for her pronunciation problems—the membrane under the tongue extended too far toward the tip of the tongue. A simple procedure called a tongue-clip remedied the situation, and after a few months of speech therapy, Tracy's speech was normal.
Language delay refers to the condition in which a child fails to develop language abilities more or less on the developmental timetable outlined in this chapter. It refers specifically to a delay in the development of the underlying knowledge of language. Children with language delays are also likely to have speech delays, since the underlying system has not yet formed. Language delays can affect the comprehension of language, the production of language, or both. It is a risk factor for other kinds of developmental delay. Both speech and language delay will be discussed further in Chapter 9.
It appears that the language-delayed children had a slower rate of word learning because they had less experience of the kind of concrete, object-centered speech than their peers. Why? One possibility is that there is a difference in language ability between the two groups of children, and the mothers adjusted their speech according to the responses they observed in their children. But a second possibility exists, namely that differences in maternal speech are responsible for the difference in language ability. Other researchers have confirmed that while children are greatly dependent on concrete language "input" as they learn their first words, they become less dependent on the nature of the input in later stages, presumably because later learning is more dependent upon internal cognitive development (Bloom, 1973; Dromi, 1987, 1993, 1999). We certainly cannot draw any conclusions about the causes of language delay from these data, but they do point to a strong connection between the language environment and children's early language learning. This connection likely diminishes over time but probably extends well into the school years.
6.4 From 2 to 3 Years
Children playing near each other on a playground. Parallel play—where children play near but not with one another—is common among children in the 2–3 year range.
Associated Press
Between their second and third birthdays, children leave infancy behind. They have begun to develop a stronger sense of self and to separate more easily from parents. They are capable of expressing a wide range of emotions, and frequently do, without being able to control those emotions. They may object to changes in routine. They are highly mobile with rapidly developing large motor skills, and their play with other children seems to be more "parallel" than interactive. In other words, children of this age may play alongside each other, but until close to the third birthday, there is not much interaction between the children. During this time they
climb on playground equipment, furniture, and up stairs with ease;
walk up and down stairs, at the beginning by placing both feet on each step and then by alternating feet and holding onto a rail, hand, or wall;
run easily;
pedal a tricycle; and
maintain balance while bending over.
Their fine motor coordination has also improved, and during this year, they
make vertical, horizontal, and circular strokes with a crayon or pencil;
turn the pages of a book;
build towers of six or more blocks; and
turn rotating handles and screw and unscrew jar tops.
Cognitively, children between 2 and 3 years demonstrate a great deal of growth and proficiency as they play. They can
match a real object with a picture in a book;
engage in make-believe with toys, animals, and people (girls may be better at this than boys at this age);
sort objects by color;
complete puzzles with three or four pieces;
understand the concept of "two";
make most mechanical toys work (boys may be better at this than girls at this age);
recognize and identify most common objects and pictures;
know the difference between males and females; and
understand physical relationships such as those expressed by on, in, above, and under.
At this stage, observing the relationship between cognitive and linguistic development is easy. The appearance of personal pronouns corresponds with the growing awareness of self versus other, and the appearance of prepositions indicates their growing awareness of physical and spatial relationships. In general, children between 2 and 3 understand most sentences, say their name, age, and sex; and as they approach their third birthday, they speak clearly enough for strangers to understand most of their words.
Morphological Development and Longer Sentences
In the third year of life, children are very busy language learners. They continue to work toward mastery of the sound system, their sentences become longer and more complex as they learn to express more complex meanings, and there is marked growth in morphological development. Suddenly, at around the age of 2, the negative, as well as the word mine, become very prominent parts of children's speech. Parents will hear both no or not appended to almost any word in their children's vocabulary as they become more assertive in expressing their views. Mine! demonstrates an awareness of self and asserts the child's ownership and individuality. The vocabulary children use during this period will increase to between 50 and 300 words, and as words are added, there will be evidence of more abstract cognitive development. For example, a child who goes to the closet, retrieves mittens and says, "Me go bye-bye," is not reporting on an action but expressing a wish, and the child who says, "No go bed," is not expressing a reality but an intention.
Growth in the Sound System
Phonological development proceeds rapidly during this period, although there is still much to be learned. Children begin to master more syllable shapes; although CV syllables still dominate, consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) and vowel-consonant (VC) syllables are not uncommon. Certain infantile pronunciations will remain because children at this age are not yet cognitively mature enough, nor are their articulators mature enough, to reproduce the sounds of the language perfectly. Instead, they simplify adult sound sequences to those they can manage. These simplification processes are not random but are governed by three universal processes:
Consonant reduction. This refers to children reducing the number of consonants in a syllable. The preponderance of CV syllables occurs, in part, because children reduce consonant clusters or even syllable-final consonants, producing, for example, cool or coo for "school."
Assimilation. This refers to making a sound more like another one in a word. Assimilation is very common, especially in two-syllable words. When Janet pronounced doggie as gah-gee, she was making the first consonant more like the second one.
Substitution. This refers to replacing a difficult sound with one that is easier to articulate. An excellent example of this is the replacing of word-final /l/ with /o/ in words such as bubble (buh-bo) and little (lito).
These processes and the forms they produce are perfectly normal and, in most children, will disappear between 4 and 5 years of age if not before.
Growth in Syntax
Within a month or two of the second birthday, most children will produce three- and even four-word utterances. Children are able to produce many kinds of meaning with longer sentences. Typically, they include the semantic relationships shown in Table 6.4.
Table 6.4: Semantic relationships in children's sentences, 2–3 years
Semantic relationship Exemplars
agent action object Matthew eat cookie. Daddy chase doggie.
possessor possession place My cookie there. Mommy's car here.
possessor possession attribute My hands dirty. Mia's pool cold.
action attribute entity Go big pool.
action entity place See cake there. Bite me here.
negative agent action Me no go!
As Table 6.4 illustrates, although there are missing words (relative to the adult form), word order is generally consistent with adult word order. One of the major indicators of syntactic growth to appear during this stage is the appearance of questions and negatives. What this? may be the question parents hear most often from their 2-year-olds, and it is indicative of their growing ability to elicit new information and new words; it is evidence of their active participation in language learning.
Growth in Morphology
Before the age of 2, most children's speech is devoid of grammatical morphemes (Chapter 2). We have seen how their vocabularies tend to be grounded in the here and now; and when their sentences consist of only two words, it is not surprising that grammatical information is left out. As they become more adept at creating longer sentences, however, they begin to show some grammatical awareness. One of the first grammatical morphemes to appear is the -ing, or progressive, morpheme followed closely by the first person possessive. It is not hard to imagine why these appear early. The progressive -ing morpheme is usually associated with action (Matthew jumping!), and the possessive is highly relevant to a toddler because it is used to assert ownership. Other grammatical morphemes may also appear in this period. Some children at this stage use the plural form of nouns, especially in words like shoes, possibly because the plural is heard more often than the singular. The only plural inflection Janet used was the -s on shoes, and she used the third person possessive ("Mummy's juice") when she was 2 years, 7 months old (Piper, 2007).
The first 3 years are a time of rapid language and cognitive growth. The quality of children's interactions with adults can have a very positive impact on their learning. How Vocabulary is Measured provides some examples of how adults help children learn during this period. It is important that they do so because the next year will bring another period of rapid growth as the toddler transforms into a preschooler whose world will continue to expand.
How Vocabulary Is Measured
Estimates of children's knowledge of vocabulary vary widely. Different researchers and psychologists report different numbers. Some of the difference is attributable to the confounding of productive and receptive vocabulary, but another cause is the different methods for estimating children's vocabulary.
To measure vocabulary in adults, methods usually involve sampling—a person is given a list of 100 or more words and asked to mark those he knows the meanings of. The sample is deemed to be representative of the entire lexicon, or dictionary, and the researcher computes the resulting score into a proportion of the whole dictionary. Such techniques do not work well with very young children. How do we determine a child's vocabulary? For the most part, researchers use parental reporting in one of two forms:
Researchers use parental journals in which a parent keeps a record of everything an infant says and appears to understand. It becomes much more difficult to keep up as the child becomes more proficient.
They also use parental report forms. These are similar to the sampling techniques used for adults, but with the parents doing the reporting. These tools include vocabulary estimators that require a parent to view a list of words and indicate which words the child knows. Depending on the measure being used, the list can be very short or very long. In general, the longer the list, the more accurate the estimate is considered to be. See Weblinks at end of this chapter for more on this.
During this year before their third birthday, children make huge strides toward becoming proficient language learners. They will be far from perfect, but their developmental errors illustrate that they are actively acquiring the words, sounds, and sentence structure of their language. Take Oliver, for example. He is playing outside with his mother, when the following exchange occurs:
Mother: That spider has only five feet!
Oliver: Dat pider have fie feets!
Figure 6.1 breaks down Oliver's language rules in progress.
Figure 6.1: Oliver's language rules in progress
Figure breaking down Oliver's language rules in progress This figure shows that a very complex set of rules work together to enable Oliver to complete his sentence: Dat pider have fie feets, or "That spider has five feet."
6.5 From 3 to 4 Years
During this pivotal year, the toddler transforms into a preschooler. The "terrible twos," during which toddlers display frequent emotions, gradually subside, and children begin to show more control over emotions. The parallel play that younger toddlers engage in is replaced by a willingness and ability to play with others in small groups, and they begin to grasp the notion of turn-taking. Children of 3 to 4 have a greater sense of personal identity. In terms of their physical and motor development, they
Boy putting on socks Learning to get dressed is a pivotal accomplishment in this boy's development, marking both fine and gross motor coordination as well as increasing independence.
Exactostock/SuperStock
eat independently using utensils;
put away their toys;
undress themselves independently; and
dress themselves with a little assistance, in part because their fine-motor skills have improved and they can snap, zip, and manage buttons with greater ease.
At the same time, their cognitive development is advancing quickly, and during this time, they
understand and follow simple rules;
follow simple requests or commands, usually with little resistance;
recognize and name colors and shapes;
name almost all their body parts;
match sequences of three to six items;
count to 10 or higher;
understand the concept of same and different;
comprehend opposites—up and down, in and out, etc.
sort items by color, shape or size; and
categorize items according to function (shoe and sock, plate and spoon, ball and glove).
During this year, it becomes increasingly evident that cognitive and language development are interdependent. Table 6.5 (in the next section) shows the principle differences between a 3- and a 4-year-old in language ability. Remember that these milestones apply to most children, but every child will vary somewhat from these expectations.
Children show rapid growth in all aspects of language during the year between their third and fourth birthdays. They combine words into longer sentences, conveying more complex thoughts and relationships. They gain greater control over pronunciation, and they show signs of learning the rules of morphology—plurals, possessive and past tense, for example. But perhaps the greatest change is in the expanded functionality of language.
6.6 From 4 to 5 Years
By the time Kai, whom we met earlier in this chapter, celebrated his fifth birthday, he weighed 40 pounds and had achieved considerable cognitive and linguistic growth. Like all typical 5-year-olds, Kai's physical development included the following:
20/20 vision (unless otherwise impaired);
improved coordination, especially apparent in skipping, hopping, and jumping;
better balance, allowing him to balance while standing on one foot with eyes closed;
increased skills with crayons, pencils, and simple tools;
well-established handedness;
ability to color within lines;
ability to copy a triangle;
ability to spread with a knife; and he
may have begun to lose baby teeth by the end of this year.
Both the cognitive and linguistic development exhibited by a 5-year-old are profound; they are also difficult to separate given the tandem identity of cognition and language. We learned in Chapter 5 of the close link between cognition and language. In particular, memory capacity and memory strategies are closely related to the ability to learn language. At age 5, Kai was much better at remembering and retrieving information, thus all aspects of language seemed to expand. His language was typical of other children his age. Like other children his age, Kai's ability to learn new words and expressions seemed boundless during the year between 4 and 5.
Five-year-old children are becoming more social. They have friends outside the family, and they are better able to play with and integrate into small groups of children. Language learning continues, but from age 5 onward, it happens within a larger social sphere. With the structural building blocks in place, children begin to learn to use language appropriately in a wider variety of settings and for a broader range of purposes, as we will see in Chapter 7.
Bilingual Children
Children learning and playing at bilingual preschool. These bilingual children may not have yet achieved equal competence in both their languages, but with proper instruction and some time they will catch up with their monolingual peers in English.
Associated Press
Before the age of 5, bilingual children have essentially acquired two first languages. This is not to say that all bilingual children will have achieved equal competence in both, but they have activated the same processes for learning them. To get an accurate measure of a bilingual child's language development, it is necessary to evaluate both languages. For example, Sarah, at age 3, had an English vocabulary of around 600 words, which would appear to lag behind the norm (Table 6.5). But Sarah is bilingual, and in French, she had 600 or more words. Therefore, her vocabulary size is 1,200 words. Similarly, while she appeared to be confused by why questions in English, at age 4, she handled similar questions much better in French.
In most instances, it is not possible to get an accurate estimate of the development of a bilingual child's two languages. The number of variables makes it too difficult to estimate—all of the different ages at which learners begin the second language, the different languages and settings involved, and the different levels of proficiency achieved, but as we will see in Chapter 9, it is especially important to look at the bilingual's total accomplishment, especially if there is any suspicion of language or speech delay. What we need to remember too, is that bilingual children have a cognitive advantage, as we saw in Chapters 4 and 5. If they appear to lag behind, this advantage will help them to catch up in the dominant language when the time is right.
Table 6.5: Language abilities, 3–5 years
3-year-olds 4-year-olds 5-year-olds
Speak clearly enough for strangers to understand.
Vocabulary of 1,000 words. Vocabulary of up to 2,000 words. Vocabulary of more than 4,000 words, growing to 6,000 words by end of this year.
Speak in sentences of three or four words. Speak in sentences of five or six words. Longer sentences with greater complexity.
Sing simple repetitive songs. Remember and recite rhymes and simple songs. Repeat more complicated songs and rhymes.
May experience some difficulty in turn-taking in conversation. May change topics abruptly. Engage in conversational turn-taking and can sustain one topic longer. Follow directions and can give simple directions (e.g., "put your books away").
Struggle with some word pronunciations, especially those with three or more syllables and with consonant clusters. Have mastered most of the sound combinations of the language. May still have difficulty with consonant clusters. Some consonant clusters and multisyllable words may cause some problems.
Ask questions with who, what, where and why but may not always be able to answer such questions. Often able to answer who, what, and where questions, but may still have difficulty with why. Can answer why questions. Ask more probing questions, addressing meaning and purpose.
Will overuse words such as because, but, and when. Will still overuse because and show confusion in the use of because (e.g., "Mia hit me 'cause she hurt me!") Increasingly self-correct.
May have some difficulty with appropriate use of before, after, and until. Show better understanding of before, after, and until, but still have difficulty, especially with until. Understand before, after, and until, and generally uses them correctly, but until age 6, may struggle with correct use of until.
Can do simple sentence combining to link ideas, mostly using and ("I eat my lunch and I eat it all.") Try to communicate beyond what vocabulary allows, creating new words or extending meaning of existing words. Can recite full name, address, and phone number if taught.
Will resist talking in front of groups. Will talk in front of small groups, with some reluctance. More willing to speak in front of groups.
Is able to retell a simple story but may confuse the order or forget the point of a story, concentrating on favorite parts. Can accurately retell a story with a sequence of four to five events. Can tell a story and engage more meaningfully in conversation (see Chapter 7).
Use more advanced sentence structures such as relative clauses ("Sheepy ate the pancakes that Nana made") and tag questions ("It's pretty, right, Mommy?")
Have mastered some basic rules of grammar. Most of the rules of grammar are in place. Can understand and use some passive constructions ("Sheepy got hit!" "It was ruined.")
Show interest in written materials, especially books. May be able to identify some written letters, and may ask what a written word says. Often able to identify written letters and numbers.
Ch. 6 Conclusion