LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT
Our vast intelligence also allows us to have language, a system of
communication that uses symbols in a regular way to create meaning. Language gives
us the ability to communicate our thoughts to others by talking, reading, and writing.
Although other species have at least some ability to communicate, as far as we know,
none of them have language. There are many components of language that will now
be reviewed.
A. Components of Language
1. Phoneme: A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound that makes a meaningful
difference in a language. The word “bit” has three phonemes. In spoken
languages, phonemes are produced by the positions and movements of the
vocal tract, including our lips, teeth, tongue, vocal cords, and throat, whereas
in sign languages phonemes are defined by the shapes and movement of the
hands. There are hundreds of unique phonemes that can be made by human
speakers, but most languages only use a small subset of the possibilities.
English contains about 45 phonemes, whereas other languages have as few
as 15 and others more than 60. The Hawaiian language contains fewer
phonemes as it includes only 5 vowels (a, e, i, o, and u) and 7 consonants (h,
k, l, m, n, p, and w). Infants are born able to detect all phonemes, but they lose
their ability to do so as they get older; by 10 months of age a child’s ability to
recognize phonemes becomes very similar to that of the adult speakers of the
native language. Phonemes that were initially differentiated come to be treated
as equivalent (Werker & Tees, 2002).
2. Morpheme: Whereas phonemes are the smallest units of sound in language,
a morpheme is a string of one or more phonemes that makes up the smallest
units of meaning in a language. Some morphemes are prefixes and suffixes
used to modify other words. For example, the syllable “re-” as in “rewrite” or
“repay” means “to do again,” and the suffix “-est” as in “happiest” or “coolest”
means “to the maximum.”
3. Semantics: Semantics refers to the set of rules we use to obtain meaning from
morphemes. For example, adding “ed” to the end of a verb makes it past tense.
4. Syntax: Syntax is the set of rules of a language by which we construct
sentences. Each language has a different syntax. The syntax of the English
language requires that each sentence have a noun and a verb, each of which
may be modified by adjectives and adverbs. Some syntaxes make use of the
order in which words appear. For example, in English the meaning of the
sentence “The man bites the dog” is different from “The dog bites the man.”
5. Pragmatics: The social side of language is expressed through pragmatics, or
how we communicate effectively and appropriately with others. Examples of
pragmatics include turn-taking, staying on topic, volume and tone of voice, and
appropriate eye contact. Lastly, words do not possess fixed meanings, but
change their interpretation as a function of the context in which they are spoken.
We use contextual information, the information surrounding language, to help
us interpret it. Examples of contextual information include our knowledge and
nonverbal expressions, such as facial expressions, postures, and gestures.
Misunderstandings can easily arise if people are not attentive to contextual
information or if some of it is missing, such as it may be in newspaper headlines
or in text messages.
B. Language Developmental Progression
An important aspect of cognitive development is language acquisition. The
order in which children learn language structures is consistent across children and
cultures (Hatch, 1983). Starting before birth, babies begin to develop language and
communication skills. At birth, babies recognize their mother’s voice and can
discriminate between the language(s) spoken by their mothers and foreign languages,
and they show preferences for faces that are moving in synchrony with audible
language (Blossom & Morgan, 2006; Pickens et al., 1994; Spelke & Cortelyou, 1981).
Do newborns communicate? Of course, they do. They do not, however,
communicate with the use of oral language. Instead, they communicate their thoughts
and needs with body posture (being relaxed or still), gestures, cries, and facial
expressions. A person who spends adequate time with an infant can learn which cries
indicate pain and which ones indicate hunger, discomfort, or frustration.
Intentional vocalizations. In terms of producing spoken language, babies
begin to coo almost immediately. Cooing is a one-syllable combination of a consonant
and a vowel sound (e.g., coo or ba). Interestingly, babies replicate sounds from their
own languages. A baby whose parents speak French will coo in a different tone than
a baby whose parents speak Spanish or Urdu. These gurgling, musical vocalizations
can serve as a source of entertainment to an infant who has been laid down for a nap
or seated in a carrier on a car ride. Cooing serves as practice for vocalization, as well
as the infant hears the sound of his or her own voice and tries to repeat sounds that
are entertaining. Infants also begin to learn the pace and pause of conversation as
they alternate their vocalization with that of someone else and then take their turn
again when the other person’s vocalization has stopped.
At about four to six months of age, infants begin making even more elaborate
vocalizations that include the sounds required for any language. Guttural sounds,
clicks, consonants, and vowel sounds stand ready to equip the child with the ability to
repeat whatever sounds are characteristic of the language heard. Eventually, these
sounds will no longer be used as the infant grows more accustomed to a particular
language.
At about 7 months, infants begin babbling, engaging in intentional vocalizations
that lack specific meaning and comprise a consonant-vowel repeated sequence, such
as ma-ma-ma, da-da-da. Children babble as practice in creating specific sounds, and
by the time they are a 1 year old, the babbling uses primarily the sounds of the
language that they are learning (de Boysson-Bardies, Sagart, & Durand, 1984). These
vocalizations have a conversational tone that sounds meaningful even though it is not.
Babbling also helps children understand the social, communicative function of
language. Children who are exposed to sign language babble in sign by making hand
movements that represent real language (Petitto & Marentette, 1991).
Gesturing. Children communicate information through gesturing long before
they speak, and there is some evidence that gesture usage predicts subsequent
language development (Iverson & Goldin-Meadow, 2005). Deaf babies also use
gestures to communicate wants, reactions, and feelings. Because gesturing seems to
be easier than vocalization for some toddlers, sign language is sometimes taught to
enhance an infant’s ability to communicate by making use of the ease of gesturing.
The rhythm and pattern of language is used when deaf babies sign, just as it is when
hearing babies babble.
Understanding. At around ten months of age, the infant can understand more
than he or she can say, which is referred to as receptive language. You may have
experienced this phenomenon as well if you have ever tried to learn a second
language. You may have been able to follow a conversation more easily than
contribute to it. One of the first words that children understand is their own name,
usually by about 6 months, followed by commonly used words like “bottle,” “mama,”
and “doggie” by 10 to 12 months (Mandel, Jusczyk, & Pisoni, 1995). Infants shake
their head “no” around 6–9 months, and they respond to verbal requests to do things
like “wave bye-bye” or “blow a kiss” around 9–12 months. Children also use contextual
information, particularly the cues that parents provide, to help them learn language.
Children learn that people are usually referring to things that they are looking at when
they are speaking (Baldwin, 1993), and that that the speaker’s emotional expressions
are related to the content of their speech.
Holophrasic speech. Children begin using their first words at about 12 or 13
months of age and may use partial words to convey thoughts at even younger ages.
These one-word expressions are referred to as holophrasic speech. For example, the
child may say “ju” for the word “juice” and use this sound when referring to a bottle.
The listener must interpret the meaning of the holophrase, and when this is someone
who has spent time with the child, interpretation is not too difficult. But someone who
has not been around the child will have trouble knowing what is meant. Imagine the
parent who to a friend exclaims, “Ezra’s talking all the time now!” The friend hears only
“ju ga da” to which the parent explains means, “I want some milk when I go with
Daddy.”
Language Errors: The early utterances of children contain many errors, for
instance, confusing /b/ and /d/, or /c/ and /z/. The words children create are often
simplified, in part because they are not yet able to make the more complex sounds of
the real language (Dobrich & Scarborough, 1992). Children may say “keekee” for kitty,
“nana” for banana, and “vesketti” for spaghetti because it is easier. Often these early
words are accompanied by gestures that may also be easier to produce than the words
themselves. Children’s pronunciations become increasingly accurate between 1 and
3 years, but some problems may persist until school age. A child who learns that a
word stands for an object may initially think that the word can be used for only that
particular object, which is referred to as underextension. Only the family’s Irish Setter
is a “doggie”, for example. More often, however, a child may think that a label applies
to all objects that are similar to the original object, which is called overextension. For
example, all animals become “doggies”. The first error is often the result of children
learning the meaning of a word in a specific context, while the second language error
is a function of the child’s smaller vocabulary.
First words and cultural influences. If the child is using English, first words
tend to be nouns. The child labels objects such as cup, ball, or other items that they
regularly interact with. In a verb-friendly language such as Chinese, however, children
may learn more verbs. This may also be due to the different emphasis given to objects
based on culture. Chinese children may be taught to notice action and relationships
between objects, while children from the United States may be taught to name an
object and its qualities (color, texture, size, etc.). These differences can be seen when
comparing interpretations of art by older students from China and the United States
(Imai et al., 2008).
Two-word sentences and telegraphic (text message) speech. By the time
they become toddlers, children have a vocabulary of about 50-200 words and begin
putting those words together in telegraphic speech, such as “baby bye-bye” or “doggie
pretty”. Words needed to convey messages are spoken, but the articles and other
parts of speech necessary for grammatical correctness are not yet used. These
expressions sound like a telegraph, or perhaps a better analogy today would be that
they read like a text message. Telegraphic speech/text message speech occurs when
unnecessary words are not used. “Give baby ball” is used rather than “Give the baby
the ball.”
Infant-directed speech. Why is a horse a “horsie”? Have you ever wondered
why adults tend to use “baby talk” or that sing-song type of intonation and exaggeration
used when talking to children? This represents a universal tendency and is known as
infant-directed speech. It involves exaggerating the vowel and consonant sounds,
using a high-pitched voice, and delivering the phrase with great facial expression
(Clark, 2009). Why is this done? Infants are frequently more attuned to the tone of
voice of the person speaking than to the content of the words themselves and are
aware of the target of speech. Werker, Pegg, and McLeod (1994) found that infants
listened longer to a woman who was speaking to a baby than to a woman who was
speaking to another adult. Adults may use this form of speech in order to clearly
articulate the sounds of a word so that the child can hear the sounds involved. It may
also be because when this type of speech is used, the infant pays more attention to
the speaker and this sets up a pattern of interaction in which the speaker and listener
are in tune with one another.
C. Theories of Language Development
Psychological theories of language learning differ in terms of the importance
they place on nature and nurture. Remember that we are a product of both nature and
nurture. Researchers now believe that language acquisition is partially inborn and
partially learned through our interactions with our linguistic environment (Gleitman &
Newport, 1995; Stork & Widdowson, 1974). First to be discussed are the biological
theories, including nativist, brain areas and critical periods. Next, learning theory and
social pragmatics will be presented.
Nativism. The linguist Noam Chomsky is a believer in the nature approach to
language, arguing that human brains contain a language acquisition device (LAD) that
includes a universal grammar that underlies all human language (Chomsky, 1965,
1972). According to this approach, each of the many languages spoken around the
world (there are between 6,000 and 8,000) is an individual example of the same
underlying set of procedures that are hardwired into human brains. Chomsky’s
account proposes that children are born with a knowledge of general rules of syntax
that determine how sentences are constructed. Language develops as long as the
infant is exposed to it. No teaching, training, or reinforcement is required for language
to develop as proposed by Skinner. Chomsky differentiates between the deep
structure of an idea; that is, how the idea is represented in the fundamental universal
grammar that is common to all languages, and the surface structure of the idea or how
it is expressed in any one language. Once we hear or express a thought in surface
structure, we generally forget exactly how it happened. At the end of a lecture, you will
remember a lot of the deep structure (i.e., the ideas expressed by the instructor), but
you cannot reproduce the surface structure (the exact words that the instructor used
to communicate the ideas).
Although there is general agreement among psychologists that babies are
genetically programmed to learn language, there is still debate about Chomsky’s idea
that there is a universal grammar that can account for all language learning. Evans
and Levinson (2009) surveyed the world’s languages and found that none of the
presumed underlying features of the language acquisition device were entirely
universal. In their search they found languages that did not have noun or verb phrases,
that did not have tenses (e.g., past, present, future), and even some that did not have
nouns or verbs at all, even though a basic assumption of a universal grammar is that
all languages should share these features.
Brain areas for language. For the 90% of people who are right-handed,
language is stored and controlled by the left cerebral cortex, although for some left-
handers this pattern is reversed. These differences can easily be seen in the results
of neuroimaging studies that show that listening to and producing language creates
greater activity in the left hemisphere than in the right. Broca’s area, an area in front
of the left hemisphere near the motor cortex, is responsible for language production
(Figure 3.28). This area was first localized in the 1860s by the French physician Paul
Broca, who studied patients with lesions to various parts of the brain. Wernicke’s area,
an area of the brain next to the auditory cortex, is responsible for language
comprehension.
Is there a critical period for learning language? Psychologists believe there
is a critical period, a time in which learning can easily occur, for language. This critical
period appears to be between infancy and puberty (Lenneberg, 1967; Penfield &
Roberts, 1959), but isolating the exact timeline has been elusive. Children who are not
exposed to language early in their lives will likely never grasp the grammatical and
communication nuances of language. Case studies, including Victor the “Wild Child,”
who was abandoned as a baby in 18th century France and not discovered until he was
12, and Genie, a child whose parents kept her locked away from 18 months until 13
years of age, are two examples of children who were deprived of language. Both
children made some progress in socialization after they were rescued, but neither of
them ever developed a working understanding of language (Rymer, 1993). Yet, such
case studies are fraught with many confounds. How much did the years of social
isolation and malnutrition contribute to their problems in language development?
A better test for the notion of critical periods for language is found in studies of children
with hearing loss. Several studies show that the earlier children are diagnosed with
hearing impairment and receive treatment, the better the child’s long-term language
development. For instance, Stika et al. (2015) reported that when children’s hearing
loss was identified during newborn screening, and subsequently addressed, the
majority showed normal language development when later tested at 12-18 months.
Fitzpatrick, Crawford, Ni, and Durieux-Smith (2011) reported that early language
intervention in children who were moderately to severely hard of hearing,
demonstrated normal outcomes in language proficiency by 4 to 5 years of age. Tomblin
et al. (2015) reported that children who were fit with hearing aids by 6 months of age
showed good levels of language development by age 2. Those whose hearing was
not corrected until after 18 months showed lower language performance, even in the
early preschool years. However, this study did reveal that those whose hearing was
corrected by toddlerhood had greatly improved language skills by age 6. The research
with hearing impaired children reveals that this critical period for language
development is not exclusive to infancy, and that the brain is still receptive to language
development in early childhood. Fortunately, it is has become routine to screen hearing
in newborns, because when hearing loss is not treated early, it can delay spoken
language, literacy, and impact children’s social skills (Moeller & Tomblin, 2015).
Learning theory. Perhaps the most straightforward explanation of language
development is that it occurs through the principles of learning, including association
and reinforcement (Skinner, 1953). Additionally, Bandura (1977) described the
importance of observation and imitation of others in learning language. There must be
at least some truth to the idea that language is learned through environmental
interactions or nurture. Children learn the language that they hear spoken around them
rather than some other language. Also supporting this idea is the gradual improvement
in language skills over time. It seems that children modify their language through
imitation and reinforcement, such as parental praise and being understood. For
example, when a two-year-old child asks for juice, he might say, “me juice,” to which
his mother might respond by giving him a cup of apple juice. However, language
cannot be entirely learned. For one, children learn words too fast for them to be learned
through reinforcement. Between the ages of 18 months and 5 years, children learn up
to 10 new words every day (Anglin, 1993). More importantly, language is more
generative than it is imitative. Language is not a predefined set of ideas and sentences
that we choose when we need them, but rather a system of rules and procedures that
allows us to create an infinite number of statements, thoughts, and ideas, including
those that have never previously occurred. When a child says that she “swimmed” in
the pool, for instance, she is showing generativity. No adult speaker of English would
ever say “swimmed,” yet it is easily generated from the normal system of producing
language. Other evidence that refutes the idea that all language is learned through
experience comes from the observation that children may learn languages better than
they ever hear them. Deaf children whose parents do not communicate using ASL very
well nevertheless are able to learn it perfectly on their own and may even make up
their own language if they need to (Goldin- Meadow & Mylander, 1998). A group of
deaf children in a school in Nicaragua, whose teachers could not sign, invented a way
to communicate through made- up signs (Senghas, Senghas, & Pyers, 2005). The
development of this new Nicaraguan Sign Language has continued and changed as
new generations of students have come to the school and started using the language.
Although the original system was not a real language, it is becoming closer and closer
every year, showing the development of a new language in modern times.
Social pragmatics. Another view emphasizes the very social nature of human
language. Language from this view is not only a cognitive skill, but also a social one.
Language is a tool humans use to communicate, connect to, influence, and inform
others. Most of all, language comes out of a need to cooperate. The social nature of
language has been demonstrated by a number of studies showing that children use
several pre-linguistic skills (such as pointing and other gestures) to communicate not
only their own needs, but what others may need. So, a child watching her mother
search for an object may point to the object to help her mother find it. Eighteen-month
to 30-month-olds have been shown to make linguistic repairs when it is clear that
another person does not understand them (Grosse, Behne, Carpenter & Tomasello,
2010). Grosse et al. (2010) found that even when the child was given the desired
object, if there had been any misunderstanding along the way (such as a delay in
being handed the object, or the experimenter calling the object by the wrong name),
children will make linguistic repairs. This would suggest that children are using
language not only as a means of achieving some material goal, but also to make
themselves understood in the mind of another person.
