How Children Learn Language

Study Notes

Language skills, including speech production and comprehension, develop over time rather than being innate at birth.
By age 4, children acquire substantial vocabulary and grammatical knowledge, enabling varied sentence structures.
Some complex language elements, such as passives, remain challenging for children even after age 4.
This rapid language acquisition is consistent across cultures and languages, demonstrating a universal pattern.
Young children's language proficiency often surpasses that of adults learning a second language, underscoring the effectiveness of early language learning.

Vocalization and Babbling: Infants produce sounds like crying and cooing that are consistent across cultures, including those of deaf infants.
Babbling Onset: Around seven months, infants start babbling with repetitive syllables, often in a consonant-vowel structure (e.g., 'baba', 'momo').
Universal Babbling: This repetitive babbling is a universal stage in speech development, aiding parent-child communication through context inference.
Utterances vs. Sentences: "Utterance" refers to what a child articulates, focusing on communicative intent rather than grammatical correctness.

Children generally begin producing two- to three-word utterances around 2 years of age, displaying a surprising complexity in meaning.
Early utterances often lack function words like articles and prepositions, focusing instead on nouns, verbs, and adjectives which convey more substantial meaning.
Understanding nouns helps children infer the meanings of function words, illustrating how vocabulary building supports comprehension of language structure.

Negation Development: Children first use simple negative forms and gradually construct complex negation statements (e.g., "No cookie" to "I do not want a cookie").
Question Formation: Basic questions start with simple prompts and progress to more intricate structures, including various question types.
Relative Clauses: Children learn to use relative clauses (“The book that I read”) starting from simpler forms, gradually moving to more complex ones.

Speech comprehension hinges on the connection between concepts and personal experiences prior to understanding spoken language.
Language serves as a vehicle for expressing thoughts and relies on an individual’s experiences for meaningful communication.
Syntactic understanding requires linking individual words to their roles in larger contexts, facilitating grasp of basic semantic sequences.

Parentese: Also known as caregiver speech, Parentese is specialized language tailored to children, enhancing language development significantly compared to passive listening of impersonal language.
Parentese usage is widespread across cultures, with both parents and non-parents adopting simplified speech when communicating with children.

Baby Talk is even more simplified than Parentese, employing reduced vocabulary and syntax, closely mirroring children’s early speech patterns.
Typical Baby Talk features oversimplified words and sound structures, often mimicking associated sounds (e.g., 'choo-choo' for trains).
Syntax in Baby Talk is less elaborate, often omitting articles and using personal names instead of pronouns, resembling the telegraphic stage of early speech development.
The vocabulary of Baby Talk is commonly shared and transmitted culturally, standardized across generations.

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