How Children Learn Language

• How children learn language concerns first language acquisition.

Introduction

• At birth, babies cannot comprehend or produce speech.
• From birth to age 4, children learn the basics of their first language.
• Children acquire vocabulary and grammatical rules.
• This acquisition involves creating sentence structures, including negatives, questions, and relative clauses.

Stages of Early Childhood

• Newborn: 0-2 months.
• Infant: 2 months - 1 year.
• Toddler: 1-4 years.

The Development of Speech Production

• The stages are Vocalisation, Babbling, and Speech.

Vocalisation

• Prior to speech sounds, babies produce a variety of sounds.
• This includes crying, cooing, and gurgling.
• Babies everywhere make the same sounds, even deaf children.
• Types of vocalisation: Reflexive (cries, coughs, hiccups) and Non-reflexive (cooing, playful interactions).

Babbling

• Around the 5th month, infants begin to babble.
• Babbling involves producing repeated syllables, known as syllabic reduplication.
• Babbling is a learned phenomenon where infants follow the intonation of the language they hear.
• Stages of babbling: 4-6 months (single syllable), 7-9 months (reduplicated), 10-12 months (variegated), 12+ months (jargon).

Speech

• Speech typically occurs around one year of age.
• It can happen much earlier or later.
• While distinct from babbling in terms of intentionality, speech depends on babbling.

Developmental milestones

• At 3 months, cooing and gurgling sounds are produced; at 6 months babbling begins.
• At 12 months first words appear; at 18 months the child knows 5 to 40 words.
• At 2 years, 150-300 words are known and 2-3 word sentences are spoken; at 3 years, 900-1000 words are known and short questions are asked.
• At 4 years, 2000 words are known and 5+ word sentences are spoken; at 5 years, letters can be identified, and longer sentences can be created.

The Acquisition Order of Consonants and Vowels

• Consonants are acquired in a front-to-back order, referring to the articulation origin.
• Vowels are acquired in a back-to-front order.
• Visibility of articulators: Front consonants (/p/, /m/, /b/, /f/, /v/) are made by lips and teeth, so children can see these articulators.
• Ease of articulation: Back vowels are easy to pronounce because the tongue is relaxed.

Early Speech Stages

• The stages include naming, holophrastic functions, telegraphic speech, and morpheme acquisition.

Naming: One-Word Utterances

• Children learn their first word when they can utter a recognizable speech form.
• This form is used in conjunction with an object or event in the environment.
• First words can appear from 4 to 18 months, or even later.
• Proper nouns are used early on to refer to specific objects.

Holophrastic Function: One-Word Utterance

• 'Holo' indicates whole, 'phras' indicates phrase or sentence.
• Children use single words to refer to objects and express complex thoughts.
• Interpreting holophrastic words is challenging without knowing the child's experiences and the situation.

Telegraphic Speech: Two- and Three-Word Utterances

• Children don't proceed to two-word utterances as rapidly as expected.
• Children become aware that adding words improves communication.
• Around age 2, children start producing two- and three-word utterances.
• Telegraphic speech involves nouns, verbs, and adjectives.
• Features of telegraphic speech: using language for various purposes and semantic relations, low incidence of function words, close approximation of word order, and syntactic versus semantic analysis.

Morpheme Acquisition

• After acquiring two- and three-word utterances, children elaborate on what they can say.
• They start to add function words and inflections to their utterances like prepositions, articles, modals, auxiliaries, and inflections.

Speech Comprehension Occurs Without Speech Production

• This is the case for some mute-hearing children.

The Relationship Between Speech Production, Speech Comprehension, and Thought

• Comprehending language meaning is necessary before producing it.
• Language's foundation is meaning, and children learn through hearing and understanding language in context.
• The child's experiences provide the content of their thoughts.
• Without thought, children can't assign meaning to words and sentences.

Parentese

• Parentese is a speech register used by adults when addressing infants.
• It is also known as motherese, caretaker speech talk, baby talk, Adult-to-Child Language (ACL), and Child-Directed Speech (CDS).

Characteristics of Parentese

• Includes immediacy and concreteness, grammaticality of input, short and simple structures, simple vocabulary.
• Fathers' speech often differs from mothers'.
• Older children adapt their speech as well.
• Features exaggerated intonation, pitch, and stress.

Baby Talk

• Baby Talk is a form of Parentese.
• It has its own characteristics, serving to foster communication.
• Parentese uses simplified vocabulary and syntax, but Baby Talk uses overly simplified and reduced language.
• It is culturally transmitted and 'standard' because parents learn from other adults.
• Baby Talk vocabulary: words are to represent sounds and involves word changes.

What is Learned by Imitation?

• Through imitation, children learn how to pronounce sounds and words; they enjoy imitating what they hear.
• Imitation only applies to speech production, not comprehension.
• Imitation does not involve sentence construction.
• Abstract rules cannot be imitated because they lack physical existence.

Productivity by Rule

• Using new created words cannot always be explained by imitation.
• Example: children commonly produce ungrammatical plural or past tense words.

Other Example

• A child applies auxiliary 'do' rule in speaking despite his mother’s correction.

The Frequent Futility of Correction

• Parents pay little attention to children's speech correctness.
• Attempting to correct children's speech is often fruitless and frustrating.
• Corrections by parents, especially when directed toward older children, can lead to some improvement.
• Correction does not play a main role in grammar learning.

Improving Speech

• To improve speech, the child must note the difference between their utterance and the parent's.
• Determine the nature of the error.
• Then, permanently change their grammar or strategies.

Correcting Child's Grammar

• Parents are most often interested in the truth value, social appropriateness, or cleverness of the utterances of their children.

Learning Abstract Words

• Children begin with the concrete before acquiring language for the abstract.
• To learn abstract words, children infer from what people say along with the mind and environment.

Example of Learning Abstract Words

• Hungry: The child cries; the mother asks, "Are you hungry?"
• Hurt: The child falls.

Memory in Language Learning

• A child's phenomenal memory capacity is used to identify words, devise usage rules, and relate speech to the environment.
• a child must remember words, phrases, and sentences as well as the contexts inwhich they occurred.
• Without good memory, language learning cannot be possible.

Types of Memory Operate in Language Learning

• Associative learning: forming a connection between an object and its sound-form name.
• Episodic memory: remembering events and situations with spoken phrases and sentences.

Logic in Language Learning

• Young children use deductive logic to produce speech.
• Children use inductive logic to infer sentences and formulate rules.
• Deductive vs. Inductive: The general principle is first, then examples, and examples are first observed before learning the general principle.