Language Development Hearing Children

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Language Development Hearing Children
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Pre-linguistic Development

• Preverbal child is a social being
• During the first year, the child is actively
  processing information

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Pre-linguistic Development

• Interactions between adults and infants
• Shorter sentences
• Fewer verbs, modifiers and function words
• Fewer verb forms (tenses)
• Concrete vocabulary
• Prosodic elements
• Pitch, intonation appeared to be more important
  than the words
• Intonation patterns include both high and low
  pitch

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Mothers Talking to Babies

• Simple language structures
• Fewer passive and complex sentence constructions
• Avoiding sentences with deep structures that are
  different than the surface structures
• However, the mothers language is significantly
  more complex than the childs

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Mothers Talking to Infants continued

• Brown and Hanlon (1970)
• 30 of the sentences used by mothers were simple,
  affirmative, declarative structures
• 70 were complicated with a variety of richness
• Children were attentive to utterances slightly
  above their level
• Mothers used language similar to what their
  children would use 1 year later

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Mothers Talking continued

• Repetition is common
• Differences in pitch and intonation
• Infants respond best to high pitch
• Infants begin to mimic intonation patterns by 6
  months

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The Infant

• Attentive infants become
• Quiet
• Turn toward speaker
• Establish eye contact
• Gaze coupling
• Resembles adult conversational turn taking
• Infants are not passive
• They do react to speech

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Mother-infant interactions

• 3 months, infants show vocal responsiveness to
  vocal and visual stimulation from their mothers,
  less from strangers
• How the infant reacts influences how the adult
  responds
• Adults know the child does not understand but act
  as though the infant does understand

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Mother-infant interactions continued

• Mothers respond to both verbal and nonverbal
  behaviors (smiles, burps, vocalizations) and
  incorporated these behaviors into the
  conversation
• Mothers treated these behaviors as intentional
  and treated them as turns in the interaction
• Mothers would pause to provide an opportunity to
  respond
• As the child becomes older, 7 months, mothers
  accepted only higher quality vocalizations such
  as babbling
• At 12 months, mothers attempted to interpret the
  childs vocalizations as words.

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Mother-Infant Interactions

• Early language input of adults influences childs
  vocalizations
• Intentional communication markers
• Gesture, point, eye contact
• Vocalize consistent sounds and intonation
  patterns
• Persistent in attempts at communication and will
  repeat and change behavior to communicate more
  clearly

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2 Types of Communication

• Pre-verbal child
• Protodeclarative
• Child uses an object o gain the adults attention
• Protoimperative
• Child gets another person to do something

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Factors Influencing the First Words

• Between 2½ to 4½ vocabulary grows at 2-4 words
  per day
• Influences
• 1. Words adults use
• Labeling
• Categorizing
• 2. Modified speech and language input
• Cleary enunciated, slower
• Wider range of pitch and intonation
• Clear pauses

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Factors, Continued

• Adults use concrete topics
• -Reduced vocabulary
• -More content words
• -Fewer verbs, modifiers, pronouns, and function
  words
• -Repetition of key words
• 4. Adults provide feedback
• -on how well they represent their intention

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Vocabularies

• First 50 words include words from variety of
  grammatical classes
• Nominals most common
• Action words
• Modifiers
• Personal social words
• Function words

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Production and Comprehension

• Expressive vocabulary lags behind receptive
  vocabulary

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Attribution

• Children begin to use adjectives as single-word
  utterances ages 16 to 21 months
• Ages 21 months and older, children use adjectives
  in two-word utterances.
• However, the two word combinations were used as
  nominals not to differentiate between objects

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Color Words

• Conceptual knowledge required
• Isolate color from objects
• Differentiate among hues
• Notice similarities among related shades
• Linguistic knowledge required
• Recognizing that color words refer to the
  dimension of color

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Later Semantic Development

• Vocabulary size may not be an indicator of
  semantic sophistication
• Vocabulary size does not increase in a strictly
  linear manner
• Semantic development includes establishing
  semantic networks (schemata)
• Word meanings are in a constant state of change,
  modified by continued experience