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3language Development (Finished)

The document discusses language acquisition in three sentences or less: Language acquisition involves the process of learning to perceive, comprehend, produce and communicate using words through speech or sign. Children progress through prelinguistic, holophrase and telegraphic stages as their receptive and productive language skills develop. The critical period hypothesis proposes that language skills are most readily acquired during childhood before puberty.

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Ana G
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75 views

3language Development (Finished)

The document discusses language acquisition in three sentences or less: Language acquisition involves the process of learning to perceive, comprehend, produce and communicate using words through speech or sign. Children progress through prelinguistic, holophrase and telegraphic stages as their receptive and productive language skills develop. The critical period hypothesis proposes that language skills are most readily acquired during childhood before puberty.

Uploaded by

Ana G
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Language Development

•Hypothesis on the critical period for


language acquisition by E.H
• Lenneberg
•Receptive Language, Holophrase,
Telegraphic speech

Labrador, Joyce Ann P. SLP-C


WHAT IS LEARNING ACQUISITION?
• Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the
capacity to perceive and comprehend language, as well as to
produce and use words to communicate. The capacity to
successfully use language requires one to acquire a range of tools
including syntax, phonetics, and an extensive vocabulary. This
language might be vocalized as with speech or manual as in sign.
Language acquisition usually refers to first language acquisition,
which studies infants' acquisition of their native language.

• This is distinguished from second language acquisition, which deals


with the acquisition (in both children and adults) of additional
languages.
Hypothesis on the Critical
Period for Language
Acquisition by E.H
THREE MAJOR THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES ON LANGUAGE ACQUISITION:

• The Learning (or Empiricist) Perspective


• The Nativist Perspective
• Interactionist Perspective
LEARNING /EMPIRICIST PERSPECTIVE
• Children acquire language as they IMITATE other’s
speech and are REINFORCED for grammatically correct
utterances, but this is unsupported by research.
• Adults use child-directed speech and reshape their
primitive sentences with expansions and recasts.
• Children will acquire language as long as they have
partners with whom to converse, even without these
environmental supports.
• B.F. Skinner
Evaluation of the LEARNING PERSPECTIVE
• Imitation and reinforcement do play some part in
language development. Certainly, it is no accident end
up speaking the same language their parents speak,
down to the regional accent. In addition, young
children whose parents are quicker to acquire and use
the proper names of novel toys when reinforced for
doing so by receiving the toys to play with. (Whitehurst
& Valdez- Menchaca, 1988)
• Children whose parents frequently encouraged them to
converse by asking questions and making requests are
more advanced in their early language development
than their age-mates whose parents are less
conversational. (Bohannon & Bonvillian, 1997; Valdez &
Whitehurst, 1992).
• If parents really “shaped” grammar, as Skinner claimed,
they ought to reliably praise or otherwise reinforce the
child’s grammatical utterances.
• Yet, careful analyses of conversations between mothers
and young children reveals that a mother’s approval or
disapproval depends far more on the truth value
(semantics) of what a child says, not on the statement’s
grammatical correctness. (Baron ,1992; Brown, Cazden
& Bellugi,1969)
• The way children seem unable to imitate adult
grammatical constructions exactly.
THE NATIVIST PERSPECTIVE
• Limitations of Behaviorist view of language acquisition
led in 1960’s to the alternative ‘generative’ account of
language
• Human beings are innately endowed biological linguistic
processing capabilities ( a language acquisition device
(LAD) or language –making capacity (LMC) that function
most efficiently prior to puberty.
• This means that children require nothing more than
being exposed to speech in order to learn to speak the
language they hear.
THE NATIVIST PERSPECTIVE
• Nativist’s identify linguistic universals and observe that
language functions are served by Broca’s and Wernicke’s
areas of the brain.
• Deaf children of hearing parents and other children
exposed to ungrammatical pidgins
may create a language n their own.
• Broca-

• Wernicke -
THE INTERACTIONIST PERSPECTIVE
• Claims that language development reflects an interaction
of nature and nurture.
• Proponents of the interactionist viewpoint believe that
both learning theorists and nativists are partially correct.
• Children are biologically prepared to acquire language.
• Instead of specialized linguistic processes being innate,
humans have a nervous system that gradually matures
and predisposes them to develop similar ideas about the
same age.
THE INTEACTIONIST PERSPECTIVE
• Biological maturation affects cognitive development ,
which in turn, influences language development.
• Environment plays a crucial role in language learning,
for companions continually introduce new linguistic
rules and concepts.
Lenneberg’s Sensitive-Period
Hypothesis
Who is Eric Lenneberg?
- Studied the CPH in his
book “Biological
foundations of language”.
- Children having a certain amount of time to
acquire a language
- Until the age of 13 language is present in
both hemisphere.
THE SENSITIVE- PERIOD DEVELOPMENT
• The notion that human beings are most proficient at
language learning before they reach puberty.
• If language input does not occur until after this time,
the individual will never achieve a full command of
language especially grammatical systems.
GENIE
• She was locked away from
normal civilization and was
undeveloped physically
and emotionally.
• Genie was an infant who
trapped in a 13 year old
body, because she could
only make infant like
sounds and no words or
sentences.
Chelsea
• A deaf woman who –
because of her deafness
and her family’s isolation-
was 32 years old before
she was exposed to a
formal language system.
Receptive language, holophrase, telegraphic
speech
The Prelinguistic Period: Before Language
• Infants are well prepared for language learning:
– Development during the prelinguistic phase allows
them to discriminate speech- like sounds and
become sensitive to a wider variety of phonemes
than adults are.
– They are sensitive to intonational cues.
– By 7 to 10 months of age,infants are already
segmenting others’ speech into phrases and
wordlike units
• Infants begin cooing by age 2 months and start to babbling
by age 4to 6 months.
Coos- vowel –like sounds that young infants repeat over and
over during periods of contentment.
Babbling – vowel/ consonant combination that infants begin
to produce at about 4 to 6 months.
• They later match the intonation of their babbles to the
tonal qualities of the language they hear and may produce
their own vocables to signify meaning.
• Infants less than 1 year old have already learned that
people take turns while vocalizing and that gestures can be
used to communicate and share meaning with companion.
• Once begin to understand individual words, their
receptive language is ahead of their productive
language.
Receptive Language- in which the individual
comprehends when listening to other’s speech.
Productive Language- that which the individual is capable
of expressing (producing) in his or her own speech.
The Holophrase Period:One Word at a Time
• Holophrase (or one-word) phase:
 Infants speak in holophrases and spend several months
spending their vocabularies one word at a time.
 Infants talk mostly about moving or manipulative objects
that interest them.
 Infants show a vocabulary spurt (naming explosion)
between 18 to 24 months of age.
• Toddlers use social and contextual cues to fast map
words onto objects ,actions, and attributes.
• Toddler’s one-word utterances are called holophrases
because they often seem less like labels and more like
attempts to communicate an entire sentence’s worth of
meaning.
From Holophrase to Simple Sentence: The Telegraphic Period

• At 18 to 24 months of age, toddlers begin to produce


two- and three word sentences known as telegraphic
speech because they omit grammatical markers and
smaller, less important words.
• Although telegraphic sentences are not grammatical by
adult standards, they are more than random word
combinations.
• In their earliest sentences, children follow certain rules
of word order when combining words and also express
the same categories of meaning (semantic relations).
• Toddlers are also becoming highly sensitive to
pragmatic constraints, including the realization
that speakers must be directive and elaborate
when a listener doesn’t share their knowledge.
• Young children are also learning certain
sociolinguistic prescriptions such as need to be
polite when making requests.
THANKS…
(^_^)

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