LANGUAGE

DEVELOPMEN
T
 2- Months COOING

• At 2 months, infants begin making sounds that

are language-based
• Starts with cooing
• They begin by producing vowel-like sounds,
such as “ooooo” and “ahhhh”

• At 5 to 6 months, infants begin making speech-

like sound that have no meaning

• Cooing turns into babbling

 The stages of language
acquisition
• from birth to about 6 months – so called pre
linguistic stage
• at around 6-8 months onset of babbling (first
manifestation of phonology)
• at around 10-12 months first words
• at around 20-24 months onset of the two- word
stage ( first manifestation of syntax)
• till about 36-40 months: so called ‘telegraphic
speech’
• By about 5-6 years of age Normal speech
 Stages of language acquisition
There are five basic stages of language acquisition:
1. Cooing: Appears at about 6 months or so. All infants coo using all the phonemes
from every language. It comprises mostly of vowel sounds.
2. Babbling: to talk or say something in a quick, confused, excited or foolish way. It
Appears at around 9 months. Infants are starting to selectively use the phonemes
from their native language. • Consonants are also introduced along with vowels and
he is able to correlate words with objects or people. It starts using words with
repetitive sounds like “dada”, “mama” etc.
3. One-word utterances: At around 12 months, children start using words. Starts using
fairly complex words. Also can recognize correct pronunciation of familiar words.
The next stage observed is two word utterance by age of 18 months.
4. Telegraphic speech: Children start making multi-word utterances that lack function
words i.e. conjunctions & articles. (about 2 years old) for eg. “water now”
5. Normal speech: By about 5-6 years of age, children have almost normal speech
with good command over syntax and semantics. In later stage development of
vocabulary and pragmatics takes place.
 THE
LANGUAGE
ACQUISITION
DEVICE
(LAD)
• Chomsky
• Noam Chomsky American linguist, philosopher, cognitive
scientist, logician, political commentator and activist.
• He is also known as the “father of modern linguistics”
• He argues that language acquisition is an innate (inborn,
natural) structure or function of the human brain.
• Chomsky believes that there are structures(areas) of the
brain that control the interpretation and production of
speech.
• Children do not need any kind of formal teaching to learn to
speak. Chomsky proposed that all humans have a language
 Our Brain is Specialized
for Language
• LAD (language acquisition device) is an area of our
brain which facilitates the development of language.

• Chomsky believes that the LAD facilitates language and

enables children to derive the rules of grammar from
everyday speech, regardless of the native language.

• Language is experience-expectant, words are expected

by the developing brain
• -Chomsky believes that children are pre-wired(before
birth)(the ability to add something) for language.
• Language Acquisition Device
• All human being are born with an innate tendency to learn a language
. This innate , language specific ability that facilitate the acquisition
of language in man is called Language Acquisition Device.
• The LAD processes and shapes the primary linguistic data received
by the child from his surroundings and enables him to acquire ideas
about the rules of language.
• The LAD contains knowledge of grammatical rules common to all
languages.
• LAD which encodes the major principles of a language and its
grammatical structures into the child’s brain. Children have then only
to learn new vocabulary and apply the syntactic structures from the
LAD to form sentences
• The human brain is ready naturally for language in the sense
when children are exposed to speech, certain general principles
for discovering or structuring language automatically begin to
operate.
• The brain is able to analyse the language and work out the
system that the language uses.
• Chomsky originally theorized that children were born with a
hardwired language acquisition device(LAD) in their brains.
• He later expanded this idea into that of Universal Grammar, a
set of innate principles and adjustable parameters that is
common to all languages.
• The LAD is activated when the child enters the world.
• The child exploits its LAD to make sense of the
utterances heard around it, deriving from this
‘primary linguistic data’- the grammar of the
language. 
• LAD is exploited to explain the remarkable
speed with which children learn to speak, and
the considerable similarity in the way
grammatical patterns are acquired across
different children and languages. 
• According to Chomsky, the presence of
Universal Grammar in the brains of children
allow them to infer the structure of their native
• He later expanded this idea into that of Universal
Universal Grammar
Grammar, a set of innate principles and adjustable
parameters that are common to all human languages. All
the languages of the world have the same basic
underlying grammatical structure. All the languages of
the world share similar characteristics of using nouns,
verbs, pronouns though necessarily in a similar manner.
• Chomsky points out that a child could not possibly learn
a language through imitation alone because the
language spoken around them is highly irregular – adult’s
speech is often broken up and even sometimes
ungrammatical.
• Every language is extremely complex, However, all
children, regardless of their intellectual ability, become
fluent in their native language within five or six years.
•These are difficult problems for
the theory of principles and
parameters.
•To try to account for them,
Chomsky revised his theory. He
toned down the idea that
grammatical rules are
abstract(idea,concept), and
•Linguistic universals are features
that can be found in most
languages.
• Chomsky (1968) distinguished
between substantive and formal
universals.
•Substantive universals include the
categories of syntax, semantics,
 Criticism of Universal
• 
Grammar
Primary concern of UG is only
syntax.
•Semantics, Pragmatics and
Discourse are completely
excluded.
•Social and psychological
variables are ignored.
• Chomsky’s proposed principles are
unvarying(constant, not
changing,uniform) and apply to all
human languages similar to one
another.
• The biologically endowed UG equip the
children naturally with a clear set of
expectations about the shape of the
language .
• It also helps the child to construct an
internalized grammar quickly when they
 Chomsky
• The ability to learn language is
inborn,natural
• His theory explains why all babies
language development follows a
pattern
• Humans have a Language Acquisition
Device (LAD) – a structure within the
brain that allows babies to absorb and
understand the rules of language they
•This explains why children
can quickly understand
and then use their
language creatively and
correctly without ever
being formally taught or
‘knowing’ the rules
 Mark Scheme notes…
Biological Approach – Chomsky:
Children are born ready to learn
whatever languages they hear around
them – through the LAD. There is a
specific period during childhood when
language development is triggered.
Children learn to talk because they
are genetically equipped to do so
 Language Acquisition Theories

• Nature vs. Nurture

 Nature vs Nurture
Nature or Nativist Perspective says
that human infants are born with the
capacity to learn language.

Nurture or Behaviorist perspective says

that language acquisition is a result of
imitation and reinforcement.
 Behaviorist Perspective
• Suggests Nurture and learning consists
of two basic processes:
1)Classical conditioning
2)Operant conditioning and
imitation
Environment plays a
central role
Behaviorists attribute receptive language to
associations that result from classical
conditions.

Our text gives the example:

every time the baby is offered
a bottle, the mother names
the object “here’s the bottle”.

After numerous times, the baby learns that

object is called a bottle.
Operant Conditioning

•Rat Experiment
•Red lever for a mild current
•Green Lever for the food
 Social Interactionist
• Child actively and intentionally
participates in language learning and
the construction of meaning.
• Child’s interactions with caretakers,
siblings and others support, shape and
confirm the child’s construction of
language.
• Language is meaningful and intentional
even from the earliest interactions.
 Nature or Nativist
Perspective
• Humans have innate capacity
dedicated to acquiring and using
language: Language Acquisition
Device (LAD)
• Language in a child’s environment
triggers innate LAD system

Language
learning is
inherent
Wikipedia explains LAD:
“The Language Acquisition Device (LAD) is a
hypothetical module of the human mind posited to
account for children's innate predisposition for
language acquisition.
First proposed by Noam Chomsky in the 1960s, the
LAD concept is an instinctive mental capacity which
enables an infant to acquire and produce language.
It is component of the nativist theory of language.
This theory asserts that humans are born with the
instinct or "innate facility" for acquiring language.”
 Neurobiological
Interaction of Nature
Perspective and Nurture
• Neurological growth of the brain create
a blueprint that causes the brain to
develop distinct but interdependent
systems.
• Neurobiology supports elements of the
nativist, behaviorist and social
interactionist views of language
development.
Infants are born with key brain areas
genetically dedicated to language
function.

Yet for children to learn the language of

their culture, it is necessary that they
have consistent, frequent opportunities
to interact with a persistent caregiver
who models the language with the child.
•The language that a child learns is
dependent on the language that the
child hears spoken in the home.

•For children to learn the language of

their culture, it is necessary that they
have consistent, frequent
opportunities to interact with a
persistent caregiver who models the
language with the child.
 HOW
CHILDREN
DEVELOP
LANGUAGE
 Language
Development
• Prelinguistic stage
• Crying
• Cooing
• Babbling
• Linguistic stage
• Single utterances
• Telegraphic speech
• Learning rules of grammar
The Stages of Primary Language

Acquisition:
There are five basic stages of language acquisition
Cooing: Appears at about 6 months or so. All infants coo
using all the phonemes from every language. Even
congenitally deaf children coo.

Babbling: Appears at around 9 months. Infants are
starting to selectively use the phonemes from their native
language.

One-word utterances: At around 12 months, children
start using words. Holophrastic speech: A single word used
to convey an entire utterance, e.g. “allgone”

Telegraphic speech: Children start making multi-word
utterances that lack function words. (about 2 years old)

Normal speech: By about 5-6 years of age, children have
PHONOLOGICAL
DEVELOPMENT
 Phonemes
• The basic building blocks of language
• The unique sounds that can be joined to create
words
• The sound of “p” in pin, pet, and pat
• The sound of “b” in bed, bat, and bird

• Infants can distinguish many of these sounds,

some of them as early as 1 month after birth

• Can discriminate sounds they have never heard

before such as phonemes from a foreign
language
 Language development
• Infants are equipped for language even before birth,
partly due to brain readiness,

• Children around the world have the same sequence of

early language development

• Newborns prefer to hear speech over other sounds- they

prefer to listen to “baby talk”- the high pitched, simplified
and repetitive was adults speak to infants

• The sound of a human voice, whether familiar or strange

always fascinates infants
 Adults Use Infant-
Directed Speech
Adults speak slowly and with exaggerated changes in pitch and
loudness and elongated pauses between utterances
• Also known as parentese, motherese, or child-directed
speech

• Infant-direct speech may attract infants’ attention more than

adult-directed speech because its slower pace and stress changes
provide the infant with more salient language cues

• Helps infants perceive the sounds that are fundamental to

their language
 The language environment for
infants is not solely auditory.
Much language exposure comes
from face-to-face interaction
with adults
• Infants use many tools to
identity words in speech.

They don’t understand the

meaning of the word yet,

but they can recognize a

word as a distinct
configuration of sounds
Parents and adults help infants
master language sounds by
talking in a distinctive style
Think on your own…
In what distinctive way do adults talk
to infants? How can this help infants
master the language?
 When talking to child,
adults use more words
like “doggie” and
“blankie”
• The use of child-directed speech gradually
fades away as the child gets older.
• In particular, the children who learn fastest are
those who receive most encouragement and
acknowledgement of their utterances.
• Questioning and directing children’s attention
to the environment, and particularly to
features of the environment that are salient to
the child are also good facilitators of
language development.
• The children who showed the most rapid
linguistic development were those whose
parents ( both )asked their children more
questions and gave more extensive replies to
• In summary, even though CDS might not be
necessary for language development, it might
nevertheless facilitate it.
• If CDS is not necessary, then how do children
learn a language on the basis of a degenerate
and impoverished input?
• Chomsky considered it to be impossible that a
child could deduce the structure of the
grammar solely on the basis of hearing normal
language.
• Something additional is necessary. He argued
that the additional factor is that the design of
the grammar is innate: some aspects of syntax
 speech. For example, carers put more pauses in between words in
speech to young children than in speech to other adults. Children
are further aided by the great deal of information present in the
speech stream.
• Distributional information about phonetic segments is an
important cue in learning to segment speech.
• Distributional information concerns the way in which sounds co-
occur in a language.
• For example, we do not segment speech so that a word begins
with a sequence like /mp/ because this is not a legitimate string of
sounds at the start of English words. Similarly the sounds within
words such as “laughing” and “loudly” frequently co-occur by
virtue of these being words;
• infants very quickly learn to discriminate words in a stream of
syllables on the basis of which sounds tend to occur together
regularly. Once they have learned the words, they then listen
longer to novel stimuli than to the words presented in the stream
 the prosody of language.
• Prosodic information concerns the pitch of the
voice, its loudness, and the length of sounds.
Neonates(newborn) prefer to listen to parental
rather than non-parental speech.
• Infants as young as 4 days old can distinguish
languages from one another. Infants prefer to
listen to the language spoken by their parents.
For example, 6 babies born to French-speaking
mothers preferred to listen to French rather than
Russian. The likely explanation for this is that the
child learns the prosodic characteristic of the
language in the womb.
 Speech Production
• At 2 months, infants begin making sounds that are
language-based
• Starts with cooing
• They begin by producing vowel-like sounds, such
as “ooooo” and “ahhhh”

• At 5 to 6 months, infants begin making speech-like

sound that have no meaning

• Cooing turns into babbling

 “Babbling”

•Many cultures assign important

meanings to the sounds babies
babble:

•“ma-ma-ma”, “da-da-da” and “pa-

pa-pa” are usually taken to apply to
significant people in the infant’s life
• Babbling is clearly more language-like than other early
vocalizations such as crying and cooing, and consists of
strings of vowels and consonants combined into sometimes
lengthy series of syllables, usually with a great deal of
repetition, such as “bababa gugugu”,
• There are two types of babbling .
1.Reduplicated babble is characterized by repetition of
consonant-vowel syllables, often producing the same pair
for a long time (e.g. “bababababa”).
2.Non-reduplicated or variegated babble is characterized by
strings of non-repeated syllables (e.g.“bamido”).
• Babbling lasts for 6–9 months, fading out as the child
produces the first words. It appears to be universal:
• Deaf infants also babble (Sykes, 1940), although it is now
known that they produce slightly different babbling
• What is the relation between babbling and later
speech?
• The continuity hypothesis states that babbling is a direct matter of
language—in babbling the child produces all of the sounds that are to be
found in all of the world’s languages. This range of sounds is then gradually
narrowed down, by reinforcement by parents and others of some sounds but
not others (and by the lack of exposure to sounds not present within a
particular language) to the set of sounds in the relevant language.
• Words are acquired by the processes of reinforcement and shaping of random
babbling sounds. For example, a parent might give the infant extra food when
the child makes a “ma” sound, and progressively encourages the child to
make increasingly accurate approximations to sounds and words in their
language.
• There are a number of problems with the continuity hypothesis.
• Many sounds, such as consonant clusters, are not produced at all in babbling,
and also parents are not that selective about what they reinforce in babbling:
they encourage all vocalization . Nor does there appear to be much of a
gradual shift towards the sounds particular to the language to which the child
is exposed
 no simple relation to later development.
• Jakobson (1968) claimed two stages in the development
of sounds.
• In the first stage children babble, producing a wide
range of sounds that do not emerge in any particular
order and that are not obviously related to later
development.
• The second stage is marked by the sudden
disappearance of many sounds that were previously in
their repertoires. Some sounds are dropped temporarily,
re-emerging perhaps many months later, whereas some
are dropped altogether.
• Jakobson argued that it is only in this second stage that
children are learning the phonological contrasts
appropriate to their particular language, and these
 If infant-directed speech helps
infants perceive sounds that are
essential to the development of
their language…

What about children

who cannot hear?
 Deaf Children
• About 1 in every 1,000 American infants is born
deaf

• Over 90% of deaf children have hearing parents

• These children are often delayed in language and complex make-believe

play

Mommy Daddy Baby

• Deaf infants and toddlers seem to master sign
language in much the same way and at about the
same pace that hearing children master spoken
language.

• Deaf 10-month-olds often “babble” in signs: they

produce signs that are meaningless but resemble
the tempo and duration of real signs
 At 6 months – if an infant
hears either “mommy” or
“daddy”, they look toward
the appropriate person.
By their 1 birthday, infants
st

usually say their first

words, usually an extension
of babbling.
By the age of 2 most children have a vocabulary
of a few hundred words, and by age 6 the
vocabulary includes over 10,000 words!
 The Importance of Symbols
• Children begin using gestures, which are symbols shortly
before their first birthday.

• Gestures and words convey a message equally well…

sometimes gestures pave the way for language

• In one study, 50% of all objects were referred to first by

gesture and, about 3 months later, by word (Iverson &
Meadow, 2005)
 After children know
that objects have
names, a gesture is a
convenient substitute
for pronouns like “it”
or “that” and often
cause the adult to say
the object’s name
 Here are some words as they are
pronounced by young children. Can
you work out the ‘rules’ behind these
mispronunciations?
• ‘seep’ for ‘sheep’
• ‘effalant’ for’elephant’
• ‘dibbits’ for ‘biscuits’
• ‘doy’’for ‘toy
7359
• ‘wosie’ for ‘Rosie’ © 2007
www.teachit.c

• ‘choo-choo’ for ‘train’

o.uk
 Deletion
Deletion often occurs on the last consonant:
• a child might say /kæ/ instead of /kæt/
(cat) , /pɪ/ instead of /pɪg/ (pig), or /maʊ/
instead of /maʊs/ (mouse).
Sometimes children delete the last sound
and swap other sounds around. Two or
three processes can work together, making
children’s early speech quite difficult to
7359
© 2007
www.teachit.c
o.uk

comprehend.
 Early
•Children also sounds
seem to like addition
and reduplication:

•the repetition of particular sounds

and structures, e.g. doggie
(adding an extra vowel sound to
create a CVCV
structure(consonant/vowel)
•choochoo (repeating the whole
 Consonant clusters
Children find it difficult to produce
these consonant clusters, so will
reduce them to smaller units:
•/skwɪrəl/ - /skɪrəl/
•/strɒŋ/ - /stɒŋ/ or /tɒŋ/
•/blæŋkɪt/ – /bæŋkɪt/
 Substitution
Another pattern is substitution, where one
sound is swapped for another, easier
sound:
• /sɪŋ/ becomes /tɪŋ/
• /zebrə/ becomes /debrə/
• /Θɪŋ/ becomes /tɪŋ/
The pattern for all of these is similar: a
fricative sound is replaced by a stop
sound in roughly the same area of the
 Assimilation
Assimilation is a process that illustrates
how some sounds change because of
other sounds around them.
Take /gɒgi:/ and /bæbɪt/.
• In both cases, the first consonant
sound has been influenced by the
second, so doggie becomes goggie
and rabbit becomes babbit.
 LEXICAL AND
SEMANTIC
DEVELOPMENT
 “A child’s knowledge of the
world will be demonstrated in
his word knowledge”

Crais, 1990
• Lexical development:
the study of the development of
vocabulary
• Semantic development:
the study of the development
of meaning
 Semantics includes:
•Vocabulary development
•Concept development
•Meaning of words used in
combination(big-small,tall-
short)
•Asking Questions
 Semantic Development
• Acquisition of words and their meanings
• First words at about 12 months
• Initially this is a slow, gradual process
• Maybe learn a couple of words a week
• Object words, commands, some social words (bye-
bye)
• Then, several months after it begins, word learning
speeds up dramatically
• Usually begins when child’s vocabulary is around
50-100 words
The “Vocabulary Burst” or “Naming Explosion
 The Vocabulary Burst
• Rapid increase in the rate of word learning in very
early childhood. Estimated that the average 5-
year-old knows about 6000 words
• If child knows 100 words at 18-months, this
means they learn 5900 words over the next 3 ½
years.
• Almost 5 words/day
• “Fast-Mapping”
• How do they do it?
• Naming insight: Everything has a name and
there’s a name for everything
• Application of word-learning strategies or
 Early semantic relations
• Nomination (that
doggie) • Locative (cup table)
• Negation (no juice) • Agent-action
(mommy sit)
• Recurrence (more
cookie) • Action-object (hit
ball)
• Possession (my
baby) • Agent-object (daddy
truck)
• Attribution (big ball)
 Names for everything!
• Once an infant’s vocabulary reaches about 50
words it suddenly begins to build rapidly, at a
rate of 50-100+ words per month, mostly
nouns.
• Nouns are acquired more easily than verbs.
One explanation for this might be that verbs
are more cognitively complex than nouns, in
that whereas nouns label objects, verbs label
relations between objects
• This language spurt occurs around 18 months
and is sometimes called the Naming
• There are syntactic cues to word meaning.
• Brown (1958) first proposed that children may
use part-of-speech as a cue to meaning. For
example, 17-month-olds are capable of
attending to the difference between noun
phrase syntax as in “This is Sib” and count
noun syntax as in “This is a sib”.
• This is obviously a useful cue for determining
whether the word is a proper name or stands
for a category of things.
• The general capacity to use syntax to infer
meaning is called syntactic bootstrapping
 understand the verb “bringing” in the
sentence “Are you bringing me the
doll?”.
• The syntactic structure of the
sentence suggests that “bring” is a
verb whose meaning involves
transfer, thus ruling out possible
contending meanings such as
“carrying”, “holding”, or “playing”.
• Even children as young as 2 years old
can use information about transitive
 Productive
Vocabulary
• Early productive vocabularies of children in
the US include names for people, objects, and
events from the child’s everyday life.

• Frequent events or routines are also

labeled, such as “up” or “bye-bye”

• Nouns predominate the early productive

vocabularies of children
 The rate of children’s vocabulary
development is influenced by the
amount of talk they are exposed to
The more speech that is addressed
to a toddler, the more rapidly the
toddler will learn new words
 Word
• Fast Mapping is the process of rapidly
Comprehension
learning a new word by contrasting it
with a familiar word.
• A child uses a familiar word to figure out
an unfamiliar word.e.g presenting a
young child with two toys -one
familaiar(a dog) and one unfamiliar (a
platypus).
• The children’s ability to connect new
words to familiar words so rapidly that
 Example of Fast
• In a preschool classroom,
Mapping an experimenter
drew a child’s attention to two blocks – asking
the child to “get the celadon block not the
blue one”(mint green color)
• From this simple contrast, the child inferred
that the name of the color of the requested
object was “celadon” {pale green colour}
• After a single exposure to this novel word,
about half the children showed some
knowledge of it a week later by correctly
picking the celadon color child from a bunch
 Mapping problem:
A significant problem for a child when learning a new word is that the thing
it refers to can appear in many different
forms. For example, the word “building” can be used to name many
different types of structure.
• One Early
common Errors
inaccuracyin
is Language
under extension –
using a word too narrowly(restrictionof the use of
a word)
• Underextension occurs when a chid acquires a
word for a particular thing and fails to extend it
to other objects in the same category.

• Using the word “cat” to refer only to the

family cat not any other cat.

• Using the word “ball” to refer only to a

Sarah refers to the blanket she sleeps
with as “blankie”. When Aunt Ethel
gives her a new blanket Sarah refuses
to call the new one a “blankie” – she
restricts that word only to her original
blanket.
 Overextension
• They use a given word in a broader context than is
appropriate.
• Overextension is the tendency of very young children
to extend the use of a word beyond the scope of its
specific meaning.

• Common between 1 and 3 years of age

• More common than Underextension
• Toddlers will apply the new word to a group of similar
experiences

• “Open” – for opening a door, peeling fruit, or undoing

shoelaces
 Overextension
• Children overextend because they have not acquired
another suitable word or because they have difficulty
remembering a more suitable word

• Examples:
• Ball referring to ball, balloon, marble, egg, or apple
• Moon referring to moon, half-moon shaped lemon
slice,
• Car referring to a car, bus, truck, or tractor
• Daddy referring to dad or any man
• Doggie referring to dog or any four-legged animal
 Theoretical accounts of over- and under-extensions
• Semantic feature hypothesis (E.Clark)
• • The meaning of words can be specified in terms of smaller units of meaning (“semantic
features”)
• • When there is a mismatch between features of the word used by the child and the
complete representation used by
• the adult, an over- or under-extension occurs
• • Over-extensions occur when a set of features is incomplete
• • Under-extensions occur when additional spurious features are developed
• • Semantic development involves acquiring new features and reducing mismatch
between adult and child features
• • Features are acquired from the most general to the least general
• Functional core hypothesis (Nelson)
• • Generalization is not restricted to perceptual similarity—functional features are also
emphasized
• • In other ways, similar to the semantic features hypothesis
• Prototype hypothesis (Bowerman)
• • A prototype is an average member of a category
• • Lexical development consists of acquiring a prototype that corresponds to the adult
 Making Sentences
• Most children begin to combine words into simple
sentences by 18 to 24 months of age

• Children’s first sentences are two-word combinations

referred to as Telegraphic speech

• Words directly relevant to meaning

• Words not critical to the meaning are left out –

similar to the way telegrams were written such as:
• Function words: a, the in
• Auxiliary words: is, was, will be
• Word endings: plurals, possessives, verb tenses
 These sentences are brief
and to the point, containing
only vital information
“ More cookie”, “Mommy go”, “Daddy juice”,
“Sue dogs”
• By about 2 ½ years of age, children have the
ability to produce more complex sentences
(four or more words per sentence).

• The longer sentences are filled with

grammatical morphemes (words or endings of
words that make sentences more grammatical).

• A 1 ½-year-old might say “kick ball” but a 3-

year-old would be more likely to say “I am
kicking the ball”
 Over regularization
• Speech errors in which children treat irregular forms of
words as if they were regular.

• Applying rules to words that are exceptions to the rule

• This leads young children to talk about foots, t ooths, sleeps,

sheeps and mouses.

• Although technically wrong, Over regularization is a

sign of verbal sophistication because it shows children
are applying the rules to grammar.
 Between 3 and 6 Years of Age
• Children learn to use negation
• “That isn’t a butterfly”
• Children learn to use embedded sentences
• “Jennifer thinks that Bill took the book”
• Children begin to comprehend passive voice as opposed to
active voice
• “The ball was kicked by the girl” as opposed to “The girl
kicked the ball”

• By the time most children enter kindergarten, they use most of

the grammatical forms of their native language with great skill
 ignore grammatically incorrect
utterances. They may provide some
sort of feedback,
• For example, parents are more likely
to repeat the child’s incorrect
utterance in a
• grammatically correct form, or to ask
a follow-up question
• On the other hand, if the child’s
utterance is grammatically correct,
 The Contrastive Hypothesis
• Once children have a few names for things, how do they
accommodate the many new words to which they are exposed?
• Barrett (1978) argued that the key features in learning the
meaning of a word are those that differentiate it from related
words. For example, the meaning of “dog” is learned by attaining
the contrast between dogs and similar animals (such as cats)
rather than simply learning the important features of dogs.
• In the revised version of this model (Barrett, 1982), although
contrasts are still important, they are not what are acquired first.
• Instead words are initially mapped onto prototypical
representations; the most salient prototypical features are used to
group the word with words sharing similar features, and
contrastive features are then used to distinguish between
semantically similar words.
• The contrastive hypothesis is a pragmatic principle that simply says
that different words have different meanings.
• It is very similar to the lexical constraint of mutual exclusivity.
However, the child is still faced with significant problems.
• When new word meanings are acquired, because features are
contrasted with the features of existing word meanings, the meaning
should not overlap with that of existing words: the words’ meaning
should fill a gap. Children do not like two labels for the same thing.
• Unfortunately, young children are sometimes happy with two labels
for the same object .
• Contrast appears to be used later rather than earlier as an organizing
principle of semantic development. Neither is it likely to be the only
principle driving semantic development. There comes a point when it
is no longer useful for semantic development to make a contrast (for
example, between black cats and white cats), and the contrastive
hypothesis says nothing about this. It seems just as likely that when a
child hears someone use a new word, they assume that it must refer
to something new because otherwise the speaker would have used
 Does comprehension always precede
production?
• Comprehension usually precedes production for the obvious
reason that the child has to more or less understand (or think
they understand) a concept before producing it.
• Quite often contextual cues are strong enough for the child to
get the gist of an utterance without perhaps being able to
understand the details.
• In such cases there is no question of the child being able to
produce language immediately after being first exposed to a
particular word or structure.
• The order of comprehension and production is not always
preserved: words that are comprehended first are not always
those that are produced first . Early comprehension and
production vocabularies may differ quite markedly . There
 SYNTACTIC
DEVELOPMENT
 Syntax
•Syntax includes the rules of
word function (parts of
speech) and word order

•Syntax is language form

When childrenThe One-Word
first begin to speak,Stage
they use only one
word at a time.
When these words are used to communicate a more
complex meaning, they are said to function as
holophrases.
Holophrase: A single word that conveys the
meaning of a phrase or sentence.
 “Mama” = “Here is Mama.”
 “Mama” = “I want my Mama.”

 “Mama” = “This belongs to Mama.”

Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or di
splay.
 First Sentences

• At 18-24 months, toddlers start to put two words

together, tied into the appearance of verbs in the
child’s vocabulary.
• When true two-word sentences appear, they usually
take the form of telegraphic speech.
Telegraphic speech:
A toddler speech style in which words not
essential to the meaning of a sentence (articles,
conjunctions, prepositions) are omitted.
 Further Syntactic Development
Brown’s Stages of Early Syntactic Development
based on length of utterances

I. Express simple semantic & syntactic relationships (1-2 morphemes).

“See teddy.”
II. Acquire basic grammatical morphemes (2-2.5 morphemes).
“See teddies.”
III. Variations on simple sentences, incl. questions (2.5-3 morphemes).
“Where’s Mommy?” “You can’t come.”
IV. Subordinate clauses (3-3.5 morphemes).
“I want you to do it.”
V. Join simple
Copyrightsentences
splay.
to form
© 2004 The McGraw-Hill compound
Companies, sentences
Inc. Permission (3.5-4).
required for reproduction or di

“I had cake and Daddy had ice cream.”

 Negation
• Phase one
• Children will put a negation in front of
the word they want to negate.ex. No
kitty.
• Phase two
• children will put the negative word into
their sentences.ex. That not kitty.
• Phase three
• Children will be able to add a negative
 Asking negative
questions
• You are going to the store.
• Are you going to the store?
• You aren’t going to the store.
• Aren’t you going to the store?
• Native speakers understand these
constructions, but even for adults they
are hard to explain.
 Negative sentences

• “No go night-night”

• “I no go sleep”

• “I will not go to sleep”

Inflection--------(cat,cats),(girl,
Question Asking girl’s,
girls’)(buu,buys,bought,am
buying,big,bigger,biggest)
Changes in word order and addition
of words

Two types of questions:

Yes/no questions: Are you going to
school?
 Yes/No Questions
• Inflection
• The tree died?
• Tag questions
• The tree died, didn’t it?
• Word order and addition
• Did the tree die?
 Learning to ask Wh questions

Phase one
• Children will make two word questions
• ex.Where kitty?
Phase two
• Children will add helping verbs to the question but willl often
reverse them.
• ex.Where kitty is going?
Phase three
• Children will form proper questions.
• ex.Where is the kitty going?
 Embedding/Conjoining
•Conjoining: ‘and’, ‘and then’
‘because’, ‘so’,
‘but’

•Embedding: noun clauses

infinitive phrases
participle phrases
 Active and Passive Voice
• Non-reversible passives
• The boy kicked the ball
• The ball was kicked by the boy
• Reversible passives
• The boy kicked the girl
• The girl was kicked by the boy
• Before age 4– semantic strategy and first noun is the
subject hueristic
• Age 4 to 6 –rigid (FIXED)word order, first noun is the
subject
• After age 6 – correct understanding of passive
 Preschool Production
• Length of utterances increases
• Grammatical elements are added
–ing to verb (“me playing”)
–s for plural and possessive (“two books,”
“Mommy’s hat”)
articles and adjectives (‘this a big car”)
pronouns (her, him, you, me)
past tense (regular and irregular)
(“he ate it,” Sally played outside”)
future tense (“I will go home”)
•Forming negatives (“I didn’t see it”)
•Forming questions (“Can we go to
the
park?”)
•Combining clauses into complex
sentences (“I went to the swing,
but he
wasn’t there”)
THE END
Theories of
Language
Acquisition
 THEORIES OF LANGUAGE
ACQUISITION
Theory Central Idea Individual with
theory

Behaviourist Children imitate adults. Their correct utterances are Skinner

reinforced when they get what they want or are
praised.
Innateness A child's brain contains special language-learning Chomsky
mechanisms at
birth.
Cognitive Language is just one aspect of a child's overall Piaget
intellectual
development.
Interaction This theory emphasises the interaction between Bruner
children and their
care-givers.
 The development of
language in children is
amazing, but how do they
do it?
There are several theories that attempt to
explain how we develop language
 Infants Are Conditioned to
Speak
• Behaviorist’s believe that all learning is acquired step-
by-step, through associations and reinforcements

• According to this view, the reinforcement of the quantity

and quality of talking to child affect rate of language
development.

• When a 6 month-old says, “ma-ma-ma” they are

showered with attention and praise. This is exactly what
the baby wants and will make the sounds again to get
the same rewards.
 Say Ma-Ma…..
• Children who are spoken to more and praised by
caregivers tend to develop language faster.

• Parents are great intuitive teachers- we name items for

infants and praise infants when they repeat our words.

• For instance, parents typically name each object when

they talk to their child, “Here is your bottle”, “There is
your foot”, “You want your juice?”

• Parents name the object and speak clearly and slowly,

often using baby talk to capture the infant’s interest
(Gogate et al., 2000).
 What Do the Linguist’s
say?
• Noam Chomsky believes language is a product of
biology and is too complex to be mastered so early
and easily by conditioning.

• Chomsky noted that children worldwide learn the

rudiments of grammar at approximately the same
age because the human brain is equipped with a
language device(LAD).

• including intonations and structure of language

•The earliest theory was
behaviorism.
•Later, the cognitive theory of
language development emerged
before it was primarily
surpassed by the linguistic
theory, also known as the
innatist theory.
•The fourth and most recent is
THANK YOU