GETTING STARTED AND PHONOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT

GETTING STARTED

AND PHONOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT

Two themes: (After “Preliminaries to developmental Psycholinguistics”) a child can acquire language because he has adequate physical and cognitive endowment and because he grows up in speech-filled environment. A child from birth is well equipped to perceive human speech but takes several years to learn to correctly produce the speech sounds of his language.

A. PRE ELIMINARIES TO DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

1.  Developmental Psycholinguistics: Overview

Development in one area of language supports development in other areas. For convenience part II is divided in to three chapters, each chapter laying a foundation for the next chapter. Together, the three chapters develop the themes: a child acquires language in using it to communicate with people. He does so over several years, learning different aspect as a the child grows older three things change;

·         The contents and function of his messages

·         The circle people with whom he communicates

·         The means by which communicates

       These changes may be treated according to the following six phases

1.      A neonate (neo = ‘new’ nate = born) or an infant (in = “without” fant = “speech”; up to age 1) uses  prelinguistics means – e.g., crying, gestures and vocalization-to communicate its few physical and social needs to those people  close to it, especially to its mother.

2.      As a toddler (ages 1-2 years) takes an uncertain but inevitable step into the world of walking, so he steps into the world of verbal communication by learning  how to pronounce  speech sound and to use individual words. His mother still is the pivot of his communicative activities.

3.      A 2-3 year old child can communicate most of this physical and social needs using language, which now includes budding syntax (some grammatical morphemes and words combination). Thanks to emerging language, his circle of communication widens slightly to include  a few peers.

4.      A preschooler (aged 3-5, before starting school) elaborates on the basic of communication skills and language already acquired. He can produce a variety of Utterance to communicate a variety of messages. In interacting with his peers, he tones his conversational skills, which include taking turns rapidly and staying on the topic at hand.

5.      A schoolchild (ages 6-12) is skilled in communicating ideas (not just physical and social needs) through sentences and discourses of varied structure and complexity. His syntax is reasonably secure. He also learns a means of communication other than oral speech, namely reading and writing, which will play important roles in his further intellectual development.

6.      A high school student has further room for development in language and communication skills if he wishes to become a fully literate member of his society. (alas, some never do)

The there chapter of developmental psycholinguistic deal with mostly phases 1 to 4, and marginally with phases 5 and 6. They report findings on children speaking diverse languages, such as German, French and Italian (Indo-European); Turkish, Japanese, and Korean (Altaic); Hebrew and Arabic (Hamito-Semitic); and Chinese (Sino-Tibetan) (“Language Families” ) We shall see that the earlier phases of acquisition are more similar across diverse languages than the later phases.

2. Methods of Studying Language Acquisition

Human curiosity about how children acquire language must be as old as language itself.  Countless parents have made astute, if biased, observations on how their own children acquired language. Developmental psycholinguists try to inject some objectivity and system into the study of language acquisition.   

There are two major approaches to studying language development longitudinal and cross sectional. In a longitudinal study, a researcher observes children, sometimes only a single child, acquiring language over a period of some months of years. In a typical longitudinal study, researcher might observe each of several subjects for an hour once a week for a year or more.

Longitudinal studies, valuables as they are, take a long time to complete often deal with only a few children. Therefore, they must be supplemented by cross-sectional studies in which a researcher observes simultaneously many children in each of several categories. A cross-sectional study reveals a representative picture of a stage or level in language development for each group studied, as well as a stage or level in language development trend through several age groups.

Some studies of language acquisition are simply observational: researchers observe children’s speech in a naturalistic home setting, usually interaction between child and mother. Some studies use experiment researches observe the way children’s speech changes as stimuli or setting as manipulated. Some researches conduct experiment in laboratory especially when instruments are involved, as in studies of infant’s ability to discriminate pairs of sound.

3. Index of Language Development

Language development is commonly measured with an index called mean length of utterance (MLU), which is the mean number of morpheme both free and bound, averaged over a sample of about one hundred utterance (R. Brown1973). Children, as their linguistics skill develop, add to utterances bound morphemes and function words as well as embedding coordinating clauses, thereby increasing MLU. Two children matched MLU are much more likely to have speech that is at the same level constructional complexity than are two children of the same age but different MLUz.

The children produced utterances to describe pictures of simple events; ten adults did the same, providing sentences with what children’s description could be compared. MLU is useful as an index of language development only in early childhood.

B. CHILDS MIND AND MOTHER

Language acquisition is affected by three variables: the language to be acquired, the child who acquires it, and the setting where he acquires it. Since we have considered language in part I we know consider the two remaining variables – the child and the setting dominated by mother. A child can acquire language because he has an adequate physical and cognitive endowment, and because he grows up in speech – filled environment. His mother speaks in such a way as to make it is easy for him to acquire language.

1. Cognitive Development: Piagetian

Cognitive development may set the stage for language acquisition and at the same time limit the level of acquisition, according to the noted Swiss psychologist Piaget (1948, 1962). Piaget divided cognitive development into four periods: sensorimotor, preoperational thought, concrete operation and formal operation.

First is the sensorimotor  period 9birth-age2), during which a toddler learns about the world through sensing and manipulating objects. He attains the notion of object permanence, the awareness that an object does not cease to exist when it is out of sight. Hide a rattle from a toddler and he will look for it even under a cover.

Piaget further divides the sensorimotor period into six stages. In the last of the six stages (18-24 Months), deferred imitation, symbolic play, mental imagery, and spoken language merge at roughly the same time. Each is a form of representation in the sense that toddler “re-present,” or calls to mind, a substitute that stands for the object, person, or event.

The second period (ages 2-7) is that of preoperational thought, the period before the emergence of operations, mental manipulation of ideas according to set a rule. A preschooler thinking is perceptually based and can deal with one relationship at time.

The third period is that of concrete operations (ages 7-11), during which a child becomes able to solve the Piagetian problem of conservation. The fourth and last period is that of formal operations (ages 11-15), in which a child can deal with abstract, formal relationship and entertain hypotheses.

Piaget may have underestimated the cognitive capacities of children. Some researcher find evidence of more developed cognitive capacities in children  than Piaget did (e.g., Bryant 1974). Others find evidence of jess developed capacities  as well (DeLoache 1987) Nevertheless, Piaget’s idea of periods and stages has been adopted by later researchers, who prefer the less strong term levels, sometimes using as many as eight (Fischer & Silvern 1985; also Case 1984).

Piaget’s preoperational thought does not adequately relate to the rapid and rich language development of the preschool years can be considered a critical period for language acquisition (see :Critical Period (s) for language acquisition. In discussing language acquisition, Piaget focuses on language as an abstract system of sign relations, compared  to the Soviet psychologist Vigotsky (1978), who emphasizes social interactive  and context-dependent aspect of language use (Hickmann, 1986). All the same, there may be a broad  relation between cognition and language development.

2.  Language and Cognitive Development

According to some psychologist, language and speech – in particular labeling and talking  about events – aid such cognitive tasks as categorizing, perceptual discrimination, problem solving, and remembering. Vygotsky (1962) contends that language influences children’s thought, thought within the confines of their levels of intellectual development. Blank (1974) contends that language and speech are called upon in dealing with concepts whose identities derive from the intangible world of time. Preschoolers can easily distinguish between one and two circles, regardless of whether or not they apply language to the situation.

According to some other psychologist, conceptual development and semantic development proceed simultaneously rather than one being a perquisite to the other. Gopnik (1984) studied the relation between toddlers production of gone (allgone) for the disappearance of an object and their solution of cognitive task. According to yet other psychologists, cognition and language are independent of each other. These psychologists report a few cases of mentally independent of each other. These  psychologists report a few cases of mentally  retarded children whose language ability  cultsrips their cognitive ability (Cromer 1988; Curtis & Yamada 1981). But language development of most mentally retarded children are highly variable and slow (Lenenberg, Nicholas & Rosenberg 1964; Miller & Chapman 1984).

One cognitive process important for language use is memory. Short-term memory (STM), or working memory is used by a listener or reader to integrate all the parts of a sentence in the process of comprehending. The number of items STM can hold, the span, increases from two at age 26 to eight at age 16 (Hunter 1977) the increases is due to an emergence of active memory strategies, such as verbal rehearsal and organizing, according to some researchers (e.g., Fabricius & Welman, 1984).

In acquiring both linguistic and perceptual-cognitive skills, child appear to follow a pattern that can be summarized as follows:

·         Simple and short before long and complex

·         Grossly distinct before subtly distinct

·         Salient (moving, colorful, big and so forth) before less salient

·         Personal items before nonpersonal ones

·         “Here and now” events before events displaced in time and place

3.  Babbling

In contrast to their precocity in the perception of speech sounds, children a re slow in   producing the speech sounds of their language, owing to their immature articulatory organs and immature manipulation of these organs. At first infants vocalize randomly and coo (produce vowellike sounds). Between 6b and 15 months, they indulge in babbling, vocalizing sound sequences that are still meaningless but patterned, such as CVCV (baba, mama).

Data on babbling infants from over fifteen countries – e.g., United States, Japan, Thailand, India – show that the twelve most frequent consonants, Japan, Thailand, India – show that the twelve most frequent consonant constitute about 95 percent of all babbled consonants, whereas the twelve least  frequent consonants constitute only five percent (Locke 1983). The universal babbling patterns is somewhat modified later by phonetic features of the language to which infants are exposed. Adult French judges were asked to discriminate samples of babbling produced by 6-10 month-old infants from three language backgrounds: French, Arabic, and Cantonese Chinese. In the babbling of Arabic babies, rhythmical weak-strong (or in stressed-stressed) contrast were more marked than in the babblings of French or Cantonese babies. The French judges could identify the infants that from their own  linguistics community, but could not do so when prosody alone was the stimulus (de Boysson-Basdies, Sagart, & Durand 1984; but see Kuchn & Hirsh 1985;s Olney and Scholnick 1976).

Deaf babies also babble, and what is more, they produce many stops, some nasals, and only a few fricatives, just like hearing babies (Sykes 1940). There group of babies – normal, with Downs syndrome, and hearing age (B.L Smith 1982). At age 15 months, however, the moderately and profoundly deaf babies produced labials far more than  the other two groups, presumably because they rely on visual cues for labials but need auditory feedback for other types of sound.

The similar early patterns of babbling found among normal and language-handicapped infants in diverse linguistics environments suggest that they are determined by the infants in diverse linguistics environment suggests that they are determined by the infants’ physiological factors, such as maturation of the articulatory organs and of the neutral mechanism that controls articulation.

As children grow older, they can do three things with the sounds they once babbled:

·         Maintain the babbled repertoire

·         Lose the sounds not use in their language

·         Learn to produce nonrepertoire consonants (and their sequences)

4.  Learning to Produce Phonemes

Babbling shades into early speech; toddlers everywhere tend to produce in their early speech those sounds that they babbled. The toddlers’ sound inventories closely resembled the babbling repertoire, being dominated by stops, nasals, and glides, with a modicum of fricatives and affricates and no liquids. In another study, between ages 2 and 4 the mean percentage of correctly articulated consonants improved slightly from 81 percent  to 99 percent for the repertoire consonants but greatly from 35 percent  to 83 percent for the nonrepertoire consonants (Locke 1983, fig.2) A similar pattern of improvement was found over a wider age range of 3 to 8 (Templin 1957). The repertoire-nonrepertoire discrepancy narrowed over the years but had not disappeared completely even by age 8.

The repertoire consonants tend to be found in many languages, whereas the non repertoire consonants are found in only a few languages. Children take a few years to learn to articulate correctly the phonemes of their language. The differential rates of acquisition or mastery of speech sound may reflect the relative articulatory complexities of the sounds. In some languages tones are phonemic, that is, tones or pitches – e.g., high, rising, and falling I distinguish meaning of words that have the same consonants and vowels, say (ba).

5. Learning to Produce Sound Sequences

By imitation, repetition, and practice, toddlers learn to approximately pronunciations of sound sequences to that of adults. Peter placed stress consistently on some of his words, more in spontaneous speech than in imitations. He did so even when he missed a consonants, as in flowers (‘fA:uz). He misplaced stress consistently on some words, as in puzzle [pe’zu;], perhaps because of articulatory difficulty in reducing final syllables containing consonants.

Because the phonological system has been incompletely acquired at ages 1 to 2, many of the one-and two word utterances describes this book are pronounced as approximations to adults’ words: Toddlers simplify complex syllable structures by dropping

·         The final C in CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant): boot → [bu]; ball →[bO]

·         One C in a C cluster: drum → [dVm]; flowers → [fA:uz]

·         An unstressed syllable: ba’nana → [nana]; gi’raffe → [rAf]

·         The final syllable white repeating the initial CV syllable: water → 9wawa]; bouche (French “mouth”) → [bubu]

Young children also substitute sounds, presumably an easy, repertoire consonant for a   difficult, nonrepertoire one:

·         Stops for fricatives, as in that → [d&t]

·         Glides for Liquids, as in little → [wito]

·         Front consonants for back ones, as in cu:ri: (Hindi “bangle”) →  [tui]

·         Vowel for syllabic C, as in apple → [apo]

     All in all, when young children mispronounce phonemes their difficulties are more likely to be articulatory than perceptual.

6.  Sensitivity to Phonological Pattern

In English, the initial consonant cluster /gl-/ but not /vl-/ is permissible, whereas in Russian both are permissible, and in Japanese, neither is permissible. How sensitive are preschooler to such permissible. How sensitive are preschooler to such permissible or excluded sound sequences of their language? Messer (1967) prepared tapes of twenty five pairs of monosyllables differing in degrees of deviation from English pronunciations. Asked to select which of two syllables sounded more like a word, English –speaking preschooler tended to select the syllable that was constructed according to English phonological patterns. Asked to pronounce syllables, they mispronounced the excluded syllables more often than the permissible ones, and in mispronouncing they usually changed only one distinctive feature that made the syllable more possible. For example, [Skib] changed to [skib]. In imitating nonsense-sound sequences such as [srVm], adults were more exact than children age (4,5, and 7)  (Morehead 1971). But at all ages, a phoneme change involved one or two distinctive features from the stimulus and always followed the sequential rules of the language.

Plural suffixes of English nouns take different phonetics forms depending on the last phonemes of the nouns: /s/ for voiceless stops, /t-z/ for sibilants, and /z/ for all other classes of consonants as well as vowel. In a seminal study, using an outline drawing of a bird called wug, Berko (1958) asked children (aged 4-7).

In another study, children (aged2-7) were sensitive to phonetic structure and were less likely to add either /s/ or /z/ to stems that end in /T,D,f,v/, as though “a final fricative [itself] makes a word plural” (Baker & Derwing 1982, p.217). Similarly, preschoolers do not add –ed to verbs (melt, tend), perharps because English verbs that do not change in forms end in/t/or/d/, (hit and spread), and –ed sounds like /t/ or /d/, (Bybee & Slobin 1982; also Learningverb inflection”)

By age 6, children can produce correctly most of the phonemes  and prosody of their language, though they may not have mastered all the phonological rules.

C. CRITICAL PERIOD (S) FOR LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

1.  A Critical Period in Animals

Scott (1978, 1978 p;3) reviewed behavioral development in a wide range of species of animals and noted the following characteristics of critical periods. First, organizational processes are modified most easily at the time they are proceeding most rapidly. Second, behavioral development is cumulative: as more behaviors are acquired, they are integrated into specialized system with the acquisition of subsequent new behaviors. Third behavioral change becomes progressively more difficult as organizational processes become more stable.

2.  A series of Critical Periods for Language Acquisition

During the critical period(s), young children enjoy optimal sociopsychological conditions for language acquisition (I. Taylor 1978)

1.      Children have a compelling need to communicate.

2.      The language they are acquiring is their main means of communication.

3.      Children are exposed to speech for much of the time.

4.      Children easily identify with their speech models.

5.      Children have imitative impulses.

6.      Children are not inhibited in trying out incorrect utterances.

7.      Family members tolerate, even delight in, children’s “cute errors”

8.      Adults gear their speech to children’s levels.

9.      Speech is used in a concrete way, in a context of here and now.

10.  Children’s main activities in life are acquiring language(s) and gaining knowledge about the world.

D. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

Three variables affect language acquisition: language, child, and mother. As children grow older, their cognitive abilities develop; along with cognitive development their language and communicate abilities develop. Their mothers may help language acquisition by talking in motherese, a simplified and redundant form of speech, spoken with an exaggerated prosody.

In phonological development, infants start with the ability to discriminate many pairs  of speech sounds, whether or not the sounds are used in their language, perhaps because language use those sounds that the mammalian hearing system discriminates well.

To learn to produce speech sounds correctly takes time. For several months, infants engage in babbling, producing mostly those sounds that they will use in their early speech. The repertoire of babbled sounds appears to be universal.

To learn to produce correctly consonants that are not in the babbled repertoire, toddlers try-through imitation and repetition-to approximately their pronunciations those of adults. By age 3, English-speaking children can articulate correctly most vowels, and by age 6 most consonants Preschoolers may show sensitivity to the phonological patterns of words but take some time to master phonological rules.

The first six or so years may be a critical period for language acquisition in that language, regardless of their types and number, are acquired informally and to native proficiency during this period. The bases of the critical period are favorable sociopsychological (and neurological) conditions for language acquisition.