Language and Symbolic Development

1. Language and Symbolic Development

2. Symbols • Systems for representing and conveying information • 1 thing is used to stand for something else e.g. numbers, pictures, maps, language “Dog” =

3. What makes something a language?

4. Sound transfer? Meaning?

5. Phonemes Semantics Grammar Pragmatics Semantic Development: learning about expressing meaning Syntactic Development: learning rules for combining words Pragmatic Development: learning how language is used Phonological Development: learning about the sound system of a language Components of Language

6. Language • Language Comprehension • Understanding what others say (or certain aspects) • Language Production • Actual speaking (or manually producing) those aspects • Language comprehension precedes production!

7. Language Comprehension Precedes Production • Recognize their own name at 4.5 months • When they hear “Mommy” or “Daddy” they look towards the correct person at 6 months • 12 - 14 month olds listen longer to sentences with normal word order rather than scrambled order • 13 - 15 month olds appreciate that word combinations carry meaning beyond the individual words e.g. “She’s kissing the keys” (vs. ball)

8. Understanding Word Combinations

9. Language Development Cooing “stage” (begins 6 - 8 weeks) • produce simple speech sounds (gooo, aaahh) and vocal gymnastics (smacks, clicks, bubbles) • Improved motor control of vocalizations • Imitate sounds of their partners, high pitched for Mom and lower for Dads • Will imitate speech sounds they hear from a tape

10. Language Development Babbling “stage” (begins 6 - 10 months) • produce vowel consonant syllables in repetition (bababa) • Babble only a limited set of sounds, some not in their native language • Gradually it takes on the sounds, rhythm and intonation patterns of the language they hear around them • Adults can pick out the babbling of an infant from their own language from infants in other languages • Deaf infants exposed to sign language manually babble • Video!

11. Language Development Holophrastic Period (begins 10-15 months) • One-word utterances that express a “whole phrase” e.g “Drink”, “up” • First words include mostly nouns (dada, ball, juice), frequent events or routines (bye-bye, night-night), some modifiers (mine, all gone, uh-oh) • Overextensions sometimes occur (e.g. dog for other animals, daddy for all men) probably due to their limited vocabulary rather than a lack of knowledge

12. Language Development Telegraphic Speech (begins end of 2nd year ~24 mths) • Begin to combine words into simple “sentences” • Often 2 word utterances (only essential elements like in telegrams) e.g. more juice, hurt knee, eat cookie • gradually child begins to add first person pronouns, verb endings, plurals e.g. “I eating cookies” then functions words etc. a, the, of, in… • Practice on their own “Crib-talk” • Evidence for internalized grammatical rules: • Consistent word order (never “cookie eat”) • Overregularization errors (goed, foots, mans) • Application of rules to novel words (e.g. The Wug test) • Video!