Thursday, 18 December 2014
Tuesday, 9 December 2014
How do the girl fit into the telegraphic stage of language development?
The final stage of the language development is the
telegraphic stage which is the stage that thegirl speaking to her father is at.
The girl is using mainly two or three word sentences which is a key aspect of
this stage of language development. In addition to this the girl s seeing links
between what her father is saying and is repeating words which he is saying. Another
thing I noticed was the use of questioning between the father and daughter and
the girl would ofter use these who, what, why, when, and how questions to her
father highlighting how she understands what he is saying.
Stages of Language Acquisition
There are four main stages of normal language acquisition: The babbling stage, the Holophrastic or one-word stage, the two-word stage and the Telegraphic stage. These stages can be broken down even more into these smaller stages: pre-production, early production, speech emergent, beginning fluency intermediate fluency and advanced fluency. On this page I will be providing a summary of the four major stage of language acquisition.
Within a few weeks of being born the baby begins to recognize it’s mothers’ voice. There are two sub-stages within this period. The first occurs between birth – 8 months. Most of this stage involves the baby relating to its surroundings and only during 5/6 – 8 month period does the baby begin using it’s vocals. As has been previously discussed babies learn by imitation and the babbling stage is just that. During these months the baby hears sounds around them and tries to reproduce them, albeit with limited success. The babies attempts at creating and experimenting with sounds is what we call babbling. When the baby has been babbling for a few months it begins to relate the words or sounds it is making to objects or things. This is the second sub-stage. From 8 months to 12 months the baby gains more and more control over not only it’s vocal communication but physical communication as well, for example body language and gesturing. Eventually when the baby uses both verbal and non-verbal means to communicate, only then does it move on to the next stage of language acquisition.
Holophrastic / One-word stage
The second stage of language acquisition is the holophrastic or one word stage. This stage is characterized by one word sentences. In this stage nouns make up around 50% of the infants vocabulary while verbs and modifiers make up around 30% and questions and negatives make up the rest. This one-word stage contains single word utterances such as “play” for “I want to play now”. Infants use these sentence primarily to obtain things they want or need, but sometimes they aren’t that obvious. For example a baby may cry or say “mama” when it purely wants attention. The infant is ready to advance to the next stage when it can speak in successive one word sentences.
Two-Word Stage
The two word stage (as you may have guessed) is made of up primarily two word sentences. These sentences contain 1 word for the predicate and 1 word for the subject. For example “Doggie walk” for the sentence “The dog is being walked.” During this stage we see the appearance of single modifiers e.g. “That dog”, two word questions e.g. “Mummy eat?” and the addition of the suffix –ing onto words to describe something that is currently happening e.g. “Baby Sleeping.”
Telegraphic Stage
The final stage of language acquisition is the telegraphic stage. This stage is named as it is because it is similar to what is seen in a telegram; containing just enough information for the sentence to make sense. This stage contains many three and four word sentences. Sometime during this stage the child begins to see the links between words and objects and therefore overgeneralization comes in. Some examples of sentences in the telegraphic stage are “Mummy eat carrot”, “What her name?” and “He is playing ball.” During this stage a child’s vocabulary expands from 50 words to up to 13,000 words. At the end of this stage the child starts to incorporate plurals, joining words and attempts to get a grip on tenses.
As a child’s grasp on language grows it may seem to us as though they just learn each part in a random order, but this is not the case. There is a definite order of speech sounds. Children first start speaking vowels, starting with the rounded mouthed sounds like “oo” and “aa”. After the vowels come the consonants, p, b, m, t, d, n, k and g. The consonants are first because they are easier to pronounce then some of the others, for example ‘s’ and ‘z’ require specific tongue place which children cannot do at that age.
As all human beings do, children will improvise something they cannot yet do. For example when children come across a sound they cannot produce they replace it with a sound they can e.g. ‘Thoap” for “Soap” and “Wun” for “Run.” These are just a few example of resourceful children are, even if in our eyes it is just cute.
MIcheal Halliday
Halliday identifies seven functions that language has for children in their early years. For Halliday, children are motivated to develop language because it serves certain purposes or functions for them. The first four functions help the child to satisfy physical, emotional and social needs. Halliday calls them instrumental, regulatory, interactional, and personal functions.
- Instrumental: This is when the child uses language to express their needs (e.g. "Want juice")
- Regulatory: This is where language is used to tell others what to do (e.g. "Go away")
- Interactional: Here language is used to make contact with others and form relationships (e.g. "Love you, Mummy")
- Personal: This is the use of language to express feelings, opinions, and individual identity (e.g. "Me good girl")
- Heuristic: This is when language is used to gain knowledge about the environment (e.g. 'What the tractor doing?')
- Imaginative: Here language is used to tell stories and jokes, and to create an imaginary environment.
- Representational: The use of language to convey facts and information.
Monday, 1 December 2014
How we learn to speak
At this point some would amend their position to say that children don't imitate others sentence by sentence. Instead, they imitate the nouns and verbs and sentence structures of others around them; they can fit their own words into these imitated structures to create novel sentences. Children produce many sorts of grammatical constructions that they have not heard before. At any given point in development, a child's speech more closely resembles the speech of other children at the same stage of development than it does the speech of adults in the child's environment—even if there are not other children around.
What do children do as they learn to talk? Children seek from their early days to make sense of the communication around them. As their minds mature, they attempt—through a sort of gradual trial-and-error process—to construct a system of rules that will allow them to produce sentences like those they hear others use. "Rules" is used here in a loose sense. They are not consciously saying to themselves the rules of speech. There is much evidence that children's early sentences result from the use of some sort of rules—and not simply from the haphazard imitation of adult sentences.
It is obvious that this child is not learning to talk simply by memorizing sentences or sentence types. Rather, she is formulating her own rules to help her understand sentences she hears around her to produce sentences like them. Once she formulates a rule, she uses it confidently until she begins to notice differences between her sentences and the sentences adults use. Then she will gradually add to and amend her rules so that she is able to produce sentences more like adults'. She doesn't junk her old rules altogether; this would be too disruptive. Feature by feature, she makes her rules more and more like the rules adults use to produce mature sentences.6
Remarkably, children usually go through the same sequence of rule learning as they mature in speech production. Child language researchers are not sure why children tend to acquire language rules in the same order, although one theorist has suggested that it may be because children are born "prewired" to learn language in a certain way.
Not all of children's early speech is different from adult speech. Sometimes we do hear two- and three-year-olds repeating phrases—learned by imitation—that seem more advanced than normal speech for that age. We sometimes hear "Why dincha tell me?" at two and a half, but later, oddly enough, the child reverts to a less mature form: "Why you didn't tell me?" Eventually he will come to use the correct form: "Why didn't you tell me?"
Clearly, when children construct language rules, they are attempting to find rules or patterns that account for the language used by others in their presence. It is as if they were carefully feeling and probing the language to find its joints and seams, its outer shape and its inner workings.
Children's early hunches about the way spoken language works can be wrong, of course. An area of language where this is sometimes seen is in naming things. We have an example in our young friend, Will, who produced voluminous speech throughout his second and third years. Except for a few words, most of Will's speech was unintelligible to his parents or other adults. One of Will's recognizable words was "bupmum," used to refer to his favorite vehicle, the family's Land Rover (a British-made jeep). According to Will's father, "bupmum" was a pretty fair rendering of the sound made by the exhaust popping out of the Rover's rusted tailpipe. When the family sold it and bought a Volkswagen, Will reflected the change in his name for the new car: "mummum" (a smoother-sounding name for a better-running engine). Later, he used "mummum" to refer to all cars and trucks. Still later, an element of the name showed up in his name for motorboat: "boatmum." At four, Will was speaking standard English. But in those early years, it seemed to those who knew him that he was seeking names for things in the sounds that emanated from them—a perfectly sensible strategy, really, but not one around which English is organized.
First of all, adults do provide the raw material of language from which children construct their own ideas of the way language works. In those fortunately rare cases in which children have been kept isolated from human contact, the children have been found not to have developed language—to no one's surprise. But secondly, it seems clear that when adults are speaking to children, they modify their speech considerably, into a form of speech that is sometimes called "motherese": they use fewer words per utterance and simpler syntax; they speak more slowly and in a higher range (babies have been shown to prefer high-pitched voices to low-pitched ones); and they exaggerate the stress and intonation of their speech. One researcher has compared all this exaggeration to the way an instructor demonstrates a golf swing. It is as if the mother were saying, "Here, pay attention to upness and downness and stress and words—these are the important things."10
But there's more. Most parents in English-speaking countries read to their children. The practice of reading to children has long been believed to help those children learn to read. However, recent assessments of its benefits are more specific. Some argue that reading to children leads them to associate pleasure with written language and enables them to formulate schemata for stories and other forms of written discourse. Other researchers go further and suggest that children who are read to learn a written form of language from the very beginning. They learn that language can be elaborated to explain things that are not in the context of the speech. This decontextualized language is just the sort of language that is used in reading and writing.11
So the picture that emerges from more recent studies of language learning shows that (1) parents are actively involved in their children's language learning, that they tend to direct a form of language toward their children that is easier to learn from than the speech they use with older people; and (2) written language—complete with the word choices and structures of stories, and the use of language to create a world of understanding on its own, a world removed from the context in which it is read—is often part of children's language experience from the very beginning.
What do children do as they learn to talk? Children seek from their early days to make sense of the communication around them. As their minds mature, they attempt—through a sort of gradual trial-and-error process—to construct a system of rules that will allow them to produce sentences like those they hear others use. "Rules" is used here in a loose sense. They are not consciously saying to themselves the rules of speech. There is much evidence that children's early sentences result from the use of some sort of rules—and not simply from the haphazard imitation of adult sentences.
It is obvious that this child is not learning to talk simply by memorizing sentences or sentence types. Rather, she is formulating her own rules to help her understand sentences she hears around her to produce sentences like them. Once she formulates a rule, she uses it confidently until she begins to notice differences between her sentences and the sentences adults use. Then she will gradually add to and amend her rules so that she is able to produce sentences more like adults'. She doesn't junk her old rules altogether; this would be too disruptive. Feature by feature, she makes her rules more and more like the rules adults use to produce mature sentences.6
Remarkably, children usually go through the same sequence of rule learning as they mature in speech production. Child language researchers are not sure why children tend to acquire language rules in the same order, although one theorist has suggested that it may be because children are born "prewired" to learn language in a certain way.
Not all of children's early speech is different from adult speech. Sometimes we do hear two- and three-year-olds repeating phrases—learned by imitation—that seem more advanced than normal speech for that age. We sometimes hear "Why dincha tell me?" at two and a half, but later, oddly enough, the child reverts to a less mature form: "Why you didn't tell me?" Eventually he will come to use the correct form: "Why didn't you tell me?"
Clearly, when children construct language rules, they are attempting to find rules or patterns that account for the language used by others in their presence. It is as if they were carefully feeling and probing the language to find its joints and seams, its outer shape and its inner workings.
Children's early hunches about the way spoken language works can be wrong, of course. An area of language where this is sometimes seen is in naming things. We have an example in our young friend, Will, who produced voluminous speech throughout his second and third years. Except for a few words, most of Will's speech was unintelligible to his parents or other adults. One of Will's recognizable words was "bupmum," used to refer to his favorite vehicle, the family's Land Rover (a British-made jeep). According to Will's father, "bupmum" was a pretty fair rendering of the sound made by the exhaust popping out of the Rover's rusted tailpipe. When the family sold it and bought a Volkswagen, Will reflected the change in his name for the new car: "mummum" (a smoother-sounding name for a better-running engine). Later, he used "mummum" to refer to all cars and trucks. Still later, an element of the name showed up in his name for motorboat: "boatmum." At four, Will was speaking standard English. But in those early years, it seemed to those who knew him that he was seeking names for things in the sounds that emanated from them—a perfectly sensible strategy, really, but not one around which English is organized.
First of all, adults do provide the raw material of language from which children construct their own ideas of the way language works. In those fortunately rare cases in which children have been kept isolated from human contact, the children have been found not to have developed language—to no one's surprise. But secondly, it seems clear that when adults are speaking to children, they modify their speech considerably, into a form of speech that is sometimes called "motherese": they use fewer words per utterance and simpler syntax; they speak more slowly and in a higher range (babies have been shown to prefer high-pitched voices to low-pitched ones); and they exaggerate the stress and intonation of their speech. One researcher has compared all this exaggeration to the way an instructor demonstrates a golf swing. It is as if the mother were saying, "Here, pay attention to upness and downness and stress and words—these are the important things."10
But there's more. Most parents in English-speaking countries read to their children. The practice of reading to children has long been believed to help those children learn to read. However, recent assessments of its benefits are more specific. Some argue that reading to children leads them to associate pleasure with written language and enables them to formulate schemata for stories and other forms of written discourse. Other researchers go further and suggest that children who are read to learn a written form of language from the very beginning. They learn that language can be elaborated to explain things that are not in the context of the speech. This decontextualized language is just the sort of language that is used in reading and writing.11
So the picture that emerges from more recent studies of language learning shows that (1) parents are actively involved in their children's language learning, that they tend to direct a form of language toward their children that is easier to learn from than the speech they use with older people; and (2) written language—complete with the word choices and structures of stories, and the use of language to create a world of understanding on its own, a world removed from the context in which it is read—is often part of children's language experience from the very beginning.
Early Phonological Development
Stage
|
Features
|
Ages
|
|---|---|---|
| Reflexive Vocalisations (AKA Vegetative) | vowel-like sounds such as crying and grunting which are reactions to hunger or discomfort. limited range of sounds. Tongue fills mouth and larynx is high in the neck | 0-2 Months |
| Cooing | Greater control over the sounds they make, babies begin to laugh and coo. Cooing consists of sounds made from back of mouth (k, g) | 2-4 Months |
| Vocal play | Testing the vocal equipment - Children 'play' with loud and soft, high and low pitch. Basic syllables consisting of Consonant and Vowel (gu, da) | 4-6 Months |
| Babbling | Repeating patterns of syllables that are reduplicative (babababa) and variegated (gabadado) | 6-12 Months |
| Proto-words | word-like vocalisations. | 1 year |
Phonological Development
Phonological Development refers to the way in which infants develop the ability to make sounds. You may have younger siblings or have heard stories from your own childhood about mispronunciations of sounds and words as your are in the stages of learning to speak. ‘iter’ rather than ‘sister’ for instance.
Each language has a certain set of sounds that are used to make up its lexicon (word bank) known as phonemes. These phonemes are described as contrastive – that is they help differentiate between words. Bat, and sat differ in the phoneme sounds B and S.
When describing and analysing the sound systems linguists use the International Phonetic Alphabet. The reasons is that sometimes in the written form, letters are misleading about the sound they make. For instance the first phonemes in Cat and Kettle are identical but in letter form they differ. However in Roger and Dig the phoneme identified by the letter g makes a different sound. Think also of Y in silly and young.
The phonemes (or speech sounds) that we make are divided into two major types: Vowels and Consonants. In school we learn that the 5 vowels are A E I O U and that consonants are all the other letters. Linguistics however recognises that the difference lies specifically in the way the sounds are made.
Vowels are sounds with no obstruction to the airflow. The different vowels sounds are made by either coming from the front or back or the mouth (front and back vowels) as well as whether the jaw is open or closed (open and close vowels.) the vowel in cat for instance seems to come from the back of the mouth with an open jaw. In Kit however the vowel sound is made from further forward in the mouth with a jaw that is more closed.
Consonants are speech sounds that involve a momentary interruption or obstruction in the airlfow. These can be differentiated by there factors;
Each language has a certain set of sounds that are used to make up its lexicon (word bank) known as phonemes. These phonemes are described as contrastive – that is they help differentiate between words. Bat, and sat differ in the phoneme sounds B and S.
When describing and analysing the sound systems linguists use the International Phonetic Alphabet. The reasons is that sometimes in the written form, letters are misleading about the sound they make. For instance the first phonemes in Cat and Kettle are identical but in letter form they differ. However in Roger and Dig the phoneme identified by the letter g makes a different sound. Think also of Y in silly and young.
The phonemes (or speech sounds) that we make are divided into two major types: Vowels and Consonants. In school we learn that the 5 vowels are A E I O U and that consonants are all the other letters. Linguistics however recognises that the difference lies specifically in the way the sounds are made.
Vowels are sounds with no obstruction to the airflow. The different vowels sounds are made by either coming from the front or back or the mouth (front and back vowels) as well as whether the jaw is open or closed (open and close vowels.) the vowel in cat for instance seems to come from the back of the mouth with an open jaw. In Kit however the vowel sound is made from further forward in the mouth with a jaw that is more closed.
Consonants are speech sounds that involve a momentary interruption or obstruction in the airlfow. These can be differentiated by there factors;
- voice
- place of articulation
- manner of articulation
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