DEVELOPMENT OF LANGUAGE

AND COMMUNICATION SKILLS

PREPARED BY:
BANZON, MARIJOE ANTOINETTE C.
SIGUIENTE, LOUISE ANNE N.
 DEVELOPMENT OF LANGUAGE AND
COMMUNICATION SKILLS

• Five Components of Language – Phonology,

Morphology, Semantics, Syntax, and Pragmatics

• Theories of Language Development –

Learning/Empiricist, Nativist, and Interactionist

• The Prelinguistic Period – discriminate speech-like

sounds

• The Holophrase Period – vocabulary expansion

 DEVELOPMENT OF LANGUAGE AND
COMMUNICATION SKILLS

• The Telegraphic Period

• Language Learning During the Preschool Period

• Language Learning During Middle Childhood and

Adolescence

• Bilingualism
THE TELEGRAPHIC PERIOD

• 18-24 months of age: simple sentences (e.g.

“Daddy eat”, “Mommie drink milk”, and “Kitty go”)

• similar in syntax across languages (Table 9.3)

• telegraphic speech – like telegrams; contain only

critical content words (Bochner & Jones, 2003)
THE TELEGRAPHIC PERIOD

Why do young children stress nouns and

verbs and omit articles, prepositions,
pronouns, and auxiliary verbs?
THE TELEGRAPHIC PERIOD

Current thinking is that telegraphic

children omit words because of their
own processing and production
constraints.
THE TELEGRAPHIC PERIOD

• A child who can only generate short utterances will

choose to deemphasize smaller, less important
words in favor of those heavily stressed nouns and
verbs that are necessary for effective
communication.

(Gerken, Landau, & Remez, 1990; Valian, Hoeffner, & Aubry, 1996)
THE TELEGRAPHIC PERIOD

• not as universal as earlier researchers had thought

e.g. Russian and Turkish children produce short but

reasonably grammatical sentences from the very
beginning. This is because their languages place
more stress on small grammatical markers and have
less rigid rules about word order than other
languages do.

(de Villiers & de Villiers, 1992; Slobin, 1985)

THE TELEGRAPHIC PERIOD

Whatever is most noticeable about the

structure of a language is what children
acquire first.

(de Villiers & de Villiers, 1992; Slobin, 1985)

THE TELEGRAPHIC PERIOD
A SEMANTIC ANALYSIS OF TELEGRAPHIC SPEECH

• children already realize that some word orders are

better than others for conveying meaning

e.g. “Mommy drink” rather than “Drink mommy” or

“My ball” rather than “Ball my”

(de Villiers & de Villiers, 1992)

THE TELEGRAPHIC PERIOD
A SEMANTIC ANALYSIS OF TELEGRAPHIC SPEECH

• however, a more proper interpretation of

telegraphic speech is the determine the child’s
meaning or sematic intent by considering not only
the generated words but also the context it has
taken place
THE TELEGRAPHIC PERIOD
PRAGMATICS OF EARLY SPEECH

• children supplement their words with gestures and

intonational cues to ensure that their messages are
understood (O’Neill, 1996)

• toddlers become sensitive to social and situational

determinants of effective communication, e.g.
vocal turn-taking, looking up at the listener (Rutter &
Durkin, 1987)
THE TELEGRAPHIC PERIOD
PRAGMATICS OF EARLY SPEECH

• young children are learning sociolinguistic

prescriptions such as the need to be polite when
making requests (Baroni & Axia, 1989; Garton &
Pratt, 1990)
LANGUAGE LEARNING DURING THE
PRESCHOOL PERIOD

• 2 ½ to 5 years of age: produce complex and adultlike

sentences
• mastering basic phonology and syntax
• inserting articles, auxiliary verbs, and grammatical
markers (e.g. –ed, –ing)
• negating propositions, and occasionally asking well-
formed questions

(Hoff-Ginsberg, 1997)
LANGUAGE LEARNING DURING THE PRESCHOOL PERIOD
DEVELOPMENT OF GRAMMATICAL MORPHEMES

• grammatical morphemes – give more precise

meaning to sentences (prefixes, suffixes,
prepositions, and auxiliary verbs)

• around 3 years of age: pluralize nouns by adding –s,

signify location with in and on, indicate verb tense
with –ing and –ed, and describe possessive relations
with –’s
LANGUAGE LEARNING DURING THE PRESCHOOL PERIOD
DEVELOPMENT OF GRAMMATICAL MORPHEMES

• children considerably varied with respect to

(1) age began to use grammatical markers

(2) amount of time to master rules

• however, children learned grammatical

morphemes in precisely similar orders (de Villiers &
de Villiers, 1973)

(Brown, R. 1973)
LANGUAGE LEARNING DURING THE PRESCHOOL PERIOD
DEVELOPMENT OF GRAMMATICAL MORPHEMES

• the morphemes acquired early are less semantically

and syntactically complex than those acquired later
(Brown, 1973)

• overregularization – the overgeneralization of

grammatical rules to irregular cases where the rules
do not apply (for example, saying mouses rather than
mice)

(Clahsen, Hadler, & Weyerts, 2004; Pinker & Ullman, 2002; Rodriguez-Fornells, Münte, &
Clahsen, 2002)
LANGUAGE LEARNING DURING THE PRESCHOOL PERIOD
MASTERING TRANSFORMATIONAL RULES

• transformational grammar – rules of syntax that

allow one to transform declarative statements into
questions, negatives, imperatives, and other kinds of
sentences.

• children acquire transformational rules in a step-by-

step fashion
LANGUAGE LEARNING DURING THE PRESCHOOL PERIOD
MASTERING TRANSFORMATIONAL RULES

• asking questions: declarative sentence with rising

intonation (e.g. “See doggie?”)

• wh- words placed in front of telegraphic sentences

(e.g. “Where doggie?”)

• producing negative sentences: place negative

word in front of statement (e.g. “No mitten”)
LANGUAGE LEARNING DURING THE PRESCHOOL PERIOD
MASTERING TRANSFORMATIONAL RULES

• however, first negatives are ambiguous (Bloom, 1970):

“No mitten” = “There’s no mitten”

“No mitten” = “I won’t wear a mitten”

“No mitten” = “That’s not a mitten”

• clarified when negative word inserted inside the

sentence: “I not wear mitten” / “That not mitten”
LANGUAGE LEARNING DURING THE PRESCHOOL PERIOD
MASTERING TRANSFORMATIONAL RULES

• producing complex sentences: around 3 years of

age; use relative clauses and conjunctions,
embedded sentences, intricate forms of questions
(de Villiers & de Villiers, 1992)
LANGUAGE LEARNING DURING THE PRESCHOOL PERIOD
SEMANTIC DEVELOPMENT

• 2- to 5-yearolds: beginning to understand relational

contrasts (e.g. big/little, tall/short, wide/narrow,
high/low, in/on, before/after, here/there, and I/you
(de Villiers & de Villiers, 1979, 1992)

• frequently misinterpret passive constructions

e.g. 1. The girl hit the boy.

2. The boy was hit by the girl.

LANGUAGE LEARNING DURING THE PRESCHOOL PERIOD
SEMANTIC DEVELOPMENT

• children tend to assume that the first noun is the

agent of the verb and that the second is the object

• nevertheless, can correctly interpret irreversible

passives like “The candy was eaten by the girl”
(deVilliers & deVilliers, 1979)
LANGUAGE LEARNING DURING THE PRESCHOOL PERIOD
SEMANTIC DEVELOPMENT

• reason:

People speaking to them rarely use passives or ask

questions that would encourage their use

(Brooks & Tomasello, 1999)

LANGUAGE LEARNING DURING THE PRESCHOOL PERIOD
DEVELOPMENT OF PRAGMATICS AND COMMUNICATION SKILLS

• illocutionary intent – the idea that the real

underlying meaning of an utterance may not
always correspond to the literal meaning of the
words speakers use.
LANGUAGE LEARNING DURING THE PRESCHOOL PERIOD
DEVELOPMENT OF PRAGMATICS AND COMMUNICATION SKILLS

• referential communication skills – abilities to

generate clear verbal messages, to recognize
when others’ messages are unclear, and to clarify
any unclear messages one transmits or receives.
LANGUAGE LEARNING DURING MIDDLE
CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

• 6-14 years of age: use bigger words, and produce

longer and more complex utterances

• Later syntactic development – correct previous

syntactical errors such as personal pronouns
LANGUAGE LEARNING DURING MIDDLE
CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

• Understand and produce complex passive

sentences and conditional sentences (Boloh &
Champaud, 1993)

• middle childhood is a period of syntactical

refinement occurs very gradually, often continuing
well into adolescence or young adulthood (Clark &
Clark, 1977; Eisele & Lust, 1996)
LANGUAGE LEARNING DURING MIDDLE
CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE
SEMANTICS AND METALINGUISTIC AWARENESS

• morphological knowledge – knowledge of the

meaning of morphemes that make up words;
enables children to analyze the structure of
unfamiliar words as sourer, custom-made, or
hopelessness and quickly figure out what they
mean (Anglin, 1993)
LANGUAGE LEARNING DURING MIDDLE
CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE
SEMANTICS AND METALINGUISTIC AWARENESS

• adolescents’ capacity for formal-operational

reasoning permits them to further expand their
vocabularies (McGhee-Bidlack, 1991)

• semantic integrations – drawing linguistic inferences

enable grade school children to understand more
than is actually said
LANGUAGE LEARNING DURING MIDDLE
CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE
SEMANTICS AND METALINGUISTIC AWARENESS

• metalinguistic awareness – a knowledge of

language and its properties; an understanding that
language can be used for purposes other than
communicating.
LANGUAGE LEARNING DURING MIDDLE
CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE
SEMANTICS AND METALINGUISTIC AWARENESS

• strong relationship between phonological

awareness and reading achievement remains even
after adjusting for differences in young readers’
intelligence, vocabulary, memory skills, and social
class.

• Some theorists believe that some degree of

phonological awareness is necessary before a child
can learn to read (Wagner et al., 1997)
LANGUAGE LEARNING DURING MIDDLE
CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE
FURTHER DEVELOPMENT OF COMMUNICATION SKILLS

• 6- to 7-yearolds: become notably less egocentric,

and acquire some role-taking skills
LANGUAGE LEARNING DURING MIDDLE
CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE
FURTHER DEVELOPMENT OF COMMUNICATION SKILLS

What Role Do Siblings Play in the Growth of Communication Skills?

• interactions among linguistically immature siblings

may actually promote effective communication

• older siblings monitor and repair own ambiguous

messages for younger siblings

• younger siblings learn from breakdowns in

communication

(Perez-Granados & Callanan, 1997)

BILINGUALISM: CHALLENGES AND CONSEQUENCES
OF LEARNING TWO LANGUAGES

Does learning two languages hinder language

proficiency or slow intellectual development?
BILINGUALISM: CHALLENGES AND CONSEQUENCES
OF LEARNING TWO LANGUAGES

• Before 1960, many researchers claimed it did due to

several demonstrations wherein bilingual children
scored significantly lower than monolingual peers
(Hakuta, 1988)

• however, these early studies were seriously flawed

(Francis, 2005; Peña, Bedore, & Rappazzo, 2003)
BILINGUALISM: CHALLENGES AND CONSEQUENCES
OF LEARNING TWO LANGUAGES

• tests were administered in English rather than

language of greatest proficiency

• performances of bilinguals from lower

socioeconomic backgrounds were compared with
middle-class, English-speaking monolinguals (Diaz,
1983)
BILINGUALISM: CHALLENGES AND CONSEQUENCES
OF LEARNING TWO LANGUAGES

• nativist psycholinguists in the 1960’s found that

children who were exposed early (before age 3) to
two languages had little difficulty in becoming
proficient in both
• occasionally mixed phonology, grammar, and
vocabulary, but were well-aware that the two
languages were two independent systems

(Lanza, 1992; Reich, 1986)

BILINGUALISM: CHALLENGES AND CONSEQUENCES
OF LEARNING TWO LANGUAGES

What about the cognitive consequences of

bilingualism?
BILINGUALISM: CHALLENGES AND CONSEQUENCES
OF LEARNING TWO LANGUAGES

• advantages: fully bilingual children score as high as

or higher than monolingual peers on tests of IQ,
Piagetian conservation problems, and general
language proficiency (for example, Diaz, 1985) and
metalinguistic awareness (Bialystok, 1988)
BILINGUALISM: CHALLENGES AND CONSEQUENCES
OF LEARNING TWO LANGUAGES

• Bilingual children also outperform monolinguals at

nonlinguistic tasks (Bialystok, 1999)

• reason no. 1: they learn very early that linguistic

representations are arbitrary (e.g. English-French
bilinguals learn that “canine” is symbolized in their
two languages by the words “dog” and “chien,”
which neither look nor sound alike)
BILINGUALISM: CHALLENGES AND CONSEQUENCES
OF LEARNING TWO LANGUAGES

• reason no. 2: bilinguals are more adept at

producing the language understood by their
immediate companions, while inhibiting the
distracting second language that is irrelevant to
that context
BILINGUALISM: CHALLENGES AND CONSEQUENCES
OF LEARNING TWO LANGUAGES

• English-only classrooms can cause some children

with limited English proficiency (LEP) to struggle to
grasp their lessons and to flounder academically
(see DelCampo & DelCampo, 2000)
BILINGUALISM: CHALLENGES AND CONSEQUENCES
OF LEARNING TWO LANGUAGES

• two-way bilingual education – programs in which

English-speaking (or other majority-language)
children and children who have limited proficiency
in that language are instructed half of the day in
their primary language and the other half in a
second language.
BILINGUALISM: CHALLENGES AND CONSEQUENCES
OF LEARNING TWO LANGUAGES

• benefits: strong gains in English proficiency while

remaining just as proficient in native language
(Rodriguez et al., 1995; Winsler et al., 1999); acquire
near-native levels of proficiency in a second
language while performing as well (or slightly
better) academically as English-speaking age-
mates who receive English-only instruction (Sleek,
1994)
REFERENCE:

Shaffer, D. & Kipp, K. (2014). Developmental

Psychology: Childhood and Adolescence, 9th
Edition. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing