Language development is a remarkable achievement of almost all young children, made even more notable by the fact that many aspects of language learning are nearly complete by the end of the preoperational stage. Volumes can, and have, been written summarizing the research on language acquisition. Here we will pro- vide only a sampling of what is entailed when preschoolers master language.
Phonology
First, when children learn language they are learning its phonology, that is, the sound system of the language. Every language employs only a subset of the sounds that hu- mans can use for language. Babies are beginning to learn something about what sounds are important for their language even before they are born. For example, soon after birth young infants show a preference for listening to voices speaking the native language of their mothers, apparently because they have heard their mothers while in the womb (Locke, 1993). One group of researchers found that by 6 months babies exposed to just one language show signs of sharpening their ability to discriminate distinctions that are important in that language, but have begun to lose the ability to perceive distinctions that are unimportant. Japanese babies, for example, start to lose the ability to distinguish
l sounds from r sounds by this time (Kuhl et al., 2006). However, babies raised in bilin-
gual environments continue to sharpen their abilities to discriminate sound distinctions that are important in both of the languages they are hearing.
Babies begin babbling at about 6 months, repeating consonant-vowel- consonant sequences such as bababa or doodoodoo. At first these babblings include most possible language sounds, but by 9 months babies are matching their babbling sounds to the sounds of their native language (or languages). This advance seems to depend on other people’s responses: When caregiv- ers react contingently to a baby’s babbling with smiles, touch, and so forth, infants make more rapid progress in producing the speechlike sounds (e.g., Goldstein, King, & West, 2003).
Thus, phonological development begins before birth, and there are measurable advances long before babies begin to talk. Yet the full sound system may not be mastered for many years. Most adults find it difficult to understand the speech of a 2-year-old, although doting parents, tuned in to the toddler’s phonological errors, can usually translate. The problem often is that 2-year-olds have not learned how, where, or when to use some of the sound distinctions that are important for their native tongue. For example, in English, we take advantage of voicing, using our vocal cords to make some consonant sounds but not others. The difference between the d sound and the t sound is only that the d is voiced and as children’s language ability advances, their social inter-
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Publishing ServicesTABLE 3.3 From Birth to Five: Typical Changes in Communicative/Interactive Skills
age Skill
Newborn to 1 month Reflexively signals needs through cries, facial expressions 1 to 3 months Coos, grunts, makes some other vocal sounds
Quiets or smiles when spoken to
3 to 5 months Smiles and shows interest in favorite people
Makes wider range of vocal sounds (e.g., vowel sounds, squeals) 6 to 7 months Babbles (consonant-vowel-consonant repetitions)
9 to 12 months Shows, gives objects
Reaches or points to indicate desired object
engages in simple interactive games, routines (e.g., peekaboo, patty-cake) Responds to simple requests (e.g., “Look at Daddy.”)
Produces one or two words (e.g., bye-bye, mama) Deaf child produces one or two signs
Produces first meaningful gestures (e.g., nodding to mean “yes,” waving “bye-bye”)
13 to 18 months Increases expressive vocabulary slowly, acquiring up to 50 words for familiar actions, events, and objects (e.g., bottle, all gone, no, kiss, shoe)
engages in simple pretend play, using self-directed acts (e.g., eating, washing, phone to ear) 18 to 24 months Increases expressive vocabulary rapidly (3 or more words per day)
uses short (2-word) sentences, using content words (e.g., “Baby ball?” “All gone Daddy.”)
engages in pretend play involving some coordination with partners (e.g., exchanges parent–baby roles with adult) 2 to 3 years Speaks clearly enough to be understood by family members
Requests labels for objects
uses sentences of 3 or more words; uses some function words (e.g., prepositions, articles, word endings) Overuses some grammatical rules—over-regularization (e.g., “I goed to the store.”)
Takes turns in conversation
3 to 4 years Speaks clearly enough to be understood by nonfamily members uses some complex sentences (e.g., “I think I saw the truck.”)
Pretends in complex, reciprocal interactions with others, engages in interactive planning for play 4 to 5 years Produces most speech sounds correctly (continued exceptions might be l, s, r, v, z, ch, sh, th)
Tells stories that stick to the topic, have some structure (beginning, middle, end) Coordinates conversation with multiple partners
SOuRCeS: American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA), 1997–2004; Bloom, 1998; Brazelton & Greenspan, 2000; Brown, 1973; Fenson et al., 1994.
the t is not. A toddler may not yet have caught the importance of this distinction, and when she means to say toy she may say doy. Children master most sound distinctions like these by age 3, but may continue to struggle with other aspects of phonology, such as making the th sound in the right places, for much longer. By age 3, most chil- dren can make themselves understood to familiar listeners. If a child’s speech is still difficult for nonfamily members to follow by age 4, evaluation by a speech pathologist may be advisable. See Table 3.3 for other milestones to watch for in children’s com- municative development.
semantics
Second, when children learn language they are learning which words and word parts express what meanings. This is referred to as the semantics of a language. Progress in producing words begins by the end of the 1st year, as already noted, and moves slowly for a time. In the first 6 months of word use, many words are produced only in limited contexts, as though tied to particular cues. For example, a child might say
daw only when she sees the family’s cocker spaniel, and then only if the dog barks.
At about the time that children can produce about 50 words, they typically go into a new phase of vocabulary learning called the vocabulary spurt: At about 18 to 24 months, toddlers begin learning words very rapidly, expanding their productive
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Publishing Servicesvocabulary from 50 to about 500 words in just a few months. Their comprehension vocabulary appears to be even larger. The child behaves as though she has had a sudden insight into the fact that anything can be labeled and thus communicated through words. Some have suggested that the vocabulary spurt marks the end of the sensorimotor period and is made possible by a fully functioning representational capacity; words are now truly being used as symbols for concepts and ideas, rather than being triggered by contextual cues. By age 5, the typical child may understand 15,000 words, so that an average of 9 or 10 words have been added every day for 3 years! The rapidity with which young children add new words to functional vocabulary after only one or two exposures is described as fast mapping. Working out the full details of a word’s meaning usually requires multiple exposures and is described as slow mapping (e.g., Blewitt, Rump, Shealy, & Cook, 2009).
Using words as symbols may be a bit simpler in one respect than the use of artifactual symbols, in that words are not things themselves: They function only to represent meanings. Using them correctly probably does not require representing them in two ways at once, as children must do with artifactual symbols. Rather, a word may at first be perceived by children as more like a part of the concept to which it refers. Understanding that words are arbitrary symbols seems to be much more difficult for children than using them to make meaning. Although toddlers and preschoolers rapidly acquire vocabulary, even at age 5 children may still fail to realize that labels are arbitrary and conventionally determined. For example, if we propose to change around our words and call things by different names, like calling a dog a cat and vice versa, a 5-year-old is likely to object that it cannot be done. The child seems to feel that the word, in a sense, “belongs” to the thing it symbolizes and cannot be shifted (Homer, Brockmeier, Kamawar, & Olson, 2001).
It is notable that children who grow up in bilingual homes reach vocabulary milestones at about the same time as monolingual children. That is, they produce their first words at the same time, and they grow their vocabularies at about the same pace (e.g., Pettito et al., 2001). However, their vocabulary growth is split between two languages, so they are unlikely to know as many words in either language as children who are monolingual. This may be a disadvantage to growing up bilingual, but researchers have found that there are also substantial cognitive advantages. In particular, bilinguals get extensive practice suppressing one language while listen- ing or talking in another and shifting attention depending on the language spoken. This practice appears to sharpen executive functions such as attention regulation and inhibitory control (see Box 3.3). From early childhood, bilinguals consistently perform better on tasks that assess these abilities than monolinguals do, even when they come from similar socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds (see Bialystok, Craik, Green, & Gollan, 2009, for a summary of bilinguals’ cognitive advantages).
syntax
Third, learning language requires learning to produce sentences that make sense. The aspect of language that specifies how to link words into meaningful sentences is called the syntax or grammar. Words must be ordered in a sentence in just the right way to communicate what we mean to someone else. Linguists have found that proper ordering of words and word parts (such as prefixes and suffixes in English) is governed by a com- plex set of rules. One of the most baffling things about children’s language acquisition is that they learn these rules with little difficulty, despite the fact that no one teaches them.
Beginning with two-word strings at about the time of the vocabulary spurt, children quickly progress, until by age 5 they can produce most sentence structures. To give you a sense of how complex the rules are that children implicitly know, consider the following “tag questions” in English:
That boy kicked the dog, didn’t he? The ceiling leaks all the time, doesn’t it? You and I are getting along well, aren’t we?
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Publishing ServicesMaking the right question tag at the end of the sentence requires knowledge of several rules, including how to add an auxiliary (such as did or does) to a verb and how to negate a verb, for starters. To make proper tag questions requires so many rules that children are slow to learn this particular sentence form (Brown & Hanlon, 1970). Nonetheless, most English speaking children can produce tag ques- tions effortlessly by age 5.
Here again, the development of bilingual children generally matches the pace of monolingual children. They reach milestones at about the same time (e.g., the production of two word sentences) and their grammar in both languages becomes incrementally more complex, although the details depend on which particular lan- guages they are learning (Bialystok et al., 2009).
Pragmatics
Finally, children must learn the pragmatics of language use, that is, how to use language effectively to communicate. Knowing how to put together a proper sen- tence, or knowing the labels for things, is not enough. One must be able to craft a narrative, a story or event description that conveys the full sense of an experience or gets at the point of an event while taking into account what the listener needs to hear to understand. Different listeners have different needs—say a little sister versus a grandfather—and there are different conventions of address that are acceptable in different situations. All of these kinds of language-use issues must be learned in addition to the mechanics of language. Preschoolers begin to construct narratives, usually with the help of others, by about 2 or 3 years old. Initially, their narratives are sketchy and largely uninformative. A child telling about an all-day trip to the zoo, for example, might mention only that “we went” and indicate one salient experience: “We saw a lion.” A listener counting on the narrative to learn where, when, and what is likely to be quite disappointed. Some aspects of developing pragmatic skill are dependent on cognitive developments in perspective taking, which helps account for the inadequacy of children’s early narratives (Cameron & Wang, 1999; Uccelli, Hemphill, Pan, & Snow, 1999).
Pragmatic skill also requires making appropriate adjustments in speech depend- ing on the listener. Most children gradually learn code switching, shifting from us- ing, say, slang with friends to using more polite forms with teachers. They also learn, eventually, to distinguish between what people really mean and the literal meaning of their words. Everyday expressions such as “What do ya’ know” or “That’s cool” are not to be taken literally in most social exchanges. And many such expressions require similar idiomatic responses. For example, today a greeting like “What’s happening?” is usually followed by “Nothing much!”