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Communication, Language and the Ability to Learn
The more complete the information that a person is able to communicate to someone he trusts,the more he himself becomes able to dwell on it, to understand it and to see its implications.
 John Bowlby, 1991.
Vocabulary and the general adequacy and completeness of speech vary by socio-economic class. Speech is poorer in form and articulation, less in amount, and lessprecise for children at lower socio-economic levels than for those at higher social levels(see Irwin, 1948,
1
).Another important consideration is that the sooner a child develops adequate language,the sooner he is able to understand the intentions and requirements of his parents, andto respond accordingly. This verbal comprehension helps a child understand thedifference between his “now” behaviour and his “next”. A better discrimination of hismother’s intentions leads to more efficient learning.
2
One of the early ways of predicting the future intelligence of children, tested as infants,was the measurement of their speech sounds.
3
Children reared with meagre adultattention, and who are relatively isolated or who live in institutions, are handicappedeven more in their speech than in their general IQ level. This type of handicap hasbeen shown to exist as early as two months of age. Children who, at elementary schoolages, test at the learning disability or borderline level started talking later than childrenwho measured normal or bright. At least during the early years of their lives, twins andtriplets test lower in both speech and intelligence than singletons, although much of this lag is overcome by school age. Their speech seems to be even more handicappedthan can be accounted for by their somewhat lower intelligence test scores.Pathak,
et al
., have studied the influence of socialisation, parental deprivation andfamily psychiatric history on the speech development of 267 institutionalized learningdisabled children aged ten years. The subjects were matched on sex, locality and IQlevel as well as on age. The indications from the study are that where speechdevelopment takes place it has an effective quality that depends upon the socialenvironment in which the therapy is located. Where there were lack of adequatecomponents such as poor environment and small family size, the child becamediscouraged and self-centred. There was no relation found between speechdevelopment and the family psychiatric history.
4
Skuse takes the view that theevidence is not clear-cut regarding the possibility that some exposure to language andcommunication is essential at an early age in order to facilitate later acquisition of speech.
5
While the evidence is not entirely clear-cut, children who are
bilingual
during the pre-school years
  
that is, typically, whose homes use one language while their eventualschools use a different one
  
test lower than monoglots. Although social class may beinvolved, since children from such homes are rather more frequently from lower thanfrom upper-class homes [USA], the effect seems greater than can be accounted for bysocial class alone.Work on the perceptual development of language in infants has been reviewed byCooper & Aslin.
6
They have looked at the use of auditory information during earlylanguage processing, and have found evidence that indicates that infants
actively 
process sounds, particularly those with acoustic attributes of their native language. Ithas been established that infants as young as four months can identify their colloquialspeech when presented within a mixture of other accented speech and otherlanguages. The mother’s voice registers characteristically with the infant, and with thefetus from about 20 weeks after conception. This possibly is related to the musicalcomponents of speech. These are: metrical structure or rhythm, the melodic structure,and the timbre or voice quality. Infants’ pre-natal experience with maternal speechmay determine the early post-natal perceptual salience of a specific mother’s speech,motherese speech, and native speech. Infant’s sensitivity to
suprasegmental
aspectsof speech may dictate much of what they attend to, whilst features of infant-directed
1
 
speech seem to draw theirattention to the speaker andelicit positive affectiveresponses.Following the use of brainscans, it has beendiscovered why it is easierfor children to learn asecond language than it isfor adults.If the second language islearned at the same time asthe primary, it is stored inthe same region of thebrain; in the part of thefrontal lobe known asBroca’s area. If the secondlanguage is learned later, itis still stored in Broca’s area,but separated from the firstlanguage. It seems thatlearning the primarylanguage singly sets upneural circuits in a specificarea, and these will notaccommodate a later-learned language. These findings also suggestthat the age of languageacquisition may be asignificant factor indetermining how this part of the brain is organised.Infants start by being ableto recognise equally, allrelevant sounds, but as theylearn their native tongue,the way it is represented inBroca’s area becomes fixed.Social class seems to bedirectly related tovocabulary level; yetchildren from some middle-class homes have beenshown to have lowvocabularies, while those from some lower-class homes have relatively goodvocabularies. One author
7
provides evidence indicating why there are such exceptions(at the same time presenting data to show that the child’s language status and hissocio-economic status correlate somewhere between 0.78 and 0.86, depending onwhich of two statistical techniques is used). The twenty-one high-scorers in this study of language status by Milner, which consistedof forty-two first-graders, came from homes ranging from upper-lower to lower-upper,this latter being the highest social class included in the study. They were distinguishedas a group from the twenty-one low-scorers by such factors as eating breakfast anddinner with their families and engaging in conversation during those times. Theirdiscipline inclined more toward guidance and prohibition, whereas physical disciplinewas more characteristic for the low-scoring children. High-scorers were more frequentlyexpected to look after their own possessions and/or room and received more praise andaffection. More high than low-scorers had been exposed to baby sitters, and they went
2
Suprasegmental
 
Analysis
Communication through speech relies on not just wordsbut how they are spoken. Speech is bound to the timecontinuum, and we must receive it as it happens,moment by moment. In order to understand it wesearch its form, examining segments in a search for astructure that is already laid down or is developing in ourbrains. The segments of spoken language are thevowels and consonants that combine to form syllables,words and sentences. When we articulate thesesegments our pronunciation varies, in accordance withour tone of voice.
Components of a sound-based language
Phonemes
 The individual sound units, whoseconcatenation, in a particular order, produces the basicsounds of language and dialect called
morphemes
.Certain sounds cause changes in the meaning of a wordor phrase, whilst others do not. In English there aresome 40 such sounds that are seen as
important units
,and these are called
 phonemes
or
segmental
 
 phonemes
.
Morphemes
The smallest meaningful units of aword, whose combination creates one. In order to learngrammar a child must segment the speech he hears into
morphemes
, as these are the basic units of grammaticalrules There are smaller units called
segmentalphonemes
and these form the basic sounds of languageand dialect. These are put together into syllables toform
morphemes
.
Syntax
 The admissiblecombinations of words in phrases and sentences (calledgrammar, in popular usage).
Lexicon
 The collection of all words in agiven language. Each lexical entry includes allinformation with morphological or syntactic ramificationsbut does not include conceptual knowledge.
Semantics
 The meanings that correspond toall lexical items and to all possible sentences.
Prosody
 The vocal intonation that canmodify the literal meaning of words and sentences.
Discourse
 The linking of sentences such thatthey constitute a meaningful whole.
 
to bed later, frequently as late as ten p.m. Low-scorers were ‘bribed’ with small gifts of money more frequently than high-scorers. The high-scorers, as might be expected,possessed more books and indicated that their mothers and fathers read to them morefrequently. More of the low-scorers said they could not recall ever feeling really happyand were less frequently able to recall instances or situations where they had felthappy. Low-scorers more frequently possessed, as reading material, only funny booksand /or school books.Such factors as those listed above are, of course, strongly related to social class; butwhere there are variations in language within a social class, it is plausible that suchvariables as parental conversation, attention, praise, and so on, could produce thedifference between the low and the high-scorers.DeBaryshe,
et al
., formulated a system for measuring parental beliefs about reading totheir children. Their Parent Reading Belief Inventory was completed by 155 parents of children aged between 25 and 65 months. The Inventory’s structure formed a singlefactor, and high scores on this indicated a belief by the parent that was consistent withcurrent theories of language acquisition and emergent literacy. When parent incomeand education were controlled, inventory scores remained significantly correlated inrespect to:
•
self-report measures of parents’ own book-reading habits;
•
children’s interest in books;
•
children’s exposure to joint book-reading activities. The scores also showed a significant partial correlation with the observed frequency(during book-reading sessions) of:
•
parental questions;
•
and responsiveness to children’s speech
8
 The hypothesis that parental reinforcement builds language is supported by anunpublished study of Irwin’s (1960). He secured the co-operation of a large group of mothers whose husbands were mostly skilled, semi-skilled, and unskilled labourers. Itcould be expected that such mothers did little reading to their children at any age andprobably none in the first year or so of their babies’ lives. He persuaded fifty-fivemothers to read aloud to their children for at least ten minutes a day from the time theywere one year old. The participation in the study of another, control group of motherswas invited by offers to check on the development of their babies. Otherwise nochange was made in the interaction between them and their children.Irwin measured the youngsters’ speech development regularly and found greatdifferences in all phases of speech by the time the children were twenty months of age. These differences appeared to be highly significant statistically. This study is especiallyprovocative when the relations that have been found between speech and intelligenceare considered. Irwin reports the experimental mothers’ amazement and chagrinedamusement: ‘You asked us to read ten minutes a day,’ some exclaimed, ‘but I can’t getaway from that kid. He wants me to read to him all the time.’ There are projects being developed to foster the development of early literacy amongstlow-income and ‘working-class’ families. One such took place in Australia from 1987 to1992. In this project workers assisted families by:
•
reading regularly with them;
•
discussing issues around the implementation of the programme such as themanagement of home-school relations when reaching out to disadvantaged families;
•
and the effects of the project on children’s literacy competence.
9
Another investigation examined the connections between attachment and thefrequency of reading in mother-infant dyads. A subject group of 18 children who wereread to infrequently were matched to a control group of 18 children who were read todaily. The mean age of the subjects was 3.4 years. The outcome established thatmothers in dyads that used reading frequently did not need to put pressure on theirchildren to focus on a set reading task as often as did those mothers of the subjectgroup. Of the mothers whose attachment to their child was less secure it was foundthat they:
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