Child and Adolescent

Development –
Theories of Language What are the five systems of
Development rules in language?

Dr Sau Yin LAU

The Open University of Hong Kong
EDU E253F
Spring Term 2020

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Five Systems of Rules in Language

What is language?
Major Levels of 
Linguistics:
phonetics and the 
five systems of rules 
in language 
(phonology, 
morphology, syntax, 
semantics, and 
pragmatics).

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Meaning of Language Five Systems of Rules in Language

• Language is a form of communication that • Phonology
is based on a system of words and • It refers to the system that governs how
grammar sounds may be combined.
vs • Morphology
• Language is a form of communication, • It refers to the system that governs how
whether spoken, written, or signed, that is words are formed.
based on a system of symbols. • It involves rules about plural forms and
verb tenses.

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 Five Systems of Rules in Language
• Syntax
• It refers to the system that governs how
words are combined to form acceptable
phrases and sentences.
• It involves rules about word order and
sentence structure.
• Semantics
• It refers to the system that governs the
meaning of words and sentences.
• Semantic restrictions: semantic features
cannot be violated.
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Five Systems of Rules in Language
• Pragmatics
• It refers to the system that governs the
appropriate use of language in different
contexts.
• The rules vary with different cultures.
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A task:
Suggest a sentence which is
syntactically correct but
semantically incorrect.
Suggest a sentence which is
semantically correct but
pragmatically incorrect.
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Milestones in Language Development
Birth – 3 Months
Receptive Language
• Startles at loud sounds.
• Quiets or smiles when you talk.
• Seems to recognize your voice.
Expressive Language
• Makes cooing sounds.
• Cries change for different needs.
• Smiles at people.
Milestones in Language Development
4 – 6 Months
Receptive Language
• Moves his/her eyes in the direction of sounds.
• Responds to changes in your tone of voice.
• Notices toys that make sounds.
• Pays attention to music.
Expressive Language
• Coos and babbles when playing alone or with
you.
• Makes speech-like babbling sounds,
like pa, ba, and mi.
• Giggles and laughs.
• Makes sounds when happy or upset.
Milestones in Language Development
7 Months – 1 Year
Receptive Language
• Turns and looks in the direction of sounds.
• Looks when you point.
• Turns when you call his/her name.
• Understands words for common items and
people, e.g. cup, truck, juice, and daddy.
• Starts to respond to simple words and
phrases, like “No,” “Come here,” and “Want
more?”
• Plays games with you, like peek-a-boo and
pat-a-cake.
• Listens to songs and stories for a short time.
p.2
 Milestones in Language Development
7 Months – 1 Year
Expressive Language
• Babbles long strings of sounds, like mimi
upup babababa.
• Uses sounds and gestures to get and keep
attention.
• Points to objects and shows them to others.
• Uses gestures like waving bye, reaching for
“up”, and shaking his/her head no.
• Imitates different speech sounds.
• Says 1 or 2 words, like hi, dog, dada, mama,
or uh-oh. This will happen around his/her first
birthday, but sounds may not be clear.
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Milestones in Language Development
One to Two Years
Receptive Language
• Points to a few body parts when you ask.
• Follows 1-part directions, like "Roll the ball" or
"Kiss the baby."
• Responds to simple questions, like “Who’s
that?” or “Where’s your shoe?”
• Listens to simple stories, songs, and rhymes.
• Points to pictures in a book when you name
them.
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Milestones in Language Development
One to Two Years
Expressive Language
• Uses a lot of new words.
• Uses p, b, m, h, and w in words.
• Starts to name pictures in books.
• Asks questions, like “What's that?”, “Who’s
that?”, and “Where’s kitty?”
• Puts 2 words together, like "more apple," "no
bed," and "mommy book."
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Milestones in Language Development
Two to Three Years
Receptive Language
• Understands opposites, like go–stop, big–
little, and up–down.
• Follows 2-part directions, like "Get the spoon
and put it on the table."
• Understands new words quickly.
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Milestones in Language Development
Two to Three Years
Expressive Language
• Has a word for almost everything.
• Talks about things that are not in the room.
• Uses k, g, f, t, d, and n in words.
• Uses words like in, on, and under.
• Uses two- or three- words to talk about and
ask for things.
• People who know him/her can understand
him/her.
• Asks “Why?”
• Puts 3 words together to talk about things.
May repeat some words and sounds.
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Milestones in Language Development
Three to Four Years
Receptive Language
• Responds when you call from another room.
• Understands words for some colours,
like red, blue, and green.
• Understands words for some shapes,
like circle and square.
• Understands words for family,
like brother, grandmother, and aunt.
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 Milestones in Language Development
Three to Four Years
Expressive Language
• Answers simple who, what, and where
questions.
• Says rhyming words, like hat–cat.
• Uses pronouns, like I, you, me, we, and they.
• Uses some plural words, like toys, and birds.
• Most people understand what your child says.
• Asks when and how questions.
• Puts 4 words together. May make some
mistakes, like “I goed to school.”
• Talks about what happened during the day.
Uses about 4 sentences at a time.
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Milestones in Language Development
Four to Five Years
Receptive Language
• Understands words for order, like first, next,
and last.
• Understands words for time,
like yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
• Follows longer directions, like “Put your
pyjamas on, brush your teeth, and then pick
out a book.”
• Follows classroom directions, like “Draw a
circle on your paper around something you
eat.”
• Hears and understands most of what he/she
hears at home and in school.
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Milestones in Language Development
Four to Five Years
Expressive Language
• Says all speech sounds in words. May make
mistakes on sounds that are harder to say,
like l, s, r, v, z, ch, sh, and th.
• Responds to “What did you say?”
• Talks without repeating sounds or words most
of the time.
• Names letters and numbers.
• Uses sentences that have more than 1 action
word, like jump, play, and get. May make some
mistakes, like “Peter gots 2 video games, but I
got one.”
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Milestones in Language Development
Four to Five Years
Expressive Language
• Tells a short story.
• Keeps a conversation going.
• Talks in different ways, depending on the
listener and place. May use short sentences
with younger children. May talk louder outside
than inside.
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Milestones in Language Development
Middle Childhood
• Expanding vocabulary
• Increasing understanding of language
concepts
• Sustained conversations about concrete
topics
• Pragmatics more sophisticated
• Linguistic creativity and word play
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Milestones in Language Development
Adolescence
• Increasing awareness of the terminology used
in various academic disciplines
• Increasing competence in understanding
complex, multiclause sentences
• Increasing competence in having lengthy
conversations about abstract topics
• Mastery of a wide variety of connectives
• Increasing competence in understanding
figurative language
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 Theories of Language Acquisition
• There are many theories that can explain
language acquisition. The three classic
theories are:
• Behavioural/Learning Theory
• Chomsky’s Nativist Theory (or Innatist
Theory)
• Sociocultural Theory
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Theories of Language Acquisition
• Behavioural/Learning Theory
• It is believed that language is acquired
through principles of conditioning,
including association, practice, and
reinforcement.
• At first, infants utter sounds at random.
Caregivers reinforce the sounds that
happen to resemble adult speech with
smiles, attention, and praise. Infants then
repeat these reinforced sounds.
• According to social learning theory, infants
imitate the sounds they hear adults make
and are reinforced for doing so.
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Theories of Language Acquisition
• Behavioural/Learning Theory
• According to the behavioural theory,
language acquisition is affected by factors
such as the amount of associations and
the use of reinforcement schedule.
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Theories of Language Acquisition
• Chomsky’s Nativist Theory (or Innatist
Theory)
• Avram Noam Chomsky (1928-) believes
that children are born with an innate
capacity for language development.
• He said, “Language learning is not really
something that the child does; it is
something that happens to a child placed
in an appropriate environment, much as
the child’s body grows and matures in a
predetermined way when provided with
appropriate nutrition and environmental
stimulation.”
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Theories of Language Acquisition
• Chomsky’s Nativist Theory (or Innatist
Theory)
• Since language is universal, Chomsky
suggested that all children have an inborn
language acquisition device (LAD) that
programs their brains to analyse the
language they hear and to figure out its
rules.
• Chomsky believed that LAD contains some
domain-specific knowledge about the
structure of language. This is called
Universal Grammar.
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Theories of Language Acquisition
• Chomsky’s Nativist Theory (or Innatist
Theory)
• Chomsky argued that behavioural theory
cannot fully explain language acquisition
because:
• Word combinations and nuances are so
many and complex to be acquired solely by
specific imitation and reinforcement.
• Adult speech is an unreliable model to
imitate, e.g. with ungrammatical sentences.
• Children’s imaginative ways of saying
things that they have never heard cannot
be explained by behavioural theory.
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Theories of Language Acquisition
• Chomsky’s Nativist Theory (or Innatist
Theory)
• Based on Chomsky’s theory, language
development is affected by the degree of
brain maturation.
• Some researchers further argued the LAD
needs to take place between age two and
puberty and a critical period exists in
language development.
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Theories of Language Acquisition
• Sociocultural Theory
• Based on the Sociocultural Theory,
children acquire language through social
interactions with adults (or more
knowledgeable others).
• According to this theory, language is
constructed by the child from experience
and the input from people in the
environment is crucial.
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Difficulties with Speech, Language
and Communication
• Speech which is difficult to understand
• Possible observations:
• Has difficulty in making different sounds
• Has persistently harsh or unusual voice
quality.
• Has difficulty using intonation to add to the
meaning of what has been said.
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Difficulties with Speech, Language
and Communication
• Difficulties with Language
• Possible observations:
• Has difficulties following long or complex
instructions, recalling information or
putting it into the right sequence.
• Misses out words or puts them in the
wrong order.
• Has problems linking sentences with words
such as ‘and’, ‘but’, and ‘so’.
• Uses fluent clear speech which does not
seem to mean much.
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Difficulties with Speech, Language
and Communication
• Difficulties with Communication
• Possible observations:
• Makes limited eye contact or gets too close
to others.
• Is not good at turn taking and has
difficulties with starting and ending
conversations.
• Has difficulty in understanding or
responding to feedback from the listener,
e.g. not noticing when someone is bored.
• Is unable to vary language with the
situation, using the same language with
peers, teachers and unfamiliar adults.
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Difficulties with Literacy
• Dyslexia is a term commonly used to
represent learning difficulty that can
cause problems with reading, writing and
spelling.
• The term ‘dyslexia’ is derived from two
Greek words. Its literal meaning is
‘difficulty with words’.
• Despite considerable scientific and
educational research, there is no single
commonly accepted definition or agreed
cause of dyslexia.
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 Difficulties with Literacy
• Most researchers agree that children with
dyslexia form mental representations of What are the implications to
the sounds of language that are poorly
specified or ‘fuzzy’ which makes it difficult education?
to develop an awareness of the internal
sound structure of words and to learn
letter-sound relationships.

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Difficulties with Literacy

• Phonological Deficit Hypothesis suggests
that the cause of dyslexia is a
phonological processing deficit.
• Phonological processing is the ability to
perceive, store, retrieve, and manipulate
sounds for language. It includes:
• Phonological Awareness: It refers to the
ability to determine the constituent sounds
which comprise spoken words
• Pseudoword Decoding
• Word Retrieval
• Phonological Memory

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Difficulties with Literacy

• Some researchers contend that dyslexia
is not a distinct category. There are no
clear cut-off points.
• They believe that it is not useful to
differentiate between the dyslexic and
other poor readers since the techniques
used to teach both dyslexic and other
struggling readers are the same.

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