Child Linguistic Development

2010 -2011
Children’s oral language and early literacy development serve as the foundation for later reading
abilities and overall academic success. It is well documented that children with low oral
language abilities are at risk for poor outcomes as they progress through school. Much research
has examined the language and literacy development of children learning one language.
Unfortunately, insufficient attention has been paid to the language and literacy development of
children particularly during the early childhood years. An estimated 8 to 12% of preschool
children and 12% of children entering school in our country have some form of language
impairment. Studies also show that 25% to 90% of children with language impairment
experience reading disorder, usually defined as poor reading achievement occurring after
sufficient opportunity to learn to read. When children have difficulty understanding others and
expressing themselves, it is not surprising that psychosocial and emotional adjustment problems
ensue.

2012
Dixon and colleagues (2012) synthesized information from four bodies of work: foreign language
education, child language research, sociocultural studies, and psycholinguistics to highlight an
integrated understanding across typically isolated perspectives on the optimal conditions for
second language acquisition. Studies included in the review targeted children of various ages
from preschool through twelfth grade.
Therefore, this critical review fills an important need by analyzing the recent research literature
on the language and literacy development of birth through age five. Specifically, the purpose was
to:

 Synthesized the research findings on the trajectories of’ language and literacy
development and factors that influence these areas of development.

 Identify methodological concerns, and

 Identify gaps in the research base and determine future research needs.
2013

Children’s language development the discussion of the literature published on dual language
learners from birth through age five is organized around the following aspects of language:
language processing (including behavioral and neurophysiological measures), vocabulary
development, word learning processes, semantic development, oral comprehension,
grammatical development, and pragmatic development. Also reviewed are studies that
investigated code switching and transfer as well as factors that influence children’s development.

Language processing three studies were categorized as investigations of language processing of a

child. The first study examined the latency and location in the brain of the electrical activity
evoked by the presentation of words to 19- to 22-month-old in their dominant and non-
dominant languages. The findings revealed a faster speed of processing of known words as
indicated by shorter latency of evoked response potential (ERP) relative to the latency of
response to unknown words. This difference in processing speed occurred earlier in children’s
dominant language than their non-dominant language. In addition, faster processing of known
words was found for children who were more advanced on a composite language measure
compared to children with less advanced language. It was also determined that the brain regions
involved were different for children’s dominant and non-dominant languages.

2014
Definitive evidence has not been found as to whether or not differences exist in the
developmental trajectories of monolingual and infants’ abilities to distinguish contrasting
speech sounds within a language. It is well known that all infants begin life able to perceive
essentially every sound contrast languages use, but by the age of six to twelve months
(depending on the particular sound contrast) monolingual infants’ speech perception has been
“tuned” to their one language (Kuhl, Stevens, Hayahsi, Deguchi, Kiritani, & Iverson). This means
that they discriminate sounds that are different phonemes in the ambient language, but they no
longer discriminate between different sounds that do not mark a difference in meaning. Infants
exposed to two languages are able to discriminate the sound contrasts of both their languages at
the end of their first year.
However, studies that focused on the course of development yield different results depending
on:
 The particular language pairs the infants hear,
 The sound contrasts that are under study, and
 The measure of discrimination used.

Some evidence suggests that infants pass through an intermediary stage between having the
newborn’s ability to perceive essentially all contrasts and the tuning of perception to only the
native language contrasts. During this intermediary stage, infants appear not to discriminate
between contrasts in one of their languages
2015
Children catch up to their monolingual peers in their ability to produce speech sounds.
Specifically, a case study of two Japanese-English DLLs found that the children’s ability to
differentiate the voice onset time for voiceless stops (/p/, /t/, /k/) in their two languages
emerged as children developed (Johnson & Wilson, 2015). Additionally, studies of preschoolers’
learning a variety of languages, including Spanish, Russian, Arabic, and Chinese and living in
different countries demonstrated that children’s phonetic inventories (i.e., the range of speech
sounds produced) are as complex as monolinguals during the preschool years (Fabiano-Smith &
Barlow, Gildersleeve-Neumann, Kester, Davis, & Peña,; Gildersleeve-Neumann & Wright, 2015;
Lin & Johnson, 2015). Sequential language learners, or children who began learning their second
language after age three, appear to use their knowledge of their L1 to aid them in acquiring the
phonological system of their L2 (Anderson, 2010). Linguistic development is even more
impressive when we consider the nature of what is learned. It may seem that children merely
need to remember what hear and repeat it at some later time. But as Chomsky pointed out so
many years ago, if this were the essence of language learning, we would not be successful
communicators.

2016
Language development is inherently a process of change. Exploring the multiple and varied
trajectories of language can provide us with insights into the development of more general
cognitive processes. Studies of language development have been particularly useful in helping us
to understand the emergence of specialization of function and the scale and flexibility of
cognitive processes during the learning. Novel approaches and technologies for capturing the
linguistic environment that the developing child grows up and for capturing what the child is
saying should allow for more fleshed out theories and models of how language development
actually works. First language learning begins before birth, and its foundations are laid down
during infancy. The ability of human children to acquire a language is one of the hallmarks of
the species. Within 24 hours of being born, infants already shoe evidence of having learned
aspects of the broad rhythmic structure of their mother tongue, most likely from hearing speech
in utero during gestation. Infants continue to attend to their patterns in their language and start
to learn a considerable amount its structure well before they start combining words I their own
speech.
2017

Linguistic skills play an important role in the acquisition of reading, and that learning language
and learning to read are related but distinct domains. Recent research findings pertaining to two
language skills;
(1) Phonemic awareness – over the past 20 years, researchers have made important advances in
understanding the role of children’s awareness of the spoken language. The term phonemic
awareness refers to the ability to identify, compare and manipulate the smallest unit of
spoken words – phonemes. Most spoken words contain more than one phoneme; for
example, cat has three phonemes and spill has four phonemes.
(2) Vocabulary – The ultimate goal of reading instruction is to ensure that children understand
the texts they read. Comprehending written texts is a complex process that involves fluent
word recognition as well as the activation. There is some evidence that children first become
aware of larger units of spoken language such as words within sentences and syllables within
words; however awareness of phonemes themselves is the best predictor of reading.

Awareness of phonemes measured in kindergarten is one of the best single predictors of reading
at the end of grade one. Phoneme awareness is thought to help children to read because it allows
children to understand that letters correspond to the sounds of spoken language.

2018

Research on the neurobiology of language uses neuroimaging techniques with exquisite

temporal resolution (e.g., event-related potentials; ERPs) and complementary techniques with
exquisite spatial resolution (e.g., functional magnetic resonance imaging; fMRI). ERPs are better
suited for use with infants and children, although fMRI is also used with younger populations.
Increasingly, these methods are being used to characterize the developmental time course of
different language subsystems and to more precisely examine the effects of language experience,
and the timing of these effects, on the development of different language functions and on the
neural mechanisms which mediate these subsystems. The course of language development and
its underlying mechanisms are usually described separately for the subdomains of phonological
development (the sound system), lexical development (the words), and morph syntactic
development (grammar), although these domains are interrelated both in language development
and in language use. Phonological development. Newborns have the ability to hear and
discriminate speech sounds. During the first year, they become better at hearing the contrasts
their language uses, and they become insensitive to acoustic differences that are not relevant to
their language. This tuning of speech perception to the ambient language is the result of a
learning process in which infants form mental speech sound categories around clusters of
frequently-occurring acoustic signals. These categories then guide perception such that within
category variation is ignored and between categories variation is attended to. The first sounds
infants produce are cries and noises that are not speech-like. The major milestones of pre speech
vocal development are the production of canonical syllables (well-formed consonant + vowel
combinations), which appear between 6 and 10 months, followed shortly by reduplicated
babbling (repetitions of syllables). When first words appear, they make use of the same sounds,
and they contain the same numbers of sounds and syllables, as the preceding babbling
sequences. One process that contributes to early phonological development appears to be
infants’ active efforts to reproduce the sounds they hear. In babbling, infants may be discovering
the correspondence between what they do with their vocal apparatus and the sounds that come
out. The important role of feedback is suggested by findings that children with hearing
impairment are delayed in achieving canonical babbling.

2019

The use of neuroimaging techniques to characterize:

1. The time course of the development of neural substrates of different subsystems of
language,
 2. The effects of environmental and genetic factors on the development of these neural
substrates, and

3. The time periods during which the effects of environmental and genetic factors are
maximal (i.e., sensitive the neurobiological bases of three linguistic subsystems have
been studied, specifically phonology (sound system of the language), semantics
(vocabulary and word meanings), and syntax (grammar).

Research shows that brain responses to language at early ages are predictive of later language
proficiency. Within the first year of life infants become increasingly sensitive to speech sound
contrasts important to their native language(s) and insensitive to unimportant phonetic
contrasts.1 This sensitivity to native language contrasts is reflected in a brain response which has
been shown in adults to be a neural index of phonetic discrimination: in 7.5-month-old infants
the brain response to native language contrasts correlated with behavioral perception of these
contrasts. Furthermore, an increased neural response at 7.5 months predicts word production
and sentence complexity at 24 months and mean length of utterance at 30 months. The inverse
relationship was noted for discrimination of non-native contrasts. ERP methodology has also
been used to examine early word learning and associated changes in neural specialization. In 13-
month-olds the brain response to known words differs from that to unknown words, with this
effect broadly distributed over both the left and right hemispheres. By 20 months of age this
effect was limited to the left hemisphere, a pattern more like that seen in adults and one
associated with increased specialization for language processing. In addition, such increased
brain specialization is also associated with greater language ability in children of the same
chronological age. Developmental increases in neural specialization for language are associated
with differences in SES.
 University of Northeastern Philippines
City of Iriga
College of Education

___________________________________________________________________________________________

Child Linguistic Development from 2010-Present

A Project in
Child and Adolescent Development (FTC 1)

Prepared by:

Joy B. Nanteza
BEED – 1
 Submitted to:

Mr. Robert A. Cabañes

Instructor