Tutorial 5.

5
FIVE COMPONENTS OF LANGUAGE
1. Phonology: The sound (phoneme) system of a language and the rules for combining
these sounds to produce a meaningful speech. Children learn how to discriminate,
produce, and combine sounds of their native language in order to make sense of the
speech they hear.

2. Morphology: Rules that specify how words are formed from sounds (e.g., forming plurals
by adding -s).

3. Semantics: Meaning of the word or sentence. The smallest units of language are
morphemes that can be divided in free and bound morphemes.
Free morphemes are word that can stand alone (e.g., dog) while bound morphemes cannot,
but change meaning when attached to a word (-s + dog = dogs or -ed for past tense etc.).

4. Syntax: Rules that specify how words have to be combined to form meaningful phrases
and sentences. Usually, toddles develop first the other components and then syntax.

5. Pragmatics: Knowledge of how language might be used to communicate effectively in

social context. Pragmatics also involves sociolinguistic knowledge, culturally specified
rules that dictate how language should be used in a particular context (e.g., Baby asks
for a cookie impolitely).

Despite these five aspects, a good speakers is also able to recognize non-verbal signals.

THEORIES
¨ Learning (or empiricist) perspectives
 Skinner argued that children learn to speak appropriately through reinforcement,
increasing the probability that these sounds will be repeated.
 Other learning theorists (Bandura and others) added that children learn by listening and
imitating the language heard.

¨ The nativist perspective

According to nativist, humans are biologically programmed to acquire knowledge.
 Chomsky argued that humans have a language acquisition device (LAD) an innate
linguistic processor that contains knowledge of universal grammar common to all the
languages.
 Slobin argued that children have a language-making capacity (LMC) a set of specialized
linguistic skills that enable children to analyze speech and detect language components.

Evidence:
1. The sensitive-period hypothesis states than language is acquired more easily during birth
and puberty (in the ages of brain lateralization). During this period, the right hemisphere
unspecialized can assume any linguistic functions lost when the left hemisphere is
damaged.
2. Children learn language around the same age, despite of the environment differences
3. The brain area specialized in language are the Broca’s area (frontal lobe) for speech
production and Wernicke’s area (left temporal lobe) for speech comprehension.

Criticism:
 Theory hard to test, quite vague and lack of consistency
 Children learn grammar also outside of the brain lateralization
 The theory does not consider the environmental role and social interactions: mere
exposure to speech is not enough; children must be actively involved.
 The theory does not explain development, but only attributes it to built-in language
acquisition device

¨ The interactionist perspective (Learning theorist + Nativist)

 Interactionist perspective believes that language is a complex interplay of biological
predisposition, cognitive development, and unique characteristics of the linguistic
environment.

Evidence:
 Innate sophisticated brain matures very slowly and predisposes children to develop
similar ideas at about the same age and gain knowledges.
 Toddlers talk about whatever cognitive understanding they are acquiring at the
moment. (E.g., object permanence – words “reappeared” and “disappeared”)
 Parents create a supportive learning environment by showing infants when to take turn
in conversation, even before they know how to speak properly.
 Child-directed speech or motherese, is a form of modeling by the parents.
It happens when children pay more attention to a type of speech because its
high-pitched and in varied patterns. Parents increase the length and complexity of this
speech as children’s language becomes more elaborate.

LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT
1. Prelinguistic period (0-13 months) before language
New-borns already react to human language (by opening their eyes, and sometimes even
vocalizing). They can differentiate between different voice tones a few days after birth.
The different intonation of parents talking can affect the child's mood.

2 months, the child starts coolng (vowel-like sounds like ooh and aah).
4-6 months, the child babbles (mamama, dadada).
7-8 months, the child starts listening and babbling back after someone stops talking; it
stops seeing it as a game of making noises, and instead starts understanding the
concept of interaction.
8-10 months, the child starts using gestures and nonverbal responses (e.g., facial
expressions). Two types of preverbal gestures are present:
-Declarative gestures: directing another's attention to something by pointing
towards/touching it. (E.g., pointing to the cookie box in order to state that he wants it)
-lmperative gestures: trying to convince someone to do the pointing and asking.
Preverbal infants seems to know much more about language than they can possibly say:
This means than receptive language (comprehension) appears earlier than productive
language (expression) from the 12th or 13th month of life; usually when children say their
first word.

2. Holophrase period (12-18 months)

The child's speech consists of one-word utterances that represent an entire sentence's
worth of meaning, called holophrases. (E.g., cookie for "I want a cookie, please")

There are early individual differences in the kinds of words produce, which however are not
related to later differences in linguistic achievement:
Referential style refers mainly to objects while expressive style refers to a large number of
personal/social words.

A child’s birth order also seems influential, since later born may spend less time talking with
parents about objects and more time listening to simple speech.

Fast mapping (13-24 months): The process of acquiring a word very quickly after hearing
it applied to its referent on a small number of occasions. Sometimes fast mapping allows
children to comprehend word but have trouble retrieving from memory when needed.
Overextension is a typical error that happen when a children use a specific word for a
broader set of objects (e.g., car to refer to all motor vehicles) while under extension is the
opposite. It means using a general word for a small range of object. (e.g., candy to refer
only to mints)

Processing constraints (24 months): Cognitive strategy helps children interpreting

meaning of new words.
Object scope constraints: Assumption that words refers to whole objects (e.g., kitty >
animal not animal’s ears, tail etc.).
Mutual exclusivity: Assumption that each object has a label; being able to name
something correctly.
Lexical contrast constraint: Assumption of making inferences about word meanings by
contrasting new words with words they already know (e.g., dalmatian > specific dog).
Taxonomic constraint: Assumption that words label categories objects that share
common features. (e.g., cat > any animal four legs, furry)

3. Telegraphic period (18-24 months)

 Around 18 to 24 months, children experience the vocabulary spurt/naming explosion,
an increase in the rate of word learning from 50 to 200 words.
 Telegraphic speech: early sentences that consist of content of two words and omit the
less meaningful parts of speech (e.g., articles, prepositions).The words tend to be placed
 in the correct order, suggesting that children already have an idea of grammatical
speech (e.g. "my ball", not "ball my").

 2 years old/2 ½ toddlers are quite proficient at vocal turn taklng and they know when
they must talk louder/quieter depending on their distance to the listener.
 Sociolinguistic prescriptions, being polite when making requests for instance.

4. Preschool period (2-6 years old)

 At 3 years children start using grammatical morphemes (prefixes, prepositions, auxiliary
verbs) that give more precise the meaning of sentences and to produce more complex
one.
 Overregularization happen when rules are applied to irregular cases where the rules
does not apply (e.g., mouses rather than mice).
 Transformational grammar develops; children are able to transfer sentences into
questions, negatives, imperatives and so on.

5. Middle-childhood and adolescence (6-14 years)

 Metalinguistic awareness: children can reflect on their own language.
 Phonological and grammatical awareness develops further .
 Children are now able to understand passive sentences and conditional sentences.