LANGUAGE IN RELATION TO

AGE
 Age categories
There are 4 age categories :
1.Children - 12 years and below
2.Teenagers – 13 to 19
3.Adults – 20 +
4.Seniors – 60 +
 Which age group controls the
language use ?

•Adult - guardian of the

language
Which group pushes language change ?

• New vocabulary , grammar use

• Teenagers – drivers of language
change
1.How language is used to talk about
different age group
2.How different age groups use language
3.How language is used to talk to different
age groups
• Although language use differs with age,
speakers of different ages influence one
another. ... To do so, they resort to setting
generations, or at least, establishing age
groups, because there are normally
language differences between them, as
the experience of any language speaker
attests.
•Vocabulary and discourse
•Pronunciation and grammar
don’t change
Infants begin making sounds at
birth. They cry, coo, and laugh…
but in the first year they don’t
really do much talking
It could be argued that infants DO communicate with
others, but do not have language
What adults say to young children ?

Talk about the here and now.

• Build me a tower now.
• That’s right, pick up the block.
• That’s a puppy.s a puppy.
• He’s very soft and furry.
• The puppy’s in the basket.
 Language development
• Infants are equipped for language even before birth, partly due to
brain readiness, partly because of auditory experiences in the
uterus
• Children around the world have the same sequence of early language development

• Newborns prefer to hear speech over other sounds- they prefer to

listen to “baby talk”- the high pitched, simplified and repetitive was
adults speak to infants

• The sound of a human voice, whether familiar or strange always

fascinates infants
Adults Use Infant-Directed Speech
Adults speak slowly and with exaggerated changes in pitch and loudness
and elongated pauses between utterances

• Also known as parentese, motherese, or child-directed speech

• Infant-direct speech may attract infants’ attention more than adult-directed

speech because its slower pace and accentuated changes provide the
infant with more salient language cues

• Helps infants perceive the sounds that are fundamental to their language
When talking to girls, adults use more words
like “doggie” and “blankie” whereas with
boys, adults use more words like “dog” and
“blanket”.
Girls hear twice as many diminutives.
After children know that
objects have names, a gesture
is a convenient substitute for
pronouns like “it” or “that”
and often cause the adult to
say the object’s name
 Names for everything!

• Once an infant’s vocabulary reaches

about 50 words it suddenly begins to
build rapidly, at a rate of 50-100+
words per month, mostly nouns.

• This language spurt occurs around 18

months and is sometimes called the
Naming explosion.
The rate of children’s vocabulary development is
influenced by the amount of talk they are
exposed to
The more speech that is addressed to a toddler,
the more rapidly the toddler will learn new words
Discourse and Age
• The discourse that we use to talk about people in different age categories often reflects
the power that we assign to them
• There are 2 types of discourse :

1. text only ( spoken and written)

2. Multimodal communication (text and images) – this is a more powerful type
- look at the advertisement ;
advertising for children , advertising for parents , advertising for elderly people
and advertising for teenagers.