1. Child Development Its Nature and Course Child Development
Fifth Edition
Ganie B. DeHart
Its Nature and Course
State University of New York at Geneseo
Robert G. Cooper
L. Alan Sroufe
San Jose State University
University of Minnesota
Slides by Travis Langley
Henderson State University

2. Chapter 7: Toddler Language and Thinking
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3. Symbolic representation:
The use of ideas, images, or other symbols to stand for objects or events.
During the toddler period children develop the capacity for symbolic representation.
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4. Children's representational abilities become obvious in their development of language.
An abstract, rule-governed system of arbitrary symbols that can be combined in countless ways to communicate information.
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5. The Components of Language
Phonology - sounds of a language.
Semantics - meanings of words.
Morphology - grammatical endings.
Syntax - sentence structure.
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6. The Components of Language
Every language has its own set of phonemes, speech sounds that contrast with one another and can change the meaning of a word.
The smallest meaningful units in a language are called morphemes.
Pragmatics is the set of rules governing conversation and the social use of language.
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7. Productive & Receptive Skills
Children need both productive skills and receptive skills to carry on a conversation.
The development of receptive skills tends to run slightly ahead of the development of productive skills.
Productive skills: Language skills used to put ideas into words.
Receptive skills: Language skills used to understand what other people are saying.
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8. Major Tasks in Early Language Learning

9. Learning the Sound Patterns of a Language
The early period of prelinguistic vocalization during the first year of life can be divided into five stages:
crying
cooing
vocal play
canonical babbling
conversation babbling (jargon)
Crying: In the first weeks of life, reflexive vocalization that occurs automatically whenever an infant is overly aroused.
Cooing: Prelinguistic vocalizations that consist largely of vowel sounds and express pleasure and contentment, around 2 months.
Vocal play: Prelinguistic vocalizations that vary greatly in pitch and loudness, including occasional simple syllables, around 4 months.
Canonical babbling: Prelinguistic vocalizations consisting of strings of syllables that sound increasingly like speech, around 6 months.
Conversational babbling (jargon): Prelinguistic vocalizations in which infants use adultlike stress and intonation, around 10 months.
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10. Learning the Sound Patterns of a Language
Two things are needed to prepare children to begin speaking:
Must gain control over their speech apparatus to produce speech sounds intentionally.
Must learn the phonemes of their particular language by paying close attention to the speech sounds they hear and begin imitating them.
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11. Learning the Sound Patterns of a Language
Between months, most children start to make the transition from babbling to true speech.
Protowords:
Vocalizations that seem to have consistent meanings for a child and are used in attempts to communicate, but do not closely resemble adults words in sound or meaning.
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12. Learning Words & Their Meanings
First Words
First words usually refer to:
familiar persons “Mama”
body parts “Nose”
animals “Doggie”
objects “Ball”
First words may also express:
feelings “Goodboy”
movement “Up”
social commands not broken down into their component words “Gimme!”
Many children say their first clearly identifiable words around their first birthday, although there is great individual variation.
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13. Learning Words & Their Meanings
First Words
Children differ in the purposes for which they use their first words.
Referential style:
Words primarily refer to objects and events.
Mothers of referential children often encourage labeling vs. the directing of children’s behavior more common with expressive style children.
Expressive style:
Words primarily express social routines.
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14. Learning Words & Their Meanings
Vocabulary Growth
Average vocabulary for 18-month-olds is 50 words, then there is a dramatic vocabulary increase.
Referential children have more obvious vocabulary spurts.
Average productive vocabulary = 8,000 to 14,000 words for the average 6-year-old.
Children's receptive vocabularies are considerably larger than their productive vocabularies.
Between ages 1 and 6, the average child is learning an average of 5.5 new words per day (40,000 words by age 10 or 11).
Vocabulary spurt:
A sudden increase in word acquisition at about 18 months of age.
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15. Learning Words & Their Meanings
Processes of Word Learning
Not until around the vocabulary spurt do children start using categorical words for people, objects, & events.
A milestone comes when the child discovers everything has a name.
Children's first task in learning words is to extract them from the stream of speech they hear, which leads to some segmentation errors (e.g., “readit the book” ).
Segmentation errors:
Mistakes in detecting boundaries between words in a sentence.
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16. Learning Words & Their Meanings
Processes of Word Learning
Even before age 2, children can use fast mapping, which is helped by joint attention.
Fast mapping:
A young child uses context cues to make quick & reasonably accurate guess about the meaning of an unfamiliar word.
Whole-object assumption: Children’s tendency to assume unfamiliar objects are names for objects rather than for attributes or actions.
Lexical contrast: Children’s tendency to assume no two words have the same meaning.
Joint attention:
Tendency for language-learning children and adult conversation partners to share a focus of attention.
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17. Learning Words & Their Meanings
Errors in Early Word Learning
A common semantic mistake involves errors of underextension.
too restricted use of a word
example: calling toy trucks “truck” but not full-sized trucks on the road
Another common error involves overextension
too global of a word use
example: calling a bus “truck”
Whole-object assumption: Children’s tendency to assume unfamiliar objects are names for objects rather than for attributes or actions.
Lexical contrast: Children’s tendency to assume no two words have the same meaning.
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18. Learning Morphological Rules
Children's first words are usually single morphemes.
A language's grammatical morphemes (units of language that change the meanings of words and sentences) are gradually added.
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19. Learning Morphological Rules
Order of Acquisition
First children add -s to nouns and -ing to form present participles.
Later they used -ed to form past tense verbs and -s to form the third person singular.
The last to appear are those for contractions of the verb to be.
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20. Learning Morphological Rules
Productivity & Overregularization
Morphological development provides clear evidence that language development involves rule learning.
Overregularization:
Language errors in which a child applies a morphological rule to a word that is an exception to the rule.
example: “mouses” for mice
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21. Learning to Form Sentences
In any system of syntax, individual words belong to particular form classes, such as nouns, verbs, and adjectives.
Syntactic rules specify how words belonging to various form classes can be combined to make phrases, clauses, and sentences.
Form class:
A category of words in a language that can fill similar syntactic roles in forming phrases and sentences.
Form classes are highly abstract, and cannot be learned simply by noticing how specific words are used and then figuring out a rule for each word.
Instead, children somehow extract and use rules involving these abstract categories from the particular, concrete examples of speech they hear.
An important feature of syntactic rules is their productivity.
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22. The One-Word Stage
When children first begin to speak, they use only one word at a time.
When these words are used to communicate a more complex meaning, they are said to function as holophrases.
Holophrase: A single word that conveys the meaning of a phrase or sentence.
“Mama” = “Here is Mama.”
“Mama” = “I want my Mama.”
“Mama” = “This belongs to Mama.”
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23. First Sentences
At months, toddlers start to put two words together, tied into the appearance of verbs in the child’s vocabulary.
When true two-word sentences appear, they usually take the form of telegraphic speech.
Telegraphic speech:
A toddler speech style in which words not essential to the meaning of a sentence (articles, conjunctions, prepositions) are omitted.
Categories of meaning in telegraphic speech are quite similar across languages.
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24. Further Syntactic Development
Brown’s Stages of Early Syntactic Development
based on length of utterances
Express simple semantic & syntactic relationships (1-2 morphemes).
“See teddy.”
Acquire basic grammatical morphemes (2-2.5 morphemes).
“See teddies.”
Variations on simple sentences, incl. questions (2.5-3 morphemes).
“Where’s Mommy?” “You can’t come.”
Subordinate clauses (3-3.5 morphemes).
“I want you to do it.”
Join simple sentences to form compound sentences (3.5-4).
“I had cake and Daddy had ice cream.”
As children's sentences grow longer, they also become more grammatically complex.
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25. Learning to Use Language Socially
Children also acquire linguistic and communicative competence.
Linguistic competence involves syntactically and semantically correct use of a language.
Communicative competence involves being able to carry on conversations, repair breakdowns in communications, and to use language in socially appropriate ways (as determined by culture).
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26. The Child and the Environment in Language Development

27. How can children learn a language in such a short time?
Environment theories stress environmental factors in language acquisition, including:
the language the child hears
structure of social interactions
physical environment
Nativist theories stress inborn, biologically based factors in language acquisition.
Skinner
The debate began in the 1950's, when Skinner (Verbal Behavior, 1957) proposed an environmentalist explanation of language acquisition (vocabulary and grammar) based on instrumental learning theory involving reinforcement. Chomsky (Syntactic Structures, 1957) proposed a nativist explanation based on the idea that capacities of the human brain function as a language acquisition device (LAD) to allow young children to detect the rules of language.
Chomsky’s argument was very strong.
Chomsky
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28. Chomsky argued that all languages share structural characteristics because language and the human brain evolved together.
Language acquisition device:
Chomsky’s term for innate capacities of the human brain that make language possible.
assumed that part of the brain is specially adapted for language learning
ignored social contexts in which language acquisition occurs
Most current researchers agree both inborn & environmental factors contribute to language development.
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29. What the Child Brings to Language Acquisition
Evidence For Biological Underpinnings
Apparent sensitive period early in life
Hemispheric specialization
Brain changes at 8-9 months of age
Species-specific nature of language
Inborn abilities & constraints
Hemispheric specialization: The process by which brain functions become localized in the right or left side of the cerebral cortex.
Language is species-specific: All humans share the ability as a result of common inheritance, but that is not found in other species.
Inborn Abilities & Constraints
Infants as young as 7 months can detect rules & regularities.
By 8 months, infants may segment words from a continuous stream of speech.
By 9 months, they may break down speech they hear into phrases and clauses.
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30. The Environment of Language Learning
Child-directed speech (CDS) = motherese:
The modifications adults make in their speech when talking to young children.
simpler grammatically
includes fewer grammatical errors
higher pitch
clauses & boundaries more clearly marked by pauses, intonation
focus more on objects and present tense events
quite redundant
includes many questions about objects & events
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31. The Environment of Language Learning
Impact of Child-Directed Speech (CDS)
Simplifies input.
Makes clear connections between words and what they refer to.
Provides chances for linguistic practice.
Serves attentional & affective functions in parent-infant interaction.
CDS by itself does not explain language acquisition, but it does simplify the input, make clear connections between words and the things they refer to, and provide chances for linguistic practice.
It also serves attentional and affective functions in parent-infant interaction.
Bruner has suggested that the ways in which adults structure children's language environment should be considered a language acquisition support system (LASS)--a complement to Chomsky's LAD.
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32. Nonlinguistic Aspects on Symbolic Representation
With toddlerhood comes the ability to manipulate symbols intentionally, creating new ideas and thoughts.
Symbolic language coincides with stage 6 of Piaget’s sensorimotor stage, that of mental representations.
Nonlinguistic Aspects on Symbolic Representation

33. Toddlers’ Pretend Play
14-19 months
Pretend play with replica objects (dolls, toy horses, toy cars) increases.
19-24 months
Use of substitute objects (using pillow to represent a baby, a block to represent a car) increases.
by 24 months
Most children can use one substitute object in a pretend scenario (using block to feed a baby doll).
later sensorimotor
Double substitutions (using a block for a bottle and a pillow as a baby) will appear.
Another manifestation of emerging symbolic representational capacities.
Able to use progressively less realistic objects as symbols in their play.
Social context influences engagement in pretend play.
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34. Toddlers’ Use of Gestures
around 9 months
Simple communicative gestures (such as pointing) normally emerge.
9-12 months
Conventional social gestures (like waving bye-bye, nodding yes, shaking the head no) usually appear.
12-18 months
Toddlers begin producing symbolic gestures, representing some object or action.
10-18 months
Children gradually use more gestures.
around 18 months
Frequency of gesture use declines.
around 24 months
Frequency of gesture use levels off.
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35. Toddlers’ Understanding of Iconic Symbols
Symbols that closely resemble the things they represent.
9 months old
Babies seem confused by pictures.
They try to grasp objects portrayed in them.
20 months old
Babies seem to understand objects in pictures are not physically present.
2 years old
When shown a picture of where a toy is hidden, they are rarely able to find it.
2-and-a-half years old
When shown a picture of where a toy is hidden, children find it 80% of the time.
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36. Child Development Its Nature and Course Child Development
Fifth Edition
Ganie B. DeHart
Its Nature and Course
State University of New York at Geneseo
Robert G. Cooper
L. Alan Sroufe
San Jose State University
University of Minnesota
Slides by Travis Langley
Henderson State University