Chapter 8- Infant Language and Literacy
This chapter will examine infant language and literacy development.
**Language specialists are known as psycholinguists
I. Receptive Language
A. Language understanding is often called receptive language
B. Babies understand words long before they can actually speak
C. It is advisable to speak to babies at birth
D. Even if babies don’t clearly interpret our messages in their early months, such conversations are good practice for parents
E. Speech Perception:
1. Newborns perceive and process language differently than they do other sounds
2. Since language is believed to originate in the left hemisphere of the brain, hearing speech may exercise the early linguistic functions of the nervous system
3. Psycholinguists have found that babies are quite competent in perceiving speech sounds
4. Within the first few months of life, they can distinguish among some consonant and vowel sounds, intonations, pitch and loudness
5. Infants are "wired" for language learning at birth
6. Babies may be born with a capacity to learn any language, but their speech perception narrows over time to include only the speech sounds of their own culture’s language
F. Understanding Words
1. Sometime in the second half of the first year, babies come to understand words
2. The first words they can interpret are usually labels for objects (ball, door, mommy)
3. Parents may use object words more in their talk to babies
4. It is also possible that babies believe, at first, that all words are names of objects
II. Productive Language
A. Productive language is language that babies can actually speak
B. Psychologists consider communication to be any symbolic expression that holds meaning
C. An infant’s garbled babble might rightfully be considered true productive language
D. Crying
1. Through cries, newborns communicate upset, and they show the intensity of their disturbance by varying the pitch and duration of their cries and the number of pauses between bursts of crying
2. Temperament and family circumstances may influence amount of crying
3. Babies whose parents responded quickly to their cries were less likely to cry in the second year of life and were more advanced in communicative competence
4. It may be that responding to crying shows the power of vocalization, and that babies with responsive parents graduate more quickly from this early form of communication to actual language
E. Noises and Gestures
1. As babies get older, they make noises and gestures to communicate
2. By age 1, infants of most cultures understand when others point to things and will themselves point to refer to objects
3. At about the same time, culturally defined gestures emerge
4. Noises are also used to communicate ideas
F. Babbling
1. Babbling is repetitive vocalization that babies perform during much of the first year of life
2. Babbling becomes more and more elaborate with age, as babies’ vocal systems mature
3. By 10 or 11 months, babies’ babbling is an expressive jargon that is so similar to adult speech in complexity and intonation that it sounds as if the baby were speaking in full, albeit incomprehensible, sentences
4. Babbling is a playful behavior that allows babies to make verbal contact with others
G. First Words
1. Between 8 months and 18 months, babies speak their first words
2. Babies’ meanings for the words they speak may be very different from adults’ meanings for those same words
3. Two kinds of errors are typical when toddlers begin to use words
a. the first is overgeneralization; babies often overgeneralize a new word so that it refers to many more things than it should; as children hear a word and use it in many contexts, they gradually construct a more accurate meaning and reduce the various generalizations of the word
b. a second common error is overrestriction; toddlers will often use a word to refer to a narrower range of things than an adult word; egocentrism at this age contributes to overrestriction
4. Which words do babies speak first?
5. Two types of words that are likely to emerge early are names of things, such as ball, dog, and daddy, and social expressions such as "bye-bye", "no", and "want"
6. Children who first acquire names of things are referred to as referential
7. Those who initially use social expressions are called expressive
8. Many factors determine which category a child will fall into
9. Temperament may lead some children to be more wary of people and less likely to use social words
10. Culture may influence whether children will be referential or expressive
11. The structure of language itself may also influence first word use
12. English has been referred to as "noun-dominant" so English-speaking children may more often be referential
13. Culture determines precisely which words will first be uttered
H. Early words in bilingual families
1. At least half of all children in the world are bilingual or multilingual
2. In the earliest stages of word acquisition-before 18 months of age-babies acquire new words from both languages as if they were all part of a single vocabulary
3. It is rare for toddlers to use words from both languages to describe the same concept or object
4. Children almost always opt to name something consistently in one language or the other
5. By 18 months of age, infants begin to use some "mixed speech"
6. In some instances, toddlers will combine the words of two languages into a single utterance (kittygato for cat)
7. Diversity in language environments explains the rich variation in communication style and competence during the early years
8. Bilingual babies learn some of their words in one language and others in another language
9. Measuring vocabulary by looking only at words of one of the languages does not provide a complete picture
III. Two-Word Utterances
A. Between 18 months and 2 years, babies begin putting words together
B. Using just two words, toddlers comment about objects or events, announce actions, and even confess to all manner misadventures
C. Word order is known as syntax
** D. Telegraphic speech is early utterances of young children which contain only the key words required for meaning
E. In a two-word utterance, babies must make challenging decisions about word order
F. In "car go", the baby places the agent, "car" before the action, "go" thus following the basic rules of sentence construction in English
G. Children, generally, have a tacit knowledge of language; it is an "I can do it, but I can’t tell you how I do it" form of thinking
H. Two-Word Utterances in Bilingual Families
1. Bilingual babies progress to two-word utterances at about the same age as monolingual babies
I. How do toddlers put two-word utterances together when faced with contrasting rules about word order?
J. Some babies simply select one of the languages they hear around them and apply only its rules
K. Because of the complexity of two-word sentence construction, babies from bilingual homes often engage in language switching, in which words from two languages are blended in a single utterance
L. In their preschool years, bilingual children will be able to separate the two or more languages which they hear
IV. Toddler Literacy
A. Babies in some cultures are exposed to written as well as oral language
B. In shared reading activities, babies learn that stories are read with a certain pacing and intonation
C. Even fairly young babies who have been read to often will babble in a unique way, called book babble, during a reading session
D. When reading to their toddlers, parents have been found to scaffold early literacy learning
E. Scaffolding is the process by which adults give support or guidance for some parts of a task or activity, and then gradually give over regulation of the experience to children
F. Not all infants have their earliest print experiences with storybooks
G. Magazines, signs, and the text on cereal boxes may be more prevalent in some families or cultural groups
V. Language Deficits Versus Language Differences
A. Hearing Impairment and infant Language
In the early months of life, babies with hearing impairments vocalize in much the same way that hearing babies do
B. General Language Delay
1. Some language delays have no apparent cause
2. Toddlers have been found to acquire language more slowly even when they suffer no obvious perceptual or cognitive problems
3. These children have limited vocabularies or do not begin to use words until very late
4. General language delay has been used to describe this phenomenon
5. Many children with general language delays in toddlerhood or in the preschool years are more likely to have academic problems and to be identified as having learning disabilities later in life
6. There is no profile of a child with language delay, then, no single intervention that is successful in all cases
7. Great care must be taken not to assume that language differences are deficits
8. Differences in communicative styles must also be appreciated