Language Development: Study with Video Lessons, Practice Problems & Examples

Distinguishing Speech Sounds

This video, we're going to go over how infants distinguish speech sounds. So, there was some really fascinating research done by Janet Worker back in the 1980s which showed that when humans are born we can actually distinguish between all phonemes, even in our non-native languages. What that means is that humans are actually born with the ability to hear the sounds, to hear the phonemes in every human language, which is, like, so cool. Right? And she was also able to show that around 12 months of age we actually begin to lose this ability.

And around this age, we're going to begin to get better at distinguishing the phonemes in our native language, which of course makes sense. Right? You're being exposed to it much more. It's very important for you to kind of hear the phonemes in your native language. So this has been replicated many many times over the years and we're actually going to go over one of those replications with you here.

So we're going to go over a study done by Cullen Colleagues back in 2006. So you don't have to memorize this second part of the video by any means. This is kind of the big takeaway, but it's kind of cool to see how we actually do this type of research. So, Cullen colleagues was interested in the phonetic contrast of ra and la, which exists in English but it does not exist in Japanese. So many adult speakers of Japanese actually cannot hear this phonetic contrast very well because they have no experience with it.

So their sample was 32 American infants and 32 Japanese infants, and they did a really cool method called a conditioned head turn where the baby was actually taught to turn their head to a target sound, the target either being la or ra depending on what condition they were in. So looking at this graph of their results, you can see we have the American infants graphed in blue there and the Japanese infants in red, and this is a beautiful replication of what we know about how infants distinguish speech sounds. So, around 6 to 8 months of age, you can see that these infants were basically scoring with the same level of accuracy at about 65% accuracy. That's really cool because remember those Japanese infants had no experience with that phonetic contrast. They had never heard it before and yet they were as accurate as the American infants at distinguishing it, which is, again, like, so cool to think about.

Right? And then by about 12 months of age, we began to see that kind of split of their skills where you can see the American infants began to score higher. They're now scoring at around 73% accuracy, so they're getting better at distinguishing that contrast in their native language, and then the Japanese infants began to kind of lose that skill and they were now scoring at 59% accuracy. So really beautifully showing how when we are born we seem to have the ability to hear all phonemes in all human languages and then at around 12 months of age we are going to begin to lose this ability and get better at distinguishing phonemes in our native language. Alright.

There you have it, and I will see you guys in our next one. Bye bye.

Which of the following correctly summarizes what we currently understand about infant’s phoneme discrimination abilities?

• A. Young children are born with the ability to hear all phonemes.
• B. Over the first year of life, children get better at discriminating phonemes in their native language.
• C. Around 10-12 months, infants begin to lose the ability to discriminate phonemes in non-native languages.
• D. All of the above are correct.

Language Milestones

In this video, we're going to be talking about language milestones. Before we delve into those, we will discuss a few general features of language development common to almost all children, regardless of the language they are learning. Language development occurs extremely rapidly. Syntax skills are acquired fast, and vocabulary expands quickly in the first 5 years of life.

At all stages of language development, comprehension skills tend to develop faster than production skills. This makes sense because comprehension is an internal, cognitive skill, whereas production, or the actual production of speech, requires fine motor coordination of the jaw, the tongue, and the lips. This coordination tends to develop a bit later. Even though we often think of young children as frequently speaking incorrectly, grammatical errors are actually fairly rare.

Often when we do see grammatical errors, it is the result of overapplying rules of grammar, rather than not applying them enough. We will discuss an example of this shortly. Despite children often using shortened sentences or mispronouncing words, their speech is much more grammatical than you might think. We are going to review some productive language milestones here, and although it might seem overwhelming, I encourage you to focus on the progression of these skills rather than on specific ages unless noted as particularly important.

We will begin with newborn babies from 0 to 4 months of age. At this age, we see the emergence of cooing, which consists mainly of vowel sounds such as "ahs," "ooes," and "ehs." These are typically the first productive speech milestones that babies reach. From 4 to 10 months, we observe the emergence of babbling, where babies combine consonants and vowels resulting in classic infant utterances like "ba," "ma," "da," "ga," and so on. It's important to note that at this age, utterances like "mama" or "baba" usually do not yet carry specific meanings associated with, for example, 'mom' or 'bottle.'

Around 10 to 18 months, the emergence of first words typically occurs. These words are usually simple nouns or verbs significant to the child, such as the name of a favorite toy, "mama," "dada," or siblings' names. This span is crucial to note as it's around the age of 1 year that first words typically appear. From 18 to 24 months, children start using telegraphic speech, which are short sentences missing pronouns, articles, or adjectives, such as "throw ball." These messages, though abbreviated, often adhere to basic grammatical rules, with the verb preceding the object.

Between 24 to 36 months, we begin to see the incorporation of elements like articles, pronouns, and adjectives into longer sentences. An example could be "give me the donut," showcasing the addition of a pronoun and an article. From 36 to 60 months, the phenomenon of overregularization appears, where children apply regular grammatical rules to irregular verbs or nouns, leading to phrases like "I runned," "I eat-ed," "the gooses." This gives profound insight into children's understanding of grammar, as they are actively applying rules, sometimes excessively, to words they do not realize are irregular.

By 60 months, or around 5 years of age, children typically obtain adult-like grammar skills. Although they may still mispronounce words or construct shorter sentences than adults, their syntax skills are generally well-established. From this age onward, sentence length and vocabulary will continue to expand rapidly with the child's development.

These are some important language milestones. I will see you guys in our next video. Bye-bye.

Language Development Example 1

Alright, so what we're going to do here is put all of these language development milestones in order and for the milestone listed with an asterisk, we're going to write the approximate age when that would happen on our timeline here. Alright, so we have birth and then our first language milestone is going to be cooing, right? The emergence of those vowel sounds: ahs and oohs. So, we're going to put cooing there, and then after cooing, once we've kind of got those vowel sounds mastered, we're going to begin combining consonants and vowels in babbling. Right?

We're going to put babbling next or "baz", "mad", "dav", "gaz," all that good stuff. After that, usually, we're going to have the emergence of first words. So first words are usually going to happen around 12 months of age, give or take. Right? And that range is typically going to be between, like, 10 to 18 months usually.

So, we'll have our first words happening somewhere around the first year of life. And then after that, we're going to see those very shortened sentences. So once we've kind of mastered a couple of words, we're going to begin combining words to make short sentences or telegraphic speech. So, our telegraphic speech happening usually around age 2, and then from there, sentences will continue to get longer until eventually, children begin to make those overregularization errors around age 4. Right?

So we see that overregularization, where they're basically applying regular grammatical rules to irregular verbs and nouns, and then usually that will disappear by about age 5 or so, and then by about 5 years of age or 60 months, we usually have those adult-like grammar skills by then. Alright. So there you have it, and I will see you guys in our next one. Bye-bye.

Which of the following is an example of overregularization?

• A. Two mouses.
• B. Dogs.
• C. Water bottle red.
• D. Angry I’m.

Which developmental stage occurs in infancy and involves combining consonant and vowel sounds.

• A. Cooing.
• B. Babbling.
• C. Telegraphic speech.
• D. Phoneme detection.

Theories of Language Development

This video, we're going to be going over the 3 main theories of language development. We're going to begin with behaviorist theory which was proposed by B. F. Skinner. So of course, this being one of Skinner's theories the idea is that language is learned through operant conditioning.

So, he believed that children will repeat phrases that they are reinforced for saying. So if you positively reinforce language use, then children will continue to repeat those phrases over and over, and that is how language is acquired over time. Now there is a little bit of support for this theory. It is true that adults will sometimes positively reinforce either desired or correct language use. So, you know, when children start saying mama, dada when they start using their first words you usually get very positive reinforcement from that.

Big smiles from caregivers, excited tones of voice, etcetera. So that social component is certainly there. However, this theory is definitely lacking in a lot of ways. So, for one, this theory really can't account for novel utterances particularly well. So basically children combining words in new ways and making new sentences, which honestly is the majority of language use.

Most sentences that you say are brand new things that you've never said before. So if this theory can't account for that, it's not doing so good. It also can't account for learning that takes place without reinforcement, which definitely does happen. We'll talk about that in a bit more in a moment. And it also can't account for things like over regularization because adults don't really reinforce kids who do that.

They don't reinforce it when kids say, "I eat it yesterday." Right? Like but kids still make that error and they usually will persist in making that error for a year or two. But that doesn't really make any sense. This theory also cannot account for the speed of language learning.

So like we've talked about, kids acquire language very rapidly. They're gaining new syntax skills. They gain thousands of words of vocabulary in the first couple of years, and it would just be impossible for adults to be positively reinforcing every single one of those words independently. Like, doesn't really make any sense. So you guys might remember me talking about this way back in Chapter 1, but Noam Chomsky heard this behaviorist theory of language acquisition, and he was not a fan.

He wrote a scathing academic takedown saying that's not how it works, and he proposed nativist theory. So the idea behind nativist theory is that humans are born with an innate universal grammar. So basically we are biologically predisposed to use and understand language. There is something innate inside of us that allows us to, you know, hear phonemes, discriminate between them, understand syntax, apply it, etcetera. This theory also proposes a sensitive period for language acquisition, the sensitive period basically being pre puberty.

So the idea is that if humans do not acquire any language before puberty, they basically will never be able to acquire language fully. They'll never be able to be fluent in a language is the idea behind that. Now there is quite a bit of support for nativist theory. One, we have our newborn phoneme discrimination skills, which we've talked about before. We also know that children do not need any specific types of interactions to learn language.

If children are exposed to language, they learn language. That's actually how most kids learn language. It's just through exposure to it. And so this idea that reinforcement needs to be there is just really not true from what we can tell. And research does also support the idea of sensitive periods.

We have some really tragic cases of kids who were never exposed to language for their entire life, and they basically were never able to become fluent and really use grammar correctly. And I'm sure any of us who have ever tried acquiring a second language after puberty know it's really, really hard, right, especially if you weren't bilingual in the first place. So there is some support for those sensitive periods as well. However, there are also some critiques of nativist theory. Some people say that it underestimates the role of social interactions, which it does.

And like we talked about, social interactions are definitely a component of language acquisition. They are certainly there. We can't just disregard them. Right? And it is really hard to find actual evidence of a universal grammar just being innate inside of us.

It's just a hard thing to prove, basically. Now as you may have picked up on, we're basically working with, like, a nature nurture thing here. Right? We've got nurture over here on our behaviorist side saying it's like a social thing. We've got nature over here on the nativist side saying it's this biological, you know, predisposition that humans have.

And like we talked about, modern psychologists, we don't like to take sides. Right? It's always both. We know that it's always both. And so Jerome Bruner came along and proposed interactionist theory, which kind of marries the two of them together.

So we get the kind of social component from behaviorist theory and the biology from nativist theory. So the idea behind interactionist theory is that humans are born with an innate capacity for language and social factors are also going to influence language learning. So kind of a nice marrying of the two of them. Now in terms of, support for this theory, all the support that we've talked about for the previous two theories do apply here as well, but there is some unique support for this interactionist idea. So the first is infant directed speech, and this is found in most cultures throughout the world in most languages, and this is not baby talk.

This is not goo goo gaga. This is a specific type of speech that adults often use when talking to young children that is essentially designed to make pronunciation, syntax, and word segmentation more clear. So, you know, "Where are your shoes?" Like, that kind of speech, that kind of, like, melodic speech that you'll often hear adults use with children. So the idea here is that, you know, it kind of assumes that children have these abilities.

They have the ability to hear the sounds in words and pick up on syntax and to segment the words in sentences, but adults are using the specific type of speech that makes it easier for kids to pick up on all of those things. So kind of this combination of these biological and social factors. Another really, really fascinating example of this is Nicaraguan sign language. So before the 1980s, Nicaragua did not have a universal sign language, and so quite often deaf children were just kind of isolated in their homes. And in the 1980s, they actually built a school for deaf children.

So all these kids were together for the first time, but they had no way of speaking to each other because there was no language. And so these children actually developed their own sign language back in the 1980s. And what's really cool is that as, you know, generations of kids kept going through the school, it was continually refined, and it's still being refined today. And that's really cool because it shows that these new generations aren't just copying the older generations. They're actually adding to the language.

They're adding new vocabulary, new syntax rules about word order, and things like that. So there's this idea that, you know, these kids must have had some kind of innate skill to, you know, use and apply grammar even though they had never formally been taught a language or even informally been taught a language. But the development of this language only became possible with this social component of all of these kids coming together and kind of working off of each other. So a really, really interesting example, or support for interactionist theory there. Now in general, interactionist theory is pretty accepted today.

Like we talked about, psychologists believe that there is a biological component and a social component to language acquisition, but some people do have, critiques that are similar to the critiques that we heard from the behaviorist and nativist theory. So I'm not gonna repeat them, but just know that some people do have those critiques. Now, to be perfectly honest, language acquisition is an incredibly complex thing. And while we do nowadays believe that it is going to be this kind of combination of social and biological factors, quite honestly, all of these theories do have some support and all of them have merit, and we don't totally know how it works. Alright.

So you did a great job with that one, guys. Thanks for sticking around, and I will see you in the next one. Bye-bye.

Language Development Example 2

Okay. So this one asks us, which of the following statements is consistent with the behaviorist understanding of language acquisition? So let's run through them and see what they say. Alright. So a reads, language develops as an interplay between inherent biology and social conditioning.

The behaviorist theory does believe in that kind of social conditioning component, but they don't really focus on biology at all. So a is incorrect. B reads that humans are predisposed to learning languages as children, again focusing on this innate predisposition; behaviorists don't really think about that, so b is incorrect. C says language development is the result of positive reinforcement from caregivers, and that is definitely behaviorist, right? This idea that we are basically learning language through operant conditioning, so when caregivers positively reinforce language use, children will want to repeat those phrases more and more.

That is sounding like behaviorist theory, let's just read D to make sure. So D says children will learn language as long as they are exposed to it, regardless of reinforcement, and a behaviorist would never say regardless of reinforcement. Right? They love reinforcement. So our answer here is going to be C.

Alright. There you go, and I'll see you in the next one.

The idea of a sensitive period for language learning was first introduced as a part of which theory of language acquisition?

• A. Behaviorist theory.
• B. Nativist theory.
• C. Interactionalist theory.
• D. Operant theory.