Monday, October 1, 2007

Early Lexical Development

These chapters in Clark's book (Lexical Development, Sounds in Words, Words in Meaning) give a nuanced overview of language development in children ages 0-2 (neonates?). In general, I think language development follows a whole-part-whole trajectory. A baby needs to segment the overall speech stream, break into parts and store enough so that they can recreate the whole again (encode and production). The whole piece---comprehension and understanding communication--comes significantly before production. I think, in general, language development seems to go like this (again, following the WHOLE-PART-WHOLE idea...MOUTH PLAY, SOUNDS IN WORDS, PRODUCTION). In reading the trajectory, some key ideas to keep in mind (themes) are: whole/part/whole, comprehension before production, fine motor mouth development as factor in terms of articulation, symbolic realization as milestone, object words vs. action words depending on context and home language, overextensions based on shape and/or context, gestures as protospeech acts that typically are acts of requests or metonymic (parts for whole). social and contextual shapes language:
  • Birth-6 weeks-6 months
    • crying, cooing, non-linguistic
    • babbling at 6 months - mouth play that is foundation of words even though non-existent english sounds
    • babbling does mirror tones and rhythms of native language
    • segmenting, attention, discrimination of sounds (high amplitude sucking experiments)
    • prosody is key, as well as acoustic cues
  • 8 months to 1 yr
    • intonation and identification of parts, chunking, sound and syllables
    • mental representations
    • sounds in words
    • Storage and memory leads to....
  • 1 year
    • 1 word utterances, articulation
    • beginnning of symbolic realization?
    • continuation of storage and memory
    • simplified production
      • substitutions at final positions (especially fricatives, etc...)
  • 18 months (1 and half years)
    • 2 word utterances
    • Asymmetry of production and comprehension
      • understand and hear contrast more than aquisition/production?
    • vocabulary spurts
    • continuation of articulation and symbolic realization
  • 2 years
    • word inflections, beginning of internalizing rules?
Children gain meaning from social factors and from contribution of own schema=CONVERSATION AND CONCEPTUAL KNOWLEDGE. reactions of others, approval and correction is key. Also-pragmatics of what kids need.

My reflection/rxns...where is emotion in this? validation of speech and existence and communication?

1 comment:

wilson said...

Your post is very useful and delightful to know more about child language development. Good communication, sign language, some minded games, music, etc. are the best ways to improve speech or language and to make confident to the children.