Language development
[4][5][6] Language development is thought to proceed by ordinary processes of learning in which children acquire the forms, meanings, and uses of words and utterances from the linguistic input.
[10] The nativist theory, proposed by Noam Chomsky, argues that language is a unique human accomplishment, and can be attributed to either "millions of years of evolution" or to "principles of neural organization that may be even more deeply grounded in physical law".
Their capacity to learn language is also attributed to the theory of universal grammar (UG), which posits that a certain set of structural rules are innate to humans, independent of sensory experience.
[13] This view has dominated linguistic theory for over fifty years and remains highly influential, as witnessed by the number of articles in journals and books.
[14] The empiricist theory suggests, contra Chomsky, that there is enough information in the linguistic input children receive and therefore, there is no need to assume an innate language acquisition device exists (see above).
In the documentary Project Nim, for example, researcher Herbert S. Terrace conducted the study to nurture a young chimpanzee with intimate human interaction.
For fifty years, linguist Noam Chomsky has argued for the hypothesis that children have innate, language-specific abilities that facilitate and constrain language learning.
[28] However, since he developed the minimalist program, his latest version of theory of syntactic structure, Chomsky has reduced the elements of universal grammar, which he believes are prewired in humans to just the principle of recursion, thus voiding most of the nativist endeavor.
[31] According to this theory, the neural substrate for language results from a combination of the genetically determined complexity of the human brain and the 'functional validation of synapses' during the long period of postnatal maturation that is unique among primates.
The results for this experiment had shown that the infants were able to recognize what they had heard in utero, providing insight that language development had been occurring in the last six weeks of pregnancy.
The females in this age range showed more spontaneous speech production than the males and this finding was not due to mothers speaking more with daughters than sons.
[47] In addition, boys between 2 and 6 years as a group did not show higher performance in language development over their girl counterparts on experimental assessments.
[54] When a child learns to write they need to master letter formation, spelling, punctuation and they also have to gain an understanding of the structure and the organisational patterns involved in written language.
As a result of the individual being aware of the audience, context and reason they are communicating, both written and spoken language are able to overlap and take several forms at this stage.
[citation needed][60] Environmental influences on language development are explored in the tradition of social interactionist theory by such researchers as Jerome Bruner, Alison Gopnik, Andrew Meltzoff, Anat Ninio, Roy Pea, Catherine Snow, Ernest Moerk and Michael Tomasello.
Jerome Bruner who laid the foundations of this approach in the 1970s, emphasized that adult "scaffolding" of the child's attempts to master linguistic communication is an important factor in the developmental process.
[citation needed] One component of the young child's linguistic environment is child-directed speech (also known as baby talk or motherese), which is language spoken in a higher pitch than normal with simple words and sentences.
[64][citation needed] Child-directed speech concentrates on small core vocabulary, here and now topics, exaggerated facial expressions and gestures, frequent questioning, para-linguistic changes, and verbal rituals.
"[65] Specifically in North American culture, maternal race, education, and socioeconomic class influence parent-child interactions in the early linguistic environment.
[78] One study concludes that children between the ages of 24 and 30 months typically can produce 3–4-word sentence, create a story when prompted by pictures, and at least 50% of their speech is intelligible.
[citation needed] Within the first 12–18 months semantic roles are expressed in one word speech including agent, object, location, possession, nonexistence and denial.
[citation needed] Within these years, children are now able to acquire new information from written texts and can explain relationships between multiple meaning words.
After several months of speech that is restricted to short utterances, children enter the "telegraphic stage" and begin to produce longer and more complex grammatical structures (O'Grady & Cho, 2011, p. 347).
This stage is characterized by production of complex structures as children begin to form phrases consisting of a subject and a complement in addition to use of modifiers and composition of full sentences.
Subsequently, language acquisition continues to develop rapidly and children begin to acquire complex grammar that shows understanding of intricate linguistic features, such as the ability to switch the position of words in sentences.
The morphological structures that children acquire during their childhood, and even up to the early school years, are: determiners (a, the), -ing inflection, plural –s, auxiliary be, possessive –s, third person singular –s, past tense –ed).
Brown[84] proposed a stage model that describes the various types of morphological structures that are developed in English and the age range within which they are normally acquired.
Infants also can engage in turn taking activities[86] on the basis of their sensitivity to reactive contingency, which can elicit social responses in the babies from very early on.
[94] In another study throughout America, elementary school English-monolingual children performed better in mathematics and reading activities than their non-English-dominant bilingual and non-English monolingual peers from kindergarten to grade five.
A disorder may involve problems in the following areas: Olswang and colleagues have identified a series of behaviors in children in the 18–36-month range that are predictors for the need of language intervention.
