Linguistic Development Research Paper (Page 6 of 37) in pdf

2 LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

The errors are also very similar to the naming errors that children make in the holophrastic and

telegraphic stages of development. The child might use a word to indicate some speciﬁc feature of

the object to which they are refering. For instance “ball” might be used to refer to anything that is

round such as a clock face or the moon or anything that bounces. This error is known as “semantic

overextension.”

The removal of such over- or under-generalization of rule is an application of the process of diﬀer-

entiation described above. In the process that will require modiﬁcations to semantic or syntactic

categories and eventually to the hierarchical organization these rules are a part of.

Children create approximations to grammatical adult sentences, and such approximations can reveal

similar rules being applied at other levels.

2.1

Social Inﬂuences On Development

As we saw above children make and test hypotheses about the meaning of words and the organization

of morphemes in a sentence. But how would the child test such hypotheses? The solution is in the

social context of language formation. There can be identiﬁed three aspects to the social inﬂuence

on children.

1. establishing the communicative functions of language.

2. providing models of the form and use of language.

3. placing demands on children to communicate eﬀectively.

It is during the very early part of development in the pre-linguistic stage (see section 6 on page

17) that the interactions of parent and child establish vocal noise-making as the primary vehicle of

communication. That is done through crying, babbling, cooing, whining etc.

The models of form and use of language are provided throughout the developmental process. The

use of “Baby Talk Register” (often known as “Motherese” or “Child Directed Speech”) serves this

purpose very well. It does so by providing examples of short, well articulated and grammatically

complete sentences which closely approximate to the complexity of the child’s own speech.

Parents also play word games that give access to vocabulary and sentence structure. They also repeat

the sentences back to children in expanded grammatical form. This practice serves two purposes.

First, it acts as a model for sentence structure rather than as a correction of any imprecise usage.

secondly it indicates to the child that the parent has understood what the child has said, thus giving

encouragement.

Although it is clear that the exposure to language that children receive from their parents is not of

the bulk that might be required in the behaviorist model. It is also clear that the language which is

shown to them is well suited to the task of providing archetypal examples of sentence structure.

In teaching their children parents very seldom set out with the intention of providing formal instruc-

tion. They use language to communicate, to play and to maintain social, mental and emotional

contact with the child. In doing so they are inadvertently providing what current research indicated

is the best kind of schooling in speech.

It is also evident that parents are inadvertently using their communication with the child to train the

child in language use. They display modiﬁed and highly speciﬁc behavior in the choice of sentence,

syntax, complexity, tense and cognitive payload that they utter. Such sentence structure is not

present in any other social context, and could not be produced by a voluntary act of will.

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