Child's Development of Language- Subsystems
Phonological Development
Phonological development is that process in which children learn to produce sounds. It is an ongoing process in children, particularly in the first 5 years of their life. They learn to mimic the sounds in their environment which they are exposed to from birth. The systems which take place in phonological process are the auditory systems- the ears, ear canal and brain; and the vocal system- the vocal chords, the throat, the mouth, teeth, tongue and jaw. During the first phase of phonological development, children will listen to utterances spoken by others and learn to make their own interpretations of what they hear. This usually begins when the child is about 14 months old. At this age, the child’s vocal system would not have developed enough for them to speak properly, therefore the sounds produced will be babbling and very simple consonant sounds. |
Children enter the second phase of phonological development when they’re about 2 year old. During this time, their vocal cords will begin to strengthen as they learn to move and place their tongue to articulate sounds properly. However, they are still unable to produce consonants against a consonant, and are only able to pronounce a consonant against a vowel. Therefore, children tend to replace one of the consonants with a vowel.
The third and final phase is when children learn how to properly place their tongue against their teeth and how to pronounce a consonant next to a consonant in a word, allowing them to make the correct sounds to create the proper word. A child’s vocabulary would have also expanded greatly during this stage, but it is still common for children to used word incorrectly. |
Morphological Development
Morphological development is to do with children learning about the structure and learning how to form words correcting, for example, learning about affixes such as the plural and past tense. During this development, caretakers do not actually play a large role, it’s more of the child picking up patterns in the language and applying them to the words they use. The rate of morphological acquisition in children differs between individuals, but there is still some similarities in the stages that they go through as they acquire certain morphemes. At first, children are simply repeating what they hear, therefore their words have the correct morphology. However, as their mind begins to pick up patterns in the words they hear and try to regularize it in a systematic fashion, children will begin to make morphological error. This is because they are applying a particular pattern to a word that is an exception to that ‘rule’, causing them to produce words that they have not heard from their environment. |
Semantic Development
A children’s acquisition of semantics is to do with them learning the meanings of the words which they hear and learn. There are some major obstacles which a child faces when doing this, such as working out which of the many words in an utterance is and label for an object or the fact that a particular item can be labelled in a number of different ways can confuse the child. One major problem that occurs is when children begin to explore principles of meaning extension for their language. For example, a child might recognize a dog as a four-legged animal and may end up calling every four-legged animals ‘dogs’. This phenomenon is referred to as overgeneralization. |
Just as children can overgeneralize, they can also undergeneralize a word’s meaning. This is when a child uses a particular word for only a limited number of contexts in which an adult would use the word. Another mistake which children make is completely conceptualizing a word’s meaning incorrectly. This is referred to as a mismatch. However, children are still very quick and accurate at correctly labelling objects, therefore over, undergeneralisations and mismatches occur only for a short period of time.
As children learn the labels for more and more objects, they also begin developing an understanding of the relations between various groups of words, organizing them into various semantic fields. For instance, a child might learn the worlds blue, red, black and pink and assign these world to the semantic field of ‘colours’. Children get better and better at doing this as they grew older. |
Syntactic Development
Syntactic development refers to the way which children about how words are arranged in relation to each other to create sentences. They usually learn and develop syntactic rules just by listening to others speak around them and do not need instructions. Stage 1 (12- 18 months): Children begin by using one word utterances to communicate, before moving to the 2 word stage after a few months. The words they use are mainly nouns, verbs and adjective, and they lack grammatical information. |
Stage 2 (2-3 years): Children’s sentences begin to become longer. They learn to understand and make use of the present tense (-ing) and then form an understanding of prepositions ‘in’ and ‘on’.
Stage 3 (3- 3.5 years): Children begin to develop an understanding of the irregular past tense, e.g ‘met’ and they also learn to use the proper form of the verb ‘to be’ in different tenses. Stage 4 (3.5-4 years): Children start to use articles, the regular past tense (-ed) and the third person regular present tense |
Stage 5 (4 years +): Children start to use contractions like ‘I’m’ and also start to use the irregular past tense in 3rd person. They also form an understanding of using the verb ‘to be’ with other verbs. By the time they reach 4, they should be able to produce 4-5 word long utterances. The type of sentences they use are based on the communicative function. The four types are:
- Declarative: Making a statement, e.g. ‘I like shoes’ - Imperative: Giving a command or order, e.g ‘Go away’ - Exclamative: Shows emotion, e.g. ‘That’s disgusting!’ - Interrogative: Asked a question, e.g. ‘What time is it?’ Children able to rapidly move through language development, moving from simply utterances to a variety of syntactically intricate sentences in just a few years |
Lexical Development
Lexical development is to do with a child’s acquisition of their vocabulary. Most words in a child’s vocabulary comes from what they hear from the environment around them every day. They store the sounds they hear and remember it in their minds. Children usually begin speaking at about 1 years old, although in some cases it can be as late as 16 month. At 18 months, a child’s vocabulary would have developed to about 50- 100 words, and 200-300 by the time they’re 2 year old. By age 3, a child should have a vocabulary of 500 to 1100 words, and by 5-7 years, they will have developed a communicative vocabulary, consisting of 3000-5000 words. |