LANGUAGE

DEVELOPMENT
By- PRITHUL PRAKASH
MAED 1ST Year
WHAT IS LANGUAGE?
 “A Socially shared code to express thougths and concepts. Language is
expressed through speech, writing and gesture. A system for the
expression of thoughts feelings etc. By the use of spoken sounds or
convetional symbols. ”
LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT IN CHILDREN

Infants are equipped for language even before birth, partly due to brain readiness, partly
because of auditory experiences in the uterus. Children around the world have the same
sequence of early language development, new borns prefer to hear speech over other sounds.
They prefer to listen to baby talk the high pitch, simplify and repeatitve words adults speak to
infants. The sound of human voice, whether, familiar or strange always fascinates infants.
Children’s First World is used to fulfill the specific intention
TOOLS OF COMMUNICATION
 Verbal communication
 Non-verbal communication
 Listening
 Visual aids
 Parental interaction
 Technonlogy
IMPORTANCE OF
COMMUNICATION TOOLS
 Enhnaces vocabulary
 Builds cognitive skills
 Supports social interaction
 Improves emotional expression
 Strengthens parent-child bond
 promotes academic success
 Boosts confidence
SIGN AND SYMBOLS DURING COMMUNICATION

 Gestures
 Facial expressions
 Body language
 Sign language
 Letter and words

These signs and symbols play a critical

role in supporting communication
before full language proficiency
develops.
STAGES OF LANGUAGE
DEVELOPMENT
Most people think that baby do not start to talk until they are about 1 year old but long before we hear
them produce intelligible words, they are learning a great deal about sound in particular, about the
basic phonetic functions on which speech depends.

Early vocalization-
a) Very young babies display a remarkable range of auditory abilities. There have been
several experiments in which different sounds are played to babies and their responses
montionered.
b) Other studies have shown how babies turn their heads towards the source of a sound
within the 1st few days of life, and prefer human voices to non-human sounds as early
as two weeks.
c) An auditory ability to discriminate certain parts of consonants or vowels is present
from around 4 weeks and this ability to discriminate becomes increasingly sophiscated
in subsequent months.
d) The early onset of this ability supports the idea that children perceptual apparatus is in
some way programmed to discriminate speech sounds that they are not born with
special feature detectors that responds to acustoic properties of speech.
e) Over the first few weeks of life, a baby’s vocal sound reflect only its biological state
and activities. State of hunger, pain or discomfort that causes crying and fussing are
known as reflexive noises.
Reflexes observed universally in Newborns
Reflex Description Disappear
Sucking Reflex When roof of infant’s mouth is touched, lips will About 2 months
close and sucking will occur.
Crawling reflex When placed on stomach, infant’s legs will make About 2 months
a crawling motion.
Startle Reflex Infant will cry when losing support and falling or About 3 months
when a loud sound is heard.
Stepping Reflex When feet touch the ground, infant will lift feet About 3 months
and will make a walking motion.
Badinski Reflex When side of foot is touched, toes will fan out and About 4 months
foot will turn inward.
Rooting Reflex When cheek is touched, infant will turn in the About 4 months
direction of touch.
Palmar Grasp When palm is touched by a finger, infant will About 6 months
grasp a finger.
Gag Reflex Prevents choking Does not disappear
Right Reflex Head will be lifted when placed on the stomach to Does not disappear
clear nose and mouth
Source: Levine & Munsch (2011).
 Babbling stage
A. Babbling emerges between 25 and 50 weeks. A smaller
set of sounds is used with greater frequency, to produce
the (baba) and other sequences known as reduplicated
babbling.

B. About half-way through the period, this develops into

variegated babbling, in which consonants and vowels
change from one syllable to the next. The rhythm of the
utterance and the syllable to the next. The rhythm of
the closer to that found in speech.

C. Most babbling consists of a small set of sounds very

similar to those used in the early language to be spoken
by the child. The brain seems to be controlling the
development of babbling and early speech in a similar
way so that a set of well-practiced sounds is available
for use at the time when children become intellectually
capable of using sound for the communication of
menaing.
Infants were able to
imitate a stranger’s
facial expressions.
The stranger in the
photo is the
researcher Andrew
Meltzoff.
Jargon stage
a) The time children are a year old, They have learned a great deal about the way adults
use sounds to express differences in meaning, but their ability to produce these sounds
lags some way behind.

b) Some one-year-olds can recognize several dozen words, involving a wide range of
vowels and consonants, but their ability to pronounce these words may be restricted to
just two or three consonants and a single vowel.

c) During 2nd year, an important feature of children’s pronunciation is an effect known as

reduplication. This happens when the different syllables of a word are pronounced in
the same way. In one child, water is pronounced as mumum and bottle as bubu.

d) The purpose of reduplication may be partly motivated simply by the need to play with
sounds or to practice them. However, it is more likely that the process helps children as
they try to cope with the pronunciation of more complicated words.

e) A word like tiger, with its changes of consonant and vowel, would be difficult for an
18th-month-old to learn at one go. Repuplication would give the child a chance to
 MEANINGFUL WORDS AND SENTENCES
 When learning new words, children appear to make the same basic assumptions about words
and their possible labels. In this sense, they are biased learners.
 Children learn many new words by asking adults, What’s that.? This strategy has been called an
original word game.
 Imagine a child sees a helicopter and asks, What’s that? Dad says, It’s a helicopter. The child is
not likely to assume that the word refers to the rotating blade rather, the word will be
understood as referring to the whole object. This bias is called the whole object bias when
acquiring new words.
 Children tend to assume that a word refers to a type of object or whole category rather than a
specific example of the category. For example, children will assume the word cat does not refer
to just Grandma’s kitty but is a word that is used to describe all kitties. This has been referred
to as the taxonomy bias.
 By the time most children are between 3 and 4 years of age, they are producing complex
sentences. Their sentences contain grammatical morphones, such as function words. Eg. Aur
and main. Some of their sentences will even contain multiple clauses eg. Main jaunga, mujhe
Khanna hai
 As children begin to produce more words, they are on the road to figuring out how to express
their intentions as sentences.
REFERENCES
 Introduction of language development book by Shelia M. Kennison
 The Language Instinct - How the Mind Creates Language book by Steven Pinker
 Levine and Munsch (2011) tabular representation data
 Wikipedia and general Google search for definition
 Mesaures to enhance the stages of development.