Language Development of a Child

This article throws light upon the four major factors influencing language development of a child. The factors are: 1. Sex Differences Influencing Language Development 2. Social Class Differences Influencing Language Development 3. Mediated generalization4. Processes in the Acquisition of Language.

Factor # 1.

Sex Differences Influencing Language Development:

Some studies of fifties and sixties, reported the superiority of female over male babies until they attained the age of 4. Children of both sexes, ranging between two and three, were studied for the development of their speech.

The findings were, the female babies could utter more speech sounds and approximating more to the correct forms of articulation than the male babies could do. The comprehensibility of the female babies was also higher.

Factor # 2.

Social Class Differences Influencing Language Development:

Language is the basis of all social communications; and its importance in human behaviour can hardly be overestimated. For all higher mental processes, it is the means. “A host of dramatic new possibilities for psychological development” is present during the period the child learns to use language.

It is during the second year that the ability to use language is rapidly enhanced. His vocabulary goes on increasing—the more stimulating the social milieu, the more rapid and richer will be the growth of vocabulary. But the child’s passive vocabulary happens, always, to be richer by far; than his active vocabulary—he can follow the sense of many more words than the number of words he can actually use in his expression.

i. With the development of vocalization, the child’s speech becomes more comprehensible.

ii. His own comprehension of questions and commands goes on increasing.

iii. MM Shirley in a study of 25 children of about 2 years of age, found that the average vocabulary of them was 37 different words. Though the individual differences ranged from 6 to 126 words.

The speech of a 2-year-old child consists of nouns, verbs and adjectives; and “typically, each is used to convey the entire thoughts” that is, when the child says “hot”, it means “The milk is hot.” At this stage, the use of adjectives before a noun or to use prepositions, articles or conjunctions, is something unusual.

The more stimulating social environment the child gets, the more will be the linguistic development of the child. The affectionate care of parents, and, of elder siblings; their fondling’s along with utterances reassuring their love, go a long way in the process of language development of the baby.

Parents of lower stratum of society, generally, get little time to fondle their child, to talk to them; and, because of their own illiteracy and poor social-cultural background, cannot prove themselves to be effective and good stimulators and trainers in case of the linguistic development of their wards.

Children from culturally disadvantaged backgrounds are, generally, found deficient in all aspects of language development such children do not get enough stimulation. The most important research in this field has been that of B Bernstein, an educational sociologist of England. He found that mothers in the lower class families use short, grammatically poor, simple sentences; some were found to be using restricted codes also.

In comparison to this, mothers in the middle-class families pay more attention in instructing their children for better socialisation through linguistic interactions. Such instructions help children in learning operations and principles; and engender in them, a sense of autonomy in skill acquisition.

The working class mothers use language more to teach basic skills; and their children learn more of operations rather than of principles.

Moreover, verbal achievements are more highly valued and rewarded in upper and middle-class families. So the children, generally, make a more rapid progress in the development of language, and, their levels of linguistic achievements also happen to be higher. Irwin found that infants under the age of one, from professional and business families, vocalized more and more phonemes than from working class homes.

Another study indicated that the children with speech defects, on the average, come more from uneducated families of lower occupational status. Studies conducted on older children with age from 3 to 8 years, clearly demonstrated that those from lower class families, performed poorly on a variety of language tests.

The performance of the children belonging to middle and upper class families, were better both in respect of vocabulary and the length of sentences with a proper syntax. Those of the lower class families were found to be poor in vocabulary, in sentence structures, in sound discrimination; poor in articulation with less vocalization.

Those of upper class homes were superior in all aspects of language behaviour. They had richer vocabulary, could frame longer sentences with the correct placement of words. They had a higher capacity to communicate, and, their usage of words, was far more flexible and efficient. The level of their comprehension was also higher, and their sentences were more complex in terms of grammatical structure.

Early Sentence Stage:

A child of the age of about two years, generally, expresses himself through a mono-worded sentence; and that single word, happens to be a Noun. Later, at the second stage of sentence structure, he attempts to make a sentence of 3 to 4 words, and, sometimes the child even fails to articulate a word in full. Now he starts using a Verb, an Adjective, but the use of a Preposition is made at a still later stage.

My granddaughter (whom we had nick-named Shalu), used to speak—”Shalu ne kha liya” (Shalu has eaten). The use of “I” and other Pronouns is made even still later. Before the age of 4, a child can hardly make one or two complex or compound sentences out of fifty. Still, he lacks the mastery in the use of Inflections.

A child of 4, can make complete sentences, sometimes made of 6 to 8 words. Dorthea McCarthy reports that the sentences of a child of 4, generally, happen to be “characterised by greater definiteness and complexity.” Now, the child shows a fairly good mastery of Inflections and the number of relational words goes on increasing in his sentences.

The period of maximum and most rapid increase in articulation is that of between 3 and 3½ years of age. By 8, pronunciation attains the level of mature form. As for accurate grammatical usage, the four-year-old child can use Subjects, Predicates and Adjectives, in a correct sequence.

A child of 10 may be considered to have attained the level of maturity, so far the construction of sentences and the use of words of different grammatical kinds are concerned. Vocabulary level continues to increase into adulthood.

Colin Fraser has supplied a complete list of sentences uttered by Mary at 2, and of Jane at 6. Tremendous was the development of language during this short period of four years:

(i) The sentences made by Jane were longer.

(ii) There was a much greater variety in the use of words of different parts of speech, as made by Jane.

(iii) The intelligibility of Jane was much higher in comparison to that of Mary.

(iv) Jane could make use of some very sophisticated forms of grammatical constructions. But Mary could utter only shorter and simple forms of sentences.

(v) The percentage of speech in the form of social interaction was greater, by far in case of Jane than in that of Mary.

(vi) Mary’s utterances, in many cases, were the immediate imitations of what she heard from some adults. Jane on the other hand, in most cases, made her own independent utterances, as the situation demanded.

Conceptualization:

Language is the medium for the child to understand, to know his world. Almost at all times, the senses of the child remain active in getting sensual experiences of the objects and events of his world. With age, the level of his perception increases.

The field of perception also increases as the child grows more mobile. By the time the child enters the pre-operational period, as Piaget has named it, objects of the world, and those related to his “soma”, that is, body, start to be recognised as objects having some shape, size, colour and other attributes of their own.

The increasing perception of objects and events as distinct items with separate language labels, enables the child to recognise similarities and dissimilarities.

Such knowledge of objects and events is called conception. Conception is the discrete knowledge of an object, developed in reference to the past experiences of the organism as well as in the wider perspective.

All of which yields a comprehensive information regarding the nature and usage of an object along with its apparent attributes which may include shape, size (size as big, small; and, later comparatively), colour, and so on.

When objects are thus conceptualized, only then the child can see different objects related to a certain number of classes. Grouping and classification is the result of cognitive development, but such a development is a hallmark in the development of language too.

Great is the importance of verbal mediators in tasks involving concept- formation and inferences? Tracy Kendler and her colleagues have provided impressive examples of it through their studies. The verbal mediators enabled the children to solve reversal-shift problems.

That is, they could switch to the responses of just reverse nature, to what they had done previously under similar conditions. They could “integrate independently acquired responses in making inferences.” Hawell David Beach and Jack Chinsky have reported through observations that the kindergarten children, who can name depicted objects, are less likely to use the same as verbal mediators.

Marion Blank and Frances Solomon worked intensively for 4 months with nursery children. Each day, the training session continued for 15 and 20 minutes for each child. Each one of them was actively involved in the training, and, it was found that they improved in language comprehension, thought abstraction, cognitive organisation and problem solution.

The programme raised the IQs of the children, and, there were beneficial changes in the behaviour of the children. The understanding and categorisation of the environment continues unnoticed. Yet, for the child’s total development, conceptualization of language is of utmost importance.

Conceptualization and specificity of language:

With increase in conceptualization, two kinds of changes take place:

(i) Words increasingly represent some specific objects and events. A child of 3 is apt to use the word ‘Dog’ for all animals who are quadrupeds; and, ‘Car’ for all the four wheeled vehicles. Heinz Weener has called this kind of language usage as ‘undifferentiated’ or ‘syncretic’.

‘Syncretic’, because during this pre­school period, one single word may stand for a combination or fusion of several concepts; the child may use the word ‘eat’ for ‘food’ and for ‘the process of being fed.’ But before the child is five years old, he will have started making differentiated usage of words. The words ‘dog’, ‘eat’, and so on, will be applied with some of the specificity that characterizes the language of an adult.

(ii) Increase in the use of words representing Abstract Ideas or Conditions. A word like ‘Man’ is more absti-act than ‘Gopal,’ ‘Animal’, in comparison to ‘Cow’, ‘Goat’ and so on. The child learns the use of such words only when he is of the age of about five. The words like ‘Man’ and ‘Animal’ stand for different classes of beings (of objects)—the use of such words increases along with the increase in maturity.

The faculty of conceptualization of the child also increases. So, the two types of important developments in the use of language are (i) to use specific words for specific objects, and (ii) to use words which stand for groups or classes.

He gradually develops to the stage when he understands that the word ‘animal’ include all from ‘dog’, ‘cats’ to ‘frog’ and ‘butterfly.’ Of course, words stand for a child of five, only in the context in which he has learnt the same.

“Money” stands for something abstract, but for a child in India its concrete form may be only the few currency notes that he has seen, while for an American child, it may stand for a few forms of currency notes of that country, and so on. “Conceptual development is roughly measured by the number of abstract concepts for which the child has acquired labels for the sub-categories.”

Some concepts are defined in terms of their actions or functions, for example, a ‘dog’ is one who barks, a ‘monkey’ is one that jumps high to cover long distances and so on—a child, between the ages of three to four, develops his concepts in this fashion.

He defines or conceptualizes objects sometimes in abstract terms, such as money; sometimes through labelling, such as a ‘dog’ is an animal; but mostly through the functions that are the properties of the concerned objects—’a fire is that which bums.’

To sum up, the child, during the pre-school period, rapidly learns the following aspects of the language:

1. Using words which refer only to certain specific objects.

2. Using words which refer to abstract things.

3. Using words in a sentence at their proper places.

4. Using words which describe the properties of objects and events.

Factor # 3.

Mediated generalization Influencing Language Development:

My granddaughter, of about two years of age, would call anyone in the picture as ‘Da-da’ (grandfather) who is old his old age is an important property that is common with mine. She would, because of the same reason, call a man in picture as ‘Pa-pa’ because of some similarity in age, and, because of moustache, as her father wears.

If the first experience of a child with a teacher has been unpleasant, the child would define any teacher as someone who is harsh—this is mediated generalisation. The child’s reaction to the word ‘teacher’ would be that of anxiety and avoidance; his face would indicate feelings of happiness when he would call someone in the picture as ‘Pa-pa.

‘This mediated generalisation plays an important part in the process of language development.

Factor # 4.

Processes in the Acquisition of Language:

There was published some very important matter on the processes which lead the child gradually to the acquisition of syntax, in the “Harvard Educational Review”, 1964, 34, No. 2. It is authored by Roger Brown and Ursula Belluge. According to these authors, the children utter the first intelligible word during the second half of the first year of their lives.

A few months later, they start uttering words which are the names of household articles—chair, table, glass, water, milk, bread, doll, and also, names such as doggie, cow, and the word used for the sparrow, and so on. Then they start speaking words which stand for actions such as play, see, drop, etc. The use of words which stand for quantities is made still later, and, occasionally.

By the time the child is about 18 months old, he can express himself using sentences made up of two words. The child utters in such a way that primary stress is given on each word. The unity of the sentence would appear because of the absence of a terminal contour.

The longitudinal study conducted by the investigators, yielded the results that Adam, aged 27 months, was only a little more advanced than Eve, aged 18 months, in speech—judging it from the single index, that is, the average length of the sentence uttered by each.

The average length of utterance of each was 1.84 and 1.40 morphemes, respectively. During the succeeding year, the two children remained fairly together. A record was made of the utterances of the two for the succeeding period of thirty-eight weeks of the year. Now, Adam’s average was found to be 3.55 and that of Eve to be 3.27 morphemes. The remark of the investigators is being quoted here:

“Every second week we visited each child, for at least two hours, and made a tape-recording of everything said by the child as well as of everything said to the child. The mother was always present; and most of the speech to the child, was her’s.”

One of the investigators, would always make a written transcription of the scene, making a detailed mention about the speech of the mother and of the child with notes about actions made and the important objects that stimulated the children for speech and actions. From this transcription and the tape, a final transcription was made. These transcriptions constituted the primary data of the study.

Then, distributional analysis was made; the utterances were categorized, making the kinds of parts of speech a basis for the same. In sentences, there were an Adjective and a Noun, in some, a Noun and a Verb; in some the Verbs were in Past Tense; in some, Pronouns were used.

The distributional analysis showed how the children were improving in syntactic regularities. Sometimes, extra experiments were made to see how many of them had learnt the use of a Noun, both as a subject and as an object; and how many of them could pluralize a sentence from its singular form.

Children use telegraphic language, using high-information words and leaving out the low-information ones. The sentences of the children are the results of adaptation to the sentences of the adults, in an optional way. The adults utter sentences with stresses on connectives, and the functors remain unstressed. The children are more likely to leave out functors rather than the contentives.