How Children Learn Language

How Children Learn Language

At the age of 4 years a baby learns the basic vocabulary, syntax (Grammatical rules and structures) and pronunciation of a language. Moreover, at the age of 4-5 they are able to deal with the most difficult obstacles in language learning. Even, their language proficiency is much better than adults who learn a second language. In other words, they learn the language faster than the adults.

How Speech Production develops

A few-month-old baby produces sounds like Crying, Cooing like pigeon, gurgling, sucking, blowing, and Babling. This is a kind of exercise in articulation, control and practice in coordinating breathing with the making of sounds. This happens to all babies in the world, even the deaf one.

However, a deaf baby does not get any progress in babling as they cannot imitate the next level of speech sounds. When producing speech sounds, most babies produce vowels and consonant-vowel syllables like ‘a’  ‘u’  ‘ma’  ‘gi’  ‘pa’  then they keep uttering these sounds so they become ‘mama’  ‘gigi’  ‘papa’ and eventually sound closed to the language the children are exposed to, e.g. Japanese-exposed children start to sound like Japanese, etc. this happens mostly when the children are at the age of 6 months.

At the age of 10-11 months, the children will  learn how to babble using Declarative, Question and Exclamatory intonation patterns.

The One-word utterance

At the age of 10 months , children have uttered their first one word utterance.

The many uses of a single word.

          Empirically speaking, when children learn how to say a single word, even the same one, they use it for many purposes such as:

1.    To name an object; e.g. ‘mama’ for ‘mother’, ‘nana’ for ‘banana’

2.    To request something; ‘mama’ for ‘I want my mother’, ‘nana’ for ‘I want a banana’  

3.    To emphasize actions such as in greeting; e.g. ‘Hi’ with a wave of the hand or in leave-taking e.g. ‘bye-bye’ with a different wave of the hand.   

4.    To express complex situation. E.g. a child saying ‘peach’ + ‘Daddy’ + ‘spoon’ in a situation where here father had put a piece of peach onto a spoon.

So, children tend to produce a series of three single-word utterances (peach - Daddy - spoon) rather than one three word sentence (Daddy put peach on spoon):

Two and three-word utterances

At the age of 18 months or so, children start to produce two and three-word utterances. Table 1.1 shows some examples on this issue.

Table 1.1.

Child’s utterance	Mature speakers’ equivalent	Purpose
Want cookie	I want a cookie	Request
More milk	I want some more milk	Request
My cup	This cup is mine	Warning
Mommy Chair	This chair belongs to mommy	Warning
Mommy Chair	Mommy is sitting in the chair	Answer (to question)
Big boy	I am a big boy	Bragging
Red car	The car is red	Inform
No sleep	I don’t want to go to sleep	Refusal
Where doll?	Where is the doll?	Question
Daddy bring	Daddy will bring pizza	Inform
Give candy	Give me some candy	Request
Banana table	The banana is on the table	Inform / answer

Here, at only a year and a half, children use the language to request, warn, refuse, brag, question, answer and inform.

Function words and inflections

1.    Plural and Possessive before Third Person

ð  The Plural and Possessive are much more involved in meaning and information, e.g. Discerning 1 Vs 2 cookies is easier whereas the Third Person is more involved with grammatical requirements and serves less vital communicative needs. 

2.    Present before Past

ð  Once again, it concerns MEANING; for the present tense, children are listening to speech: ‘the dog is barking’ and at the same time they hear the dog barking.    

3.    Past Irregular before Past Regular?

ð  It is because the different sound of Irregular verbs are more noticeable than the regular one, e.g. : Come – came. And compare with this: Jump-jumped; in practice the regular one might be quite difficult to recognize.

4.    Auxiliary ‘be’: Regular before contracted.

ð  One more time, the uncontracted forms are much easier to recognize than the contracted one.

Morpheme knowledge.

Jean Berko Gleason conducted a morpheme research in 1950. She tested young children with respect to their knowledge of certain morphemes, such as Plural.

For example: She said: ‘This is a wug’ (Showing something), then she showed 2 and said: ‘now there are 2 ­­­­_______ (when the children are able to say ‘2 wugs’ then the children are able to make the aspect of plural. At different time she showed another thing which she called ‘Niz’ and she said; This is a ‘Niz’ then she showed 2 kinds of ‘Niz’. If the children were able to produce ‘Nizes’ means they were able to produce another aspect of Plural.

Here, Gleason wanted to state how important and useful the principle of productivity by establishing what children already know.   

DEVELOPING COMPLEX SENTENCES

Children start to make negatives, question, relative clauses. They go through 3 main periods:

Period 1 (They make simple negative)

“ No money, no fall, no singing song ”

Period 2 (They are able to insert auxiliary ‘do’)

“ I don’t want it, I don’t know his name ”

Period 3 (They even able to insert other auxiliary)

“ Paul can’t have one, you didn’t caught me ”

According to Bellugi and Klima, all took about 6 months to pass though the three periods.

By 4 or 5 years of age, they are able to produce most of the essential structure of their language. ( this is evidently a worldwide phenomenon, whatever the language ). It is perhaps by 9 or 10 years of age that all of the structures of the language have been acquired.

SPEECH UNDERSTANDING AND ITS IMPORTANCE

Speech understanding, the basis of speech production

Children will not learn speech, if they are exposed only to speech sounds. Even if the child hears a spoken word a thousand times, e.g. ‘dog’, there is no way for child to discover the meaning of the word unless some environmental clue is provided – in this example, a dog or a picture of a dog. Even abstract words must be learned in some such way.

Now, in order for a child to learn the meaning of the sound form of word, the child must first hear that word spoken by others. ( The child cannot know beforehand that one object has the name of ‘ mama ’ while another has name of ‘ dog ’).

Evidence with handicapped children perhaps provides even stronger evidence. In the research, it is known that children who were mute since birth but yet, having normal hearing, were able to understand what anyone said to them.

Learning abstract words

When dealing with word meaning, children soon understand and produce some that are quite abstract. Words expressing feeling ( hunger, pain, joy ) and complex ideas ( lie, honest, guess ) are just some of those learned.

When the child must do in order to learn the meaning of abstract words is to observe speech, along with situations and events in the physical environment and the relate them to experiences and processes in the mind.

Memory and language acquisition

Children do not remember many of words, phrases and sentences that they heard. They have little basis for discovering abstract meaning and rule.

In many other areas of life – in remembering faces, objects, music, past events and vast quantities of knowledge in a variety of fields – the child’s memory is also remarkable.

Parentese and Baby Talk

Parentese

Parentese is speech that children receive when young. The speech spoken to a child has some distinctive characteristics. For example, parents usually talk to their children about what is happening in the immediate environment and not about abstract or remote objects and events. A sentence  like “ the dog wants water” rather than “I might start reading that psycholinguisticts book tomorrow” is what a 1- or 2- year-old is likely to hear. Sentences tends to be short and the structures simple, e.g. “The dog wants water” rather than “The dog which has been running a lot wants to drink some water.” Vocabulary tends to be simple, “see” rather than “notice” and “hard” rather than “difficult”.

  The characteristics of Parentese evidently make the acquisition of language understanding and production easier for a learner. This does not mean that if parents do not use Parentese, their children do not learn language. However, given the obvious facilitating nature of Parentese and the way it naturally arises, it may well be that children who receive such language input learn to understand speech faster than children who do not.

Baby Talk

Baby Talk is different from Parentese. While Parentese uses regular vocabulary and syntax, baby talk is overly simplified and reduced. Most Baby Talk involves modifications in vocabulary. They already established words like: ‘bow-wow’ (dog), ‘pee-pee’ (urine) and ‘choo-choo’ (train) in English. From such examples, we can see that the main sound structure of such words tends to be dominated by a Consonant + Vowel syllable unit which is repeated.

In some cases, Baby Talk is common to add the ‘iy’ sound to words ending in a consonant, e.g. ‘birdy’ for bird, ‘horsie’ for horse, ‘kitty’ for kitten. Syntax plays a less prominent role in Baby Talk.

Imitation and correction

The role of Imitation.

Children learn to say words and phrases such as ’dog’, ‘Papa’,’run’,’happy’, ‘no’, ‘why not’, ‘bread and butter’, ‘Not now’,etc. While, English children commonly produce words like ‘mouses’, ‘sheeps’, ‘ghooses’, ‘goed’,’comed’, ‘falled’, and ’breaked’. Why do children produce such words? The most satisfactory answer is that children have formulated rules in their minds, and construct such words on the basis of this rules. The same must be said for children saying things like ’No heavy’, ‘No the sun shining’. When we can go?’ and ’He is doing what?’. Since these are not utterences made by adults, and since they regularly appear, they cannot be ones that children have imitated.

While expections to rules must be learned, such as in pluralizing nouns (‘mice’ and not ’mouses’) and in making the Past Tense (‘went’ and not ’goed’), and while further aspects regarding negation and question-making must be developed, the errors in themselves provide strong evidence that rule-learning (Regular Plural, regular Past) has taken place. Rules, by their very nature, cannot be imitated.

The rule of correction

Correction is not an important factor in that process. In actual fact, parents pay little attention to the grammatical correctness of their children’s speech. Rather than correcting the child’s grammar, parents are more interested in responding to their speech.

When parents correct their children’s speech, the results are often fruitless and frustrating. Consider the following exchange between a mother and son :

Son              :  Nobody don’t like me.

Mother         :  Nobody likes me.

The above sequence is repeated by mother and son seven or more times.

Mother (in despiration):  Now, listen carefully. Nobody likes me.

Son    :  Oh! Nobody don’t likes me.

In any case about correction form, the child is really given no direct clue as to exactly what is wrong with the utterence that he or she has produced. Children natarully correct their own mistakes over time, without others’ the intervention.