Chapter 4: Speech & Language Development

• Speech development: progressive evolving and shaping of individual sounds and syllables that are used as arbitrary symbols and applied in rule-governed combinations to produce words to communicate a person's wants, needs, thoughts, feeling, and knowledge
• language development: the progressive growth of a receptive and expressive communication system for representing concepts using arbitrary symbols (sounds and words) and rule-governed combinations of those symbols (grammar)
• behavioral theory - a perspective of development that asserts that speech and language are behaviors learned through operant conditioning
• operant (instrumental) conditioning - a learning model for changing behavior in which a desired behavior is reinforced immediately after it spontaneously occurs
• successive approximations (shaping) - the reinforcement of each response that more closely resembles the target response until the target response is acquired
• parentese - how parents and other caregivers often talk to infants using a high-pitched voice with significant pitch variation, one and two syllable words in short, simple sentences and speak at a slower rate with clearer articulation than normal, sometimes emphasizing every syllable
• nativist theory - a perspective of language development that emphasizes the acquisition of language as an innate, physiologically determined and genetically transmitted phenomenon
• utterances - a unit of vocal expression that is preceded and followed by silence and may be made up of a vocal sound (like "huh?"), words, phrases, clauses, or sentences
• semantic-cognitive theory - a perspective of language development that emphasizes the interrelationship between language learning and cognition, the meanings conveyed by a child's productions
• four variables that affect a child's understanding of an utterance:

  1. complexity of an utterance
  2. amount of information in an utterance
  3. rate at which an utterance is spoken
  4. duration of an utterance
• rule of fives – five letter words, five word sentences to simplify
• social-pragmatic theory - a perspective of language development that considers communication as the basic function of language
• turn-taking - the manner in which orderly conversation normally takes place. the process by which people in conversation alternate turns speaking, which depends on both cultural factors and subtle cues
• culture - the philosophies, values, attitudes, perceptions, religious and spiritual beliefs, educational values, language, customs, childrearing practices, lifestyles, and arts shared by a group of people and passed from one generation to the next
• multicultural - a society characterized by a diversity of cultures, languages, traditions, religions and values
• living language - a language that people still speak and use in their ordinary lives
• dialect - a specific form of speech and language used in a geographical region or among a large group of people that differs significantly from the standard of the larger language community in pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, and idiomatic use of words
• 7,120 languages in the world
• 220 living languages in US
• standard dialect - the dialect of a language that is commonly spoken or established by individuals with considerable formal education
• cultural-linguistic diversity (CLD): a perspective of language development that emphasizes the similarities and differences of the people and the languages spoken around the world, and that stresses how one language or dialect is no better than another
• accent - usually considered the speech pronunciation and inflections used by nonnative American English speakers (foreign accent)
• if children are exposed to a second language before 8 years old, they will generally speak it without an accent
• Hispanic population is 18.5%
• ESL/ELL - English as a Second Language/English Language Learner, learning english after a child's native (home) language has been established
• dual-language learner (DLL) - someone who learns two or more languages at the same time
• bilingual - children who often speak the parents' native language in the home environment and speak American English in school or other environments
• code switching - an occurrence for bilinguals in which sounds, words, semantics, syntactic or pragmatic elements from one language are included when speaking another language, either automatically or unintentionally
• 13.5% african american
• worldview - an individual or group's perception of reality and a framework of ideas, beliefs, and attitudes about the world, life, and themselves
• Stage I, Speech Development from birth to 12 months
• Speech development -Stage I: Birth to 6 months - Prelinguistic (Preverbal) Vocalizations: the sounds produced by an infant before the production of true words and language (crying, babbling, cooing, etc.)
• cooing - the production of vowel-like sounds (/u/ and /oo/ with occasional brief consonants (like /k/ and /g/) usually produced by infants when feeling comfort or pleasure and interacting with a caregiver
• babbling - the production of a consonant and vowel in the same syllable either reduplicated (baba, gaga) or nonreduplicated (ba-da-gi) that tends to appear at about 6 or 7 months of age
• echolalia - an infant's immediate and automatic reproduction or imitation of speech heard from the sounds made by others in the environment, the words infants imitate are not yet meaningful to them
• neonate - an infant less than 4 weeks old
• speech development -6-12 months – Prelingusitic (Preverbal) Vocalizations - vocal play: longer strings of syllables that extend babbling (baa da gi daa umm ma)
• jargon - strings of syllables produced with stress and intonation that mimic real speech but are not actual words
• stop - sound made by blocking the air pressure in the mouth and then suddenly releasing it, air flow can be blocked by pressing lips together, pressing tongue against either gum or soft palate
• nasal - sound produced by lowering the velum to the base of the tongue which closes the oral cavity and allows air to be directed into the nasal passages