Developmental linguistics

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Developmental linguistics is the study of the development of linguistic ability in an individual, particularly the acquisition of language in childhood. It involves research into the different stages in language acquisition, language retention, and language loss in both first and second languages, in addition to the area of bilingualism. Before infants can speak, the neural circuits in their brains are constantly being influenced by exposure to language. Developmental linguistics supports the idea that linguistic analysis is not timeless, as claimed in other approaches, but time-sensitive, and is not autonomous  – social-communicative as well as bio-neurological aspects have to be taken into account in determining the causes of linguistic developments. [1]

Contents

Language acquisition

The concept of Nature vs. Nurture

Noam Chomsky (1995) proposes the theory of Universal grammar, supporting that a child’s language abilities is a result of nature. [2] The theory of Universal Grammar proposes that every child develops their language abilities through their innate and natural cognitive abilities in their mind, allowing them to learn languages. This inborn linguistic tool suggest that humans intrinsically have the ability to learn languages on their own.

On the other hand, the Behaviorist theory supports the theory that the ability for a human to learn language is a result of nurture. Central to this theory is the use of negative and positive reinforcement to achieve desired results. This is commonly observed in classrooms, where teachers utilize consequence or reward systems to motivate a student to succeed. Skinner (1957) believed that this form of nurture justified language development in children. [3] Skinner (1957) claimed that children were not actually learning language per se, instead they were learning about rewards and consequences through the behaviorist theory when they were rewarded for their correct use or language, and punished for incorrect use of language. [3]

Critical period

The Critical period is the first few years of life during which the brain is most sensitive to language learning and development, typically defined to be from age two to puberty. Researchers have found that this can be biologically explained through the maturity of the brain during childhood, leading to a gradual decrease of neuroplasticity in the language areas of the brain up until puberty. [4]

This does not mean it is impossible to learn another language once a person is past the critical period. Though vocabulary learning does not seem to be as sensitive to age, mastery of grammar and pronunciation of a language is not likely to be on par with the standard of a native speaker’s if it is learnt past the critical period.[ citation needed ]

Generally, researchers agree that the critical period learning curve echoes the data for a wide variety of second-language acquisition studies. However, the temporally defined critical period does not apply in the same manner to every aspect of a language and it differs for the phonetics, lexical and syntactic levels of a language, though studies have yet to conclude the exact timing for each individual level.[ citation needed ]

Studies on monolingual children have shown that the time before an infant turns one year of age, is an important window for phonetic learning; between 18 months to 36 months of age is an important period for syntactic learning; and vocabulary acquisition grows exponentially at 18 months of age. [5]

Social skills

Behaviourists believe that social environments play a vital role in language learning. Opportunities for social interactions among children as well as between children and adults are important for children to learn languages through exposure and practice. [5]

Motor skill

Speech motor learning is an important part of the linguistic development of infants as they learn to use their mouths to articulate the various speech sounds in language. Speech production requires feedforward and feedback control pathways, in which the feedforward pathway directly controls the movements of the articulators (namely the lips, teeth, tongue and the other speech organs). [6]

Typical tongue movements have been generated as a training set using major muscle combinations, and these muscle combinations are used as a basis for articulating a set of whole proto-vocalic tongue babbling movements in infants. [6]

Phonetics

Word awareness involves the recognition of the respective syllables in each word, and breaking down these meaningful parts and recreating them into words. They also learn to read words in whole instead of their parts, and making sense of these words and their meanings in sentences. [7]

Prosody

Tone refers to the use of pitch to mark lexical items whereas in intonation, variations in pitch patterns denote non-lexical differences like phrase boundaries and utterance-level pragmatic distinctions. Wormith et al. (1975) found that even from birth, infants are sensitive to fundamental frequencies in non-linguistic stimuli and are able to distinguish pure tones that differ only in F0. [8]

Nazzi et al. (1998) have also demonstrated that infants even at an early age are sensitive to pitch differences when presented linguistic stimuli. [9]

Perceptual reorganisation with regards to linguistic pitch occurs in children within 6 and 9 months of age. On the other hand, with regards to intonation, head-turn preference experiments have shown that by 4 to 5 months of age, infants are already sensitive to intonational units in speech. [10]

Music

Across many academic fields there has been growing interest in the connections between music and language. [11]

The deep and profound links between music and language support their simultaneous use for improved outcomes of language acquisition. [12] [ self-published source? ]

According to Jourdain (1997), language is primarily responsible for content whilst music is to evoke emotion. [13] The impact of music on language is positive, affecting language accent, memory and grammar, as well as mood, enjoyment and motivation. [12]

Joanne Loewy (1995) hinges on works of Charles Van Riper and proposes that instead of considering language in a cognitive context, it should instead be looked at in a musical context. Loewy (1995) terms this the ‘Musical Stages of Speech’. [14]

Looking at the sounds created by infants during their developmental stages (crying and comfort utterances followed by babbling and eventually acquiring or comprehending words) prepare for telegraphic speech. [15] Lowery (1995) asserts, “This music of speech is the earliest dimension of language understood by children”. [14]

Stages of vocal development

The five stages of vocal development are: [16]

Developmental issues

A typical child should acquire many of the critical components of a language by age three. [17] Children who, when compared with peers their age, are not as competent in language in terms of language processing and speech production or areas related to communication, could possibly be displaying signs of developmental delay. Having language-related developmental delays in childhood could cause problems in a child’s development [18] such as emotional, behavioural and literacy difficulties. Research has shown that children with developmental delays have a higher rate of having emotional and behavioural issues, and this is likely due to their frustration with having difficulties in communication. [17] To minimise the rate of misdiagnosis, parents should bring their kids to see a Speech-Language Pathologist. In some cases, it might be a language disorder which requires treatment and therapy.

Speech-language pathologist

A Speech-Language Pathologist (SLP) is a qualified practitioner who is involved in professional practice in areas that affect communication and swallowing, specifically speech production, fluency, language, cognition, voice, resonance, feeding, swallowing, and hearing. Focus is placed on prevention and reduction of the possibility of developing a new disorder by recognising disorders or diseases during its early stages. The work of SLPs to improve communication and swallowing issues of an individual is a collaborative one which requires cooperative effort from the individual, the individual's family. [19] Clinical visits to an SLP helps to lower the severity of a potential communicative disorder manifesting during childhood. [16]

Bilingual Language Learners

Benefits

Metalinguistic awareness

Early bilingualism is associated with advantages in metalinguistic awareness, which is the speaker's ability to distance himself from the content of speech in order to pay attention to the structural features of language and the language's properties as an object. [20] In this aspect, bilingual children often display greater facility than their monolingual peers, in tasks such as judging the grammaticality of semantically anomalous sentences or in identifying and explaining language contrasts. [21] Results have also shown that bilinguals benefit from the exposure of both languages and show cross-linguistic influences on metalinguistic skills in two typologically similar languages, which use different orthographies. [22]

Cognitive advantages

Bilingual children also benefit from cognitive advantages in executive control, attention span and working memory. For instance, experiments using conflict monitoring and attentional control tasks like the Simon task or the Attentional Networks Task, results have concluded that early bilinguals outperform monolinguals in inhibiting prepotent responses, which suggests that the acquisition of two or more languages engages the same sort of switching and control mechanisms for languages as for general cognitive processes. While the extent of these advantages is under debate for adult learners and unbalanced bilinguals, bilingual children display cognitive benefits relative to monolingual children. [21] Furthermore, bilinguals are found to be at an advantage in object classification and naming them, showing cognitive flexibility in such linguistic activities. [23]

Linguistic effects

Unlike monolingual learners who can make recourse to the first language (L1) only, bilingual students can rely on the structural transfer of both their L1 and second language (L2)  properties at the initial state of their third language (L3) acquisition. This means that bilingual learners can select from a larger pool of grammatical options from their L1 and L2 and thus exploit cross-linguistic correspondences to a greater extent than monolingual foreign learners. [21]

Factors affecting bilingual benefits

  1. Age of acquisition
  2. Level of proficiency in all previously acquired languages
  3. Usage of the minority language at home and in formal settings
  4. Type of heritage language spoken at home [21]

See also

Related Research Articles

Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language, as well as to produce and use words and sentences to communicate.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Babbling</span> Stage in child development and language acquisition

Babbling is a stage in child development and a state in language acquisition during which an infant appears to be experimenting with uttering articulate sounds, but does not yet produce any recognizable words. Babbling begins shortly after birth and progresses through several stages as the infant's repertoire of sounds expands and vocalizations become more speech-like. Infants typically begin to produce recognizable words when they are around 12 months of age, though babbling may continue for some time afterward.

Language transfer is the application of linguistic features from one language to another by a bilingual or multilingual speaker. Language transfer may occur across both languages in the acquisition of a simultaneous bilingual, from a mature speaker's first language (L1) to a second language (L2) they are acquiring, or from an L2 back to the L1. Language transfer is most commonly discussed in the context of English language learning and teaching, but it can occur in any situation when someone does not have a native-level command of a language, as when translating into a second language. Language transfer is also a common topic in bilingual child language acquisition as it occurs frequently in bilingual children especially when one language is dominant.

Monoglottism or, more commonly, monolingualism or unilingualism, is the condition of being able to speak only a single language, as opposed to multilingualism. In a different context, "unilingualism" may refer to a language policy which enforces an official or national language over others.

Second-language acquisition (SLA), sometimes called second-language learning — otherwise referred to as L2acquisition, is the process by which people learn a second language. Second-language acquisition is also the scientific discipline devoted to studying that process. The field of second-language acquisition is regarded by some but not everybody as a sub-discipline of applied linguistics but also receives research attention from a variety of other disciplines, such as psychology and education.

Language development in humans is a process starting early in life. Infants start without knowing a language, yet by 10 months, babies can distinguish speech sounds and engage in babbling. Some research has shown that the earliest learning begins in utero when the fetus starts to recognize the sounds and speech patterns of its mother's voice and differentiate them from other sounds after birth.

Simultaneous bilingualism is a form of bilingualism that takes place when a child becomes bilingual by learning two languages from birth. According to Annick De Houwer, in an article in The Handbook of Child Language, simultaneous bilingualism takes place in "children who are regularly addressed in two spoken languages from before the age of two and who continue to be regularly addressed in those languages up until the final stages" of language development. Both languages are acquired as first languages. This is in contrast to sequential bilingualism, in which the second language is learned not as a native language but a foreign language.

Metalinguistics is the branch of linguistics that studies language and its relationship to other cultural behaviors. It is the study of dialogue relationships between units of speech communication as manifestations and enactments of co-existence. Jacob L. Mey in his book, Trends in Linguistics, describes Mikhail Bakhtin's interpretation of metalinguistics as "encompassing the life history of a speech community, with an orientation toward a study of large events in the speech life of people and embody changes in various cultures and ages."

Bilingualism, a subset of multilingualism, means having proficiency in two or more languages. A bilingual individual is traditionally defined as someone who understands and produces two or more languages on a regular basis. A bilingual individual's initial exposure to both languages may start in early childhood, e.g. before age 3, but exposure may also begin later in life, in monolingual or bilingual education. Equal proficiency in a bilingual individuals' languages is rarely seen as it typically varies by domain. For example, a bilingual individual may have greater proficiency for work-related terms in one language, and family-related terms in another language.

Ellen Bialystok, OC, FRSC is a Canadian psychologist and professor. She carries the rank of Distinguished Research Professor at York University, in Toronto, where she is director of the Lifespan Cognition and Development Lab, and is also an associate scientist at the Rotman Research Institute of the Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care.

The critical period hypothesis or sensitive period hypothesis claims that there is an ideal time window of brain development to acquire language in a linguistically rich environment, after which further language acquisition becomes much more difficult and effortful. It is the subject of a long-standing debate in linguistics and language acquisition over the extent to which the ability to acquire language is biologically linked to age. The critical period hypothesis was first proposed by Montreal neurologist Wilder Penfield and co-author Lamar Roberts in their 1959 book Speech and Brain Mechanisms, and was popularized by Eric Lenneberg in 1967 with Biological Foundations of Language.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Laura-Ann Petitto</span> American psychologist and neuroscientist (born c. 1954)

Laura-Ann Petitto is a cognitive neuroscientist and a developmental cognitive neuroscientist known for her research and scientific discoveries involving the language capacity of chimpanzees, the biological bases of language in humans, especially early language acquisition, early reading, and bilingualism, bilingual reading, and the bilingual brain. Significant scientific discoveries include the existence of linguistic babbling on the hands of deaf babies and the equivalent neural processing of signed and spoken languages in the human brain. She is recognized for her contributions to the creation of the new scientific discipline, called educational neuroscience. Petitto chaired a new undergraduate department at Dartmouth College, called "Educational Neuroscience and Human Development" (2002-2007), and was a Co-Principal Investigator in the National Science Foundation and Dartmouth's Science of Learning Center, called the "Center for Cognitive and Educational Neuroscience" (2004-2007). At Gallaudet University (2011–present), Petitto led a team in the creation of the first PhD in Educational Neuroscience program in the United States. Petitto is the Co-Principal Investigator as well as Science Director of the National Science Foundation and Gallaudet University’s Science of Learning Center, called the "Visual Language and Visual Learning Center (VL2)". Petitto is also founder and Scientific Director of the Brain and Language Laboratory for Neuroimaging (“BL2”) at Gallaudet University.

Metalinguistic awareness, also known as metalinguistic ability, refers to the ability to consciously reflect on the nature of language. The concept of metalinguistic awareness is helpful in explaining the execution and transfer of linguistic knowledge across languages. Metalinguistics expresses itself in ways such as:

Heritage language learning, or heritage language acquisition, is the act of learning a heritage language from an ethnolinguistic group that traditionally speaks the language, or from those whose family historically spoke the language. According to a commonly accepted definition by Valdés, heritage languages are generally minority languages in society and are typically learned at home during childhood. When a heritage language learner grows up in an environment with a dominant language that is different from their heritage language, the learner appears to be more competent in the dominant language and often feels more comfortable speaking in that language. "Heritage language" may also be referred to as "community language", "home language", and "ancestral language".

Statistical language acquisition, a branch of developmental psycholinguistics, studies the process by which humans develop the ability to perceive, produce, comprehend, and communicate with natural language in all of its aspects through the use of general learning mechanisms operating on statistical patterns in the linguistic input. Statistical learning acquisition claims that infants' language-learning is based on pattern perception rather than an innate biological grammar. Several statistical elements such as frequency of words, frequent frames, phonotactic patterns and other regularities provide information on language structure and meaning for facilitation of language acquisition.

Syntactic bootstrapping is a theory in developmental psycholinguistics and language acquisition which proposes that children learn word meanings by recognizing syntactic categories and the structure of their language. It is proposed that children have innate knowledge of the links between syntactic and semantic categories and can use these observations to make inferences about word meaning. Learning words in one's native language can be challenging because the extralinguistic context of use does not give specific enough information about word meanings. Therefore, in addition to extralinguistic cues, conclusions about syntactic categories are made which then lead to inferences about a word's meaning. This theory aims to explain the acquisition of lexical categories such as verbs, nouns, etc. and functional categories such as case markers, determiners, etc.

Statistical learning is the ability for humans and other animals to extract statistical regularities from the world around them to learn about the environment. Although statistical learning is now thought to be a generalized learning mechanism, the phenomenon was first identified in human infant language acquisition.

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to second-language acquisition:

Prosodic bootstrapping in linguistics refers to the hypothesis that learners of a primary language (L1) use prosodic features such as pitch, tempo, rhythm, amplitude, and other auditory aspects from the speech signal as a cue to identify other properties of grammar, such as syntactic structure. Acoustically signaled prosodic units in the stream of speech may provide critical perceptual cues by which infants initially discover syntactic phrases in their language. Although these features by themselves are not enough to help infants learn the entire syntax of their native language, they provide various cues about different grammatical properties of the language, such as identifying the ordering of heads and complements in the language using stress prominence, indicating the location of phrase boundaries, and word boundaries. It is argued that prosody of a language plays an initial role in the acquisition of the first language helping children to uncover the syntax of the language, mainly due to the fact that children are sensitive to prosodic cues at a very young age.

D. Kimbrough Oller, also known as Kim Oller, is an American scientist who has contributed to the fields of the evolution of language, child phonology, speech-language pathology, and to the fields of bilingualism and second-language acquisition. He is currently Professor and Plough Chair of Excellence at the University of Memphis. He is also an external faculty member of the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research and a permanent member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the LENA Research Foundation of Boulder, Colorado. Oller was elected as a Fellow of the American Speech–Language–Hearing Association (ASHA) in 2004 and was granted the Honors of ASHA in 2013.

References

  1. ↑ Bailey, Charles-James N. (1981). "Developmental linguistics". Folia Linguistica. 15 (1–2). doi:10.1515/flin.1981.15.1-2.29. hdl: 11303/8731 . S2CID   201725493.
  2. ↑ Chomsky, Noam (1995). "Language and Nature". Mind. 104 (413): 1–61. doi:10.1093/mind/104.413.1.
  3. 1 2 McLaughlin, S. F. (2010). "Verbal behavior by B.F. Skinner: Contributions to analyzing early language learning". The Journal of Speech and Language Pathology – Applied Behavior Analysis. 5 (2): 114–131. doi:10.1037/h0100272.
  4. ↑ Singleton, David (November 2005). "The Critical Period Hypothesis: A coat of many colours". IRAL - International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching. 43 (4): 269–285. doi:10.1515/iral.2005.43.4.269. S2CID   145554744.
  5. 1 2 Kuhl, Patricia K. (September 2011). "Early Language Learning and Literacy: Neuroscience Implications for Education". Mind, Brain, and Education. 5 (3): 128–142. doi:10.1111/j.1751-228X.2011.01121.x. PMC   3164118 . PMID   21892359.
  6. 1 2 Chen, Xi; Dang, Jianwu; Yan, Han; Fang, Qiang; Kroger, Bernd J. (October 2013). "A neural understanding of speech motor learning". 2013 Asia-Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association Annual Summit and Conference. pp. 1–5. doi:10.1109/APSIPA.2013.6694364. ISBN   978-986-90006-0-4. S2CID   9071721.
  7. ↑ Çakıroğlu, Ahmet (2018). "The Language Acquisition Approaches and the Development of Literacy Skills in Children". International Electronic Journal of Elementary Education. 11 (2): 201–206. doi: 10.26822/iejee.2019248600 . S2CID   150227623.
  8. ↑ Wormith, S. J.; Pankhurst, D.; Moffitt, A. R. (1975). "Frequency Discrimination by Young Infants". Child Development. 46 (1): 272–275. doi:10.2307/1128864. JSTOR   1128864. PMID   1132277.
  9. ↑ Nazzi, Thierry; Bertoncini, Josiane; Mehler, Jacques (1998). "Language discrimination by newborns: Toward an understanding of the role of rhythm". Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance. 24 (3): 756–766. doi:10.1037/0096-1523.24.3.756. PMID   9627414.
  10. ↑ Ota, Mitsuhiko (2016). "Prosodic Phenomena: Stress, Tone, and Intonation". In Lidz, Jeffrey L; Snyder, William; Pater, Joe (eds.). The Oxford Handbook of Developmental Linguistics. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199601264.013.5. ISBN   978-0-19-960126-4.
  11. ↑ Bjørkvold, Jon-Roar (1990). "Canto—ergo sum: Musical child cultures in the United States, the Soviet Union, and Norway". In Roehmann, Franz L; Wilson, Frank R (eds.). Music and child development: the biology of music making : proceedings of the 1987 Denver conference. MMB Music. pp. 117–133. ISBN   9780918812582. OCLC   680174672.
  12. 1 2 Stansell, Jon Weatherford (14 September 2005). "The Use of Music for Learning Languages: A Review of the Literature" (PDF). S2CID   12553004.
  13. ↑ Jourdain, Robert (1997). Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy: How Music Captures Our Imagination. W. Morrow. ISBN   978-0-688-14236-0.[ page needed ]
  14. 1 2 Loewy, J. V. (1 January 1995). "The Musical Stages of Speech: A Developmental Model of Pre-Verbal Sound Making". Music Therapy. 13 (1): 47–73. doi: 10.1093/mt/13.1.47 .
  15. ↑ Riper, Charles Van; Emerick, Lon L. (1984). Speech Correction: An Introduction to Speech Pathology and Audiology. Prentice-Hall. ISBN   978-0-13-829531-8.[ page needed ]
  16. 1 2 Proctor, Adele (December 1989). "Stages of normal noncry vocal development in infancy: A protocol for assessment". Topics in Language Disorders. 10 (1): 26–42. doi:10.1097/00011363-198912000-00005. S2CID   145652582.
  17. 1 2 Garcia, Dainelys; Bagner, Daniel M.; Pruden, Shannon M.; Nichols-Lopez, Kristin (3 September 2015). "Language Production in Children With and At Risk for Delay: Mediating Role of Parenting Skills". Journal of Clinical Child & Adolescent Psychology. 44 (5): 814–825. doi:10.1080/15374416.2014.900718. PMC   4214906 . PMID   24787263.
  18. ↑ Romski, MaryAnn; Sevcik, Rose A.; Adamson, Lauren B.; Cheslock, Melissa; Smith, Ashlyn; Barker, R. Michael; Bakeman, Roger (April 2010). "Randomized Comparison of Augmented and Nonaugmented Language Interventions for Toddlers With Developmental Delays and Their Parents". Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research. 53 (2): 350–364. doi:10.1044/1092-4388(2009/08-0156). PMID   20360461.
  19. ↑ "Scope of Practice in Speech-Language Pathology". 2016. doi: 10.1044/policy.SP2016-00343 .{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  20. ↑ Reder, Fanny; Marec-Breton, Nathalie; Gombert, Jean-Emile; Demont, Elisabeth (December 2013). "Second-language learners' advantage in metalinguistic awareness: A question of languages' characteristics". British Journal of Educational Psychology. 83 (4): 686–702. doi:10.1111/bjep.12003. PMID   24175689.
  21. 1 2 3 4 Hopp, Holger; Vogelbacher, Markus; Kieseier, Teresa; Thoma, Dieter (June 2019). "Bilingual advantages in early foreign language learning: Effects of the minority and the majority language". Learning and Instruction. 61: 99–110. doi:10.1016/j.learninstruc.2019.02.001. S2CID   150440223.
  22. ↑ Eviatar, Zohar; Taha, Haitham; Shwartz, Mila (October 2018). "Metalinguistic awareness and literacy among semitic-bilingual learners: a cross-language perspective". Reading and Writing. 31 (8): 1869–1891. doi:10.1007/s11145-018-9850-9. S2CID   149509478.
  23. ↑ Oren, Ditza L. (January 1981). "Cognitive Advantages of Bilingual Children Related to Labeling Ability". The Journal of Educational Research. 74 (3): 163–169. doi:10.1080/00220671.1981.10885303.
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