2. BACKGROUND
Communication is the activity of conveying meaningful information.
Communication requires that the communicating parties share an area of
communicative commonality. The communication process is complete once the
receiver has understood the message of the sender.
Language is thought to have originated when early hominids first started
cooperating, adapting earlier systems of communication based on expressive signs
to include a theory of other minds and shared intentionality. The word "language"
can also be used to describe the set of rules that makes this possible, or the set of
utterances that can be produced from those rules.
Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the psychological and
neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend and
produce language. Psycholinguistics covers the cognitive processes that make it
possible to generate a grammatical and meaningful sentence out of vocabulary and
grammatical structures, as well as the processes that make it possible to understand
utterances, words, text, etc. Developmental psycholinguistics studies children's
ability to learn language.
3. FIRST WORD
• First words as been reported a appearing in normal children from as
young as 4 months to as old as 18 months, or even older. On the
average, it would seem that children utter their first word around the
age of 10 months.
• Children starting their first words from one utterances and then two
and three utterances. A single word can be used to name an object,
requesting something, emphasize actions and expressing complex
situations.
• I order for a child to learn the meaning of the sound form of a word,
the child must first hear that word spoken by others. At the same
time that the word is spoken some relevant environmental
experience must occur. These being the necessary conditions for
learning, it is clear that the child must learn to understand speech
before he or she is able to produce it. It is necessarily the case that
speech understanding precedes speech productions. Speech
production, therefore, dependent on speech understanding and its
development follows that of speech understanding.
4. BIRTH OF GRAMMAR
Babies start to learn grammar right from the moment
they’re born, finds new research. A study has discovered
that babies learn grammar from word patterns listened to in
the first year of life. In 1861, historical linguist Max Müller
published a list of speculative theories concerning the
origins of spoken language:
o Bow-wow
o Pooh-pooh
o Ding-dong
o Yo-he-ho
o Ta-ta
5. CHILDISH CREATIVITY
1. A child’s linguistic environment determines it’s mother tongue.
2. Children's’ attempts to construct, or reconstruct, their mother tongue is a
type of cognitive processing or tuning which usually shows that the child
has developed to a slightly more advanced linguistic stage of language
development .
3. Example 1: Daughter: Somebody’s at the door. Mother: There is nobody at
the door. Daughter: There is yes body at the door (from P. Reich. 1986.
Language Development. Prentice-Hall, page 142)
4. Creative construction process - another example of how the relative
autonomy of the child’s developing linguistic system is related to the adult
version of the language. Children = well-programmed computers.
5. Children are not only active and creative participants in acquiring their
mother tongue; even their ‘errors’ reveal that they are incredibly sensitive
to the small and usually unobvious but inherent grammatical characteristics
of the language they learn.
6. STAGES OF LINGUISTIC DEVELOPMENT
• Stage 1: the one word stage, or holophrase stage, around the
age of a year. Eg.: milk =I want milk.
• Stage 2: two-word stage, near the second birthday. Eg.:
baby car (pointing to a toy car, meaning: This is the baby’s
car. Similarly: baby dress, no shoe, no wash.
• Stage 3: developing stage, or the telegram stage, between
two and a half and three years old. Eg: Put doll table, There
Mommy shoe.
• Stage 4: near-adult grammar, between three and five years
of age. Eg.: I see you sit down, I show you the ball I got.
• Stage 5: full competence, by late childhood. Eg.: near native
syntactic devices, sufficient performance skills to
understand and produce ordinary language.
7. Conclusion
In the early phases, language behavior is very
closely related to the satisfaction of the immediate
physiological needs and wants to child, but as he
matures, this relation may become increasingly
indirect, in pace with his growing curiosity about
the nature of his complex environment and its
meaning for him, and also in pace with the
widening of his circle of relationships with other
people. Toward the end of the second year of life
the normal child starts an intense use of language
explore his relations with people and things.
