This document summarizes key aspects of early language acquisition in children. It discusses pre-linguistic communication through gestures before children start using words. As children's vocabulary grows, they start combining words, first using holophrases and then two-word utterances that follow semantic roles. Grammatical categories emerge as children learn order rules and map semantic roles to syntactic positions. Both speech perception and production develop from babbling to first words to combining words. The acquisition of sign language follows similar developmental patterns to spoken language acquisition.

1. June 2021
Psycholinguistic (Early language acquisition)
Prof.Gholam Reza Abbasian By: Zahraa Khudhair & Helen Hamed
Z&H

2. Introduction
01
Pre linguistic Communication
02
Early Phonology
03
One Word at a Time
Early Grammar
Acquisition of Sign Language
04
05
06
Overview

3. Introduction
 Language Acquisition of Children = Babbling =Identify and Label Object, Ask for desire
 Very rapid advances
 Studied by Psychologists and Linguists
 Investigating individual or small groups of children over a period of years
 Comparing children of different aged
 But remain unanswered …..
 Unanswered Question (for ex.)
 Why do children acquire speech at this particular point in development?
 What role does the child’s environment play in language development?
 Do all children acquire language in the same way?
 In this chapter …Children’s development until they have mastered
the basic linguistic structured of the language

4. Pre linguistic Communication
 The social context of preverbal infants
1. Speech to children prior to birth
2. Speech to children in the first year of life
 Pre linguistic gestures
1. Development of communicative intent
2. Beginning of intentional communication
3. Communicative competence and early comprehension
 Up until the early part of infant’s second year, they use nonverbal ways to communicate
 These gestures (nonverbal ways of communication), though basic, reveal a good deal
about the infant’s understanding of how communication works
 Infant’s understanding of communication precedes and facilitates much of the child’s
acquisition of phonology, syntax, and semantics

5.  The Social Context of Preverbal Infants
 Speech to Children Prior to Birth
 Read a book aloud during the last 6weeks of pregnancies
(De Casper and Spence, 1986)
 Modified baby’s sucking rate
 infants had heard and retained the stories presented to them in utero.
 The infants also prefer their mother’s voices to those of strangers.
(De Casper & Fifer, 1980)
 Newborns are prepared to perceive speech at birth
 Speech to Children in the First Year of Life
 Baby talk (motherese)
 Higher in pitch, more variable in pitch, more exaggerated in its
intonational contours than adult-directed speech
= get and maintain the attention of infants
 Infants prefer to listen to baby talk than adult talk(Fernald and kuhl, 1987)
Pre linguistic Communication

6.  Pre linguistic gestures
1. Development of communicative intent
 Gestures
 Around 8 months of age
 Piaget’s stage 3, 4 (series of stages of cognitive development in the first 2
year of life)
 Piaget’s stage 3 (about 4 to 5 months): Children show little
understanding of goal-direct behavior.
 If a child is given a rattle, shakes it, and enjoys the sound, he may
continue to shake the rattle.
 8 months = more purposeful in behavior.
 Just individual goal
2. Beginning of Intentional Communication
 Assertions and Requests (Bates, Camaioni and Volterra, 1975)
 Uses objects to gain adults’ attention and to communicate
 More insistent about a response
 The transition to speech acts can then be viewed as learning how to do
with words what already has been don without words.
Pre linguistic Communication

7.  Pre linguistic gestures
1. Development of communicative intent
 Gestures
 Around 8 months of age
 Piaget’s stage 3, 4 (series of stages of cognitive development in
 the first 2 year of life)
 Piaget’s stage 3 (about 4 to 5 months): Children show little
understanding of goal-direct behavior.
 If a child is given a rattle, shakes it, and enjoys the sound, he may
continue to shake the rattle.
 8 months = more purposeful in behavior.
 Just individual goal
Pre linguistic Communication

8.  Pre linguistic gestures
2. Beginning of Intentional Communication
 Assertions and Requests (Bates, Camaioni and Volterra, 1975)
 Uses objects to gain adults’ attention and to communicate
 More insistent about a response
 The transition to speech acts can then be viewed as learning how to do
with words what already has been don without words.
3. Communicative Competence And Early Comprehension
 Infants use communicatively based strategies for comprehension prior to
developing full mastery of the various structures of their language.
 Infants respond to complex speech by using a simple, action-based
comprehension strategy (Shats, 1978)
o “Put the dog in the car” 70%
o “Do you want to put the dog in the car?” 64%
–intentions = comprehension = production
Pre linguistic Communication

9. Early phonology
 The development of speech perception
1. Categorical perception in infancy
2. The role of language experience
3. The role of prosodic factors
 The development of speech
production
1. Babbling
2. Transition to speech
3. Phonological processes
in early words

10.  The Development of Speech Perception
1. Categorical Perception in Infancy
 How infants perceive speech categorically?
 VOT (voice onset time)
/b/ : ~ 25 millisecond
/p/ : 25~ millisecond
 Infants are born with perceptual mechanisms that are
attuned to speech categories (Elimas, at al., 1971)
Early phonology

11. The development of speech perception
2. The Role of Language Experience
 Infant’s ability to perceive phonemic distinction from other
languages declines in strength during the first year of life.
(Werker, Gilbert, Humphrey, 1981)
 Infants in the oldest group (10 to 12 month) showed essentially
no ability to perceive phonemic contrasts.
 The ability to isolate words
 Use statistical information, generalized and extract rule(Marcus,
Vijayan, at al., (1999)
 These abilities are important to acquire the lexicon..
Early phonology

12.  The development of speech perception.
3. The Role of Prosodic Factors
 Infants also perceive prosodic factors.
 Prosodic factor + statistical factor + extract rules
= segmentation and reconstruction = production of speech
 The Development of Speech Production
1. Babbling
 Reduplicated babbling (6 ~ 7 months)“bababababa”
 Variegated babbling (11 ~ 12 months)“bigobabu”
 They are practiced and mastered before they are used in
communicative ways
Early phonology

13.  Development of Speech Production
2.Transition to speech
 Idiomorphs
 “ca ca ”= milk
 Idiomorphs indicate that children’s language is creative.
 Children have learned that it is important to be consistent when referring to
objects.
3. Phonological Processes in Early Words
 Reduction, Coalescence, Assimilation, Reduplication
(L. Bloom and M. Lahey, 1978)
 Systematically
 Child cannot discriminate between the sounds that are confused.
Early Phonology

15. One Word at a Time
Lexical
Development
Early Words
 Concrete aspects of their environment
- Nominals (ex. Name of toy) - Action words (ex. Up, go)
- Modifiers (ex. Dirty) -- Personal and social words (ex. Please)
- Function words (ex. What) ( Nelson, 1973)
01
Fast mappingOlive vs Blue = Chromium vs Blue (3-4 years old)
“Get me the chromium tray, not the blue tray, the chromium one.”
02
Overextensions and Underextensions
 Overextensions Ex. Four legged animals dog
 Underextensions Ex. Shoes mother’s shoes
 Their conceptual categories may actually differ from those of
adults.Attempt at humor(?)
03
The Role of Adult Speech
 Original word game
 A role of adult about infant’s learning of words
 Parts? Whole?
 Promoting infant’s lexical development.
04

16.  Approaches to Holophrases
 Use single words to express larger chunks of meaning
that mature speakers would express in a phrase or
sentence.
 Holophrases with gestures appear to be precursors of
multiword utterances.
 It is not clear what grammatical knowledge children
have at the holophrastic stage.
• One Word at a Time
• Holophrases

17. Measures of Syntactic Growth
Early Grammar

18.  Emergence of Grammatical Categories
 The Structure of Early Utterances
 The two-word utterances the child says are neither
simple imitations of adult utterances nor random
combinations of the words he knows.
 Rather, they follow from the system that the child is
using to express meanings at that time.(Sachs, 1976)
 Children tend to combine content words and
leave out function words.
 Children put particular words are put in particular
position in the sentence (Braine, 1976)
Early Grammar

19.  Emergence of Grammatical Categories
 Interpretations of Early Multiword Utterances
 Syntactic description
 Not fit children’s utterances, at least not in the
earliest stages.
 Semantic description
 Agent, object, action,
 Positional description
Ex. “want” plus desired entity
(“want car”, “want truck”)
Early Grammar

20. Early Grammar

21.  Emergence of Grammatical Categories
 Acquiring Grammatical Categories
 Semantic bootstrapping
 Children launch their syntactic careers by learning
simple order rules for combining words which in their
understanding perform semantic functions such as
agent, action, and object acted upon, or perhaps other
even less abstract semantic function.
 Induce grammatical concepts from the semantic-
positional configurations.
 Like – fond liked – was fond
Early Grammar

22.  Comprehension and Production
 Comprehension prior production
 Individual Differences
 Referential strategy (Naming Object)
 Part = > whole
 Expressive Strategy (Social Interaction)
 Whole => part
 Merge!!!
Early Grammar

23.  Although ASL differs from English in
linguistic features such as iconicity and
morphological structure, there are
more similarities than differences in
the early stages of acquisition of ASL
and English.
 The primary difference is that infants
acquire their first signs 2 to 3 months
earlier than infants typically acquire
their first words.
Acquisition of Sign
Language

24. We hope the successful in your practical &scientific life , with God willing
Your friends Zahra k. & Helen H