This document discusses the development of language in children from birth through early word acquisition. It covers: - How infants begin communicating nonverbally through gestures and vocalizations like cooing and babbling before learning words. - The earliest receptive language skills in infants include speech perception and recognition of sounds and words in speech by 2 months of age. - Productive language emerges through babbling, which resembles early meaningful words and aids linguistic development. - Children's vocabularies grow rapidly around 18 months through "naming explosions" and they learn constraints to identify new words. Common early words include objects but other word types are also learned.

1. Natural and Hallmark of
Language Development

2. Language serves a variety of purposes for the
developing child. It facilitates interpersonal
communication, helps organize thinking, and aids in
learning. The development of communicative
competence is an important part of children's language
learning.
Language…

3. The traditional learning view holds that language
development depends upon the principle of
reinforcement.

4. From the point of view of other
learning theorist however primarily is
learned through imitation.

5. THE ANTECEDENTS OF LANGUAGE
DEVELOPMENT
Not by Word Alone: Preverbal Communication
Infants acquire early training in the give and take of conversation
through "pseudo-dialogues" with their parents, and by the time
they are 1 year old, they are highly skilled at nonverbal
communication.
Using protodeclaratives and protoimperatives, young children
can make statements about things and get other people to do
things for them.

6. • Early Language Comprehension
Infants' capacity for receptive language
begins as early as the first month of life, as
demonstrated in their categorical speech
perception,
-the ability to discriminate among
consonant sounds as well as their ability
to recognize some vowel sounds by the
age of 2 months.

7. • Some evidence indicates that
infants may be able to segment
speech and to recognize words in
the context of ongoing speech
earlier than we had thought.

8. Babbling and Other Early Sounds
• Precursors to productive language
include cooing, babbling, and patterned
speech.
• Babbling occurs in many cultures, and the
babbling of deaf babies is very similar to
that of hearing infants.
• Babbling has also been shown to resemble
a child's first meaningful words, a finding
that suggests its importance in the
development of linguistic skills.

9. SEMANTIC DEVELOPMENT: THE
POWER OF WORDS
How Children Acquire Words
• Children's acquisition of vocabulary
proceeds in bursts, the first of these
occurring at about a year and a half
in the naming explosion.

10. • Other aids to rapid learning of new
words include a number of constraints
that allow children to make certain
narrowing judgments about a new
word, such as that it refers only to an
object or that it is entirely different
from other words they already know.

11. What Kinds of Words Do Children
Learn First??
• Children may learn object or naming
words first, although some research
has suggested that such words make
up only a third of early vocabularies.

12. Errors in Early Word Use
• A common error is that
of overextension, in which a child
uses a single word to mean many
different things. In underextension,
a child may restrict a word to only
one representative of a category.