How Adults Talk to Children and Whether It Influences Their Language Development - Essay Example

How adults talk to children and whether it influences their language development Communication and language abilities are central to most definitionsof human intelligence. The fundamental role of these abilities in social and cognitive functioning is abundantly clear when they fail to develop as expected or are impaired due to accident, disease, heredity, teratogens, or impoverished input. Delayed or deviant language and communication development are implicit in our definitions of mental retardation and autism. Early communication and language problems are often implicated as contributing factors in later appearing learning disabilities and behavior disorders. Communication- and language -related disorders affect several million children in the United States and are the single most common reason for special education referral. The purpose of this paper is to explore the children's language acquisition and define whether there is connection between children's progress to learn the language and adults' talks with children. Word learning begins in the early months of the second year (and to some extent for some children the latter months of the first year), but extends to the problems of building vocabulary during the school years and indeed throughout life. These problems, widely separated in time, are not, however, broadly different. Although the developmental status of the child changes radically over this period, the problem of the acquisition of word meaning remains similar. How the problem is addressed and solved, and what resources and strategies are brought to bear on it, are what varies psychologically as the child gains greater experience with the language. Meaning acquisition is set up and proceeds in phases that overlap with biologically organized pre-speech and speech acquisition processes. These can be roughly outlined in terms of the four components signified as SSSS. The first two terms are well specified in contemporary developmental theory as basic to language acquisition, and therefore, important as they are, they will be very briefly considered here. The most basic aspect of the SSSS is that the child is born into and grows within an interpreted social world, where the things and events of the world as well as its people are arranged by and are interpreted by adults in speech to children beginning virtually at birth. For example, what and when the child eats, when and where the child sleeps are as subject to social-cultural norms as are the songs and stories that are told, read, and sung. Infants preferentially attend to social stimuli, and those who are deprived of social companionship and comfort suffer both cognitively and emotionally. Parents (in our society) tend to treat their children as social partners and conversationalists almost from birth, and children respond with attentive looks, gurgles, smiles, in rhythmic interaction with parental child-directed talk. This practice is presumably as important to the child's entering into meaningful communicative exchanges as is the pre-speech pattern extraction that has been demonstrated recently (Morgan & Demuth, 1996). However, it must be noted that in cultures where mothers do not engage in these practices children may need to extract patterns of conversation from those of adults and children talking together in groups. It is important from the perspective of a social orientation to language development, and from the perspective of experiential semantics, that our theories are universal in the sense that they may apply to varying cultural and social conditions. Thus we recognize that all children live in and experience social environments where talking is part of the milieu, without insisting that the particulars of any social world must be constrained to meet theoretical a priori specifications based on our own social practices. By the last half of the first year the child begins to take part in a new interaction pattern, sharing attention to objects with another by following the other's gaze or point, responding to the other's emotional reaction to an event, and imitating another's object-directed actions. This level ofsecondaq intersubjectivity (Tomasello, 1998) sets the stage for the pairing of speech and object that begins to bring the child into the sharing of words and things at the end of the first year and the beginning of the second. The first speech forms that the child recognizes and responds to, and that she attempts to produce, are usually simple associates of objects or situations. These "words" may be used in a way similar to a point, for sharing reference to objects or events (such as "bath"), or to an aspect of a situation (as in the use of "bye-bye" in the context of departure). There is an important distinction between the use of words in specific contexts or for specific objects, and their shared use (both receptive and expressive) for any object of that kind in varied situational contexts. The first use may be communicative in the same sense that a point is (indicative of shared attention), but such use of a word or gesture rather than a point does not yet constitute a symbol. By the end of the first year many children are quite attuned to the use of specific forms-words or phrases-in specific contexts for specific uses. Such attunement has been observed both informally and systematically in prior research. More recent research (Schafer & Plunkett, 1998) has demonstrated that infants of about 12 to 18 months can form specific word-image associations after a few trials in a laboratory, as measured by increased looking to the specific picture paired with the specific speech form. These studies have systematically demonstrated processes of attention to and analysis of speech and its patterns and correlations with the visual array in the latter part of the first year and the first part of the second. However, the leap from this point into meaningful language requires on the part of the child the integration of these pre-speech skills with pre-speech communicative patterns and conceptual knowledge. There is a pervasive temptation to take precursor behaviors-such as the assocation of words with objects-as representing underlying competence relevant to more complex achievements, but this obscures the long slow process of development that is necessary for the full flowering of a system of knowledge or skill. Fischer and Bidell (1991) warned about the pitfalls of this kind of leap in a well-articulated chapter presented first at a previous Piaget Society Symposium. The task for developmental psychologists is to track the emergence of the system over time, in this case the symbolic system, and to understand the processes by which it is constructed. Precursors should be recognized as such and not taken as indicators of some hitherto unrecognized competence. Decades of research in and out of laboratories, homes, and playrooms have documented that integration of pre-speech skills, speech patterns, and conceptual knowledge follows diverse developmental pathways into a fully realized symbolic system that is not achieved until the late preschool years. Everybody wants that children experienced highly responsive environments for as much time as possible from infancy onward. By responsivity it is meant the style of dyadic interaction in which the child regularly experiences a wide range of natural teaching devices such as expansions; models; growth recasts; use of concrete, simplified vocabulary; talk about objects and events the child is attending to; and so forth, all finely tuned to the child's comprehension level. This style of interaction, termed as "parentese" or "motherese," appears to aid the acquisition of linguistic and communicative competence in most children and may be even more important for children with developmental disorders and delays. It works its magic cumulatively as the child experiences its effects hour-by-hour, day-by-day, year-by-year. Parents and caretakers in most parts of the world modify their speech when talking to young children, one example of how people in general use several "registers" in different social settings. Speech to children is slower, shorter, in some ways (but not all) simpler, higher-pitched, more exaggerated in intonation, more fluent and grammatically well-formed, and more directed in content to the present situation, compared to speech among adults. Many parents also expand their children's utterances into full sentences, or offer sequences of paraphrases of a given sentence. One should not, though, consider this speech register to be a set of "language lessons." Though mother's speech may seem simple at first glance, in many ways it is not. Another reason why Motherese is an important set of language lessons is that children whose mothers use Motherese more consistently don't pass through the milestones of language development any faster (Newport, et al, 2001). Furthermore, there are some communities with radically different ideas about children's proper place in society. In some societies, for example, people tacitly assume that that children aren't worth speaking to, and don't have anything to say that is worth listening to. Such children learn to speak by overhearing streams of adult-to-adult speech. In some communities in New Guinea, mothers consciously try to teach their children language, but not in the style familiar to us, of talking to them indulgently. Rather, they wait until a third party is present, and coach the child as to the proper, adult-like sentences they should use. Nonetheless, those children, like all children, grow up to be fluent language speakers. It surely must help children when their parents speak slowly, clearly, and succinctly to them, but their success at learning can't be explained by any special grammar-unveiling properties of parental baby-talk. Parental speech is not a string of printed words on a ticker-tape, nor is it in a monotone like science-fiction robots. Normal human speech has a pattern of melody, timing, and stress called prosody. And motherese directed to young infants has a characteristic, exaggerated prosody of its own: a rise and fall contour for approving, a set of sharp staccato bursts for prohibiting, a rise pattern for directing attention, and smooth, low legato murmurs for comforting. Fernald (2002) has shown that these patterns are very widespread across language communities, and may be universal. The melodies seem to attract the child's attention, mark the sounds as speech as opposed to stomach growlings or other noises, and might distinguish statements, questions, and imperatives, delineate major sentence boundaries, and highlight new words. When given a choice, babies prefer to listen to speech with these properties than to speech intended for adults. Communication and language play central roles in human development and behavior across the life span. This broad, pivotal role suggests that anything beyond the most simplistic, narrow intervention will benefit from a transdisciplinary perspective on the part of researchers and practitioners. However, the inherent complexity and ubiquity of language and communication has tended to encourage conceptual and clinical fragmentation instead (Warren & Reichle, 1992). Hence, in practice "turf" tensions and clashes are all too common. Communication and language skills are learned and used in meaningful, ordinary day-to-day contexts such as the home and classroom. Whose turf is this Who is responsible for a child's communication and language development The answer is obvious--almost everybody! At the very least the list includes early childhood educators, parents, speech- language pathologists, and whoever else is directly invested in the development of the child. Logic and research suggest that the most effective intervention will involve a conspiracy by all responsible parties to provide the most responsive and developmentally progressive learning environment possible for as many of the child's waking hours as possible. Thus, the road to further progress will require a far more transdisciplinary approach than is evident in common practice at present. The continued movement away from "pull-out" models of intervention and into homes and inclusive classrooms presents its own set of challenges (e.g., McWilliam, 1996). Two particularly critical questions concern how the fidelity of specific intervention practices can be maintained and how sufficient intervention intensity can be ensured. These concerns are far from trivial. Nevertheless, I believe that curriculum approaches such as activity-based instruction (Bricker, Pretti-Frontczak, & McComas, 1998) can provide the type of classroom structure that supports the embedded, appropriately intensive use of naturalistic communication approaches such as milieu teaching and responsive interaction. Moving toward inclusive, transdisciplinary approaches does not mean that we should abandon the use of direct instruction in the form of short, intensive applications targeted on specific skills. Abundant research indicates that direct instruction approaches characterized by the use of specific prompts and reinforcement, rapid mass trial instruction, and frequent direct assessment of learning can be efficient and effective strategies for teaching advanced language skills (e.g., grammatical morphemes) to young children. The emerging developmental model of language intervention recognizes the effectiveness of direct instruction as a means of teaching a range of higher-level skills. Likewise, making sure that a child with a communication and language delay receives some daily one-on-one or small group intervention in the classroom may assure that sufficient intensity is maintained and optimal results achieved. In conclusion I would like to say that the topic of language acquisition implicate the most profound questions about our understanding of the human mind, and its subject matter, the speech of children, is endlessly fascinating. But the attempt to understand it scientifically is guaranteed to bring on a certain degree of frustration. Languages are complex combinations of elegant principles and historical accidents. We cannot design new ones with independent properties; we are stuck with the confounded ones entrenched in communities. Children, too, were not designed for the benefit of psychologists: their cognitive, social, perceptual, and motor skills are all developing at the same time as their linguistic systems are maturing and their knowledge of a particular language is increasing, and none of their behavior reflects one of these components acting in isolation. Given these problems, it may be surprising that we have learned anything about language acquisition at all, but we have. When we have, I believe, it is only because a diverse set of conceptual and methodological tools has been used to trap the elusive answers to our questions: neurobiology, ethology, linguistic theory, naturalistic and experimental child psychology, cognitive psychology, philosophy of induction, theoretical and applied computer science. Language acquisition, then, is one of the best examples of the indispensability of the multidisciplinary approach called cognitive science. BIBLIOGRAPHY: 1. Bricker, D., Pretti-Frontczak, K., & McComas, N. (1998). An activity-based approach to early intervention (2nd ed.). Baltimore: Brookes. 2. Fernald, A., & McRoberts, G. (2002) Prosodic bootstrapping: A critical analysis of the argument and the evidence. In J. L. Morgan & K. Demuth, Eds. Signal to syntax. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. 3. Fischer, K. W., 8: Bidell, T. (1991). Constralnmg nativist inferences about cognitive capaclties. In S. Carey 8: R. Gelnlan (Eds. ), The epigenesis of mind: Essays on biology and cognition (pp. 199-236). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 4. Morgan, J. L., & Demuth, K. (Eds. ). (1996). Signal to syntax: Bootstrapping from speech grammar in early acquisition. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 5. Newport, E., Gleitman, H. & Gleitman, E. (2001) Mother I'd rather do it myself: Some effects and non-effects of maternal speech style. In C. E. Snow and C. A. Ferguson (eds.), Talking to Children: Language Input and Acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 6. Schafer, G., & Plunkett, K. (1998). Rapid word learning by fifteen-month-olds under tightly controlled conditions. Child Developmental, 69, 309-320. 7. Tomasello, M. (1 998). The return of constnlctions. Journal of Child Language, 25,43 1-442. Read More