Language Development : An Example Of Telegraphic Speech

“Oral language is a skill that is acquired naturally by the young. The importance of its development in early childhood cannot be overemphasised. It underpins the whole scope of learning and is employed to question, to seek information and to proffer ideas. A child who has a well – grounded ability in oral language will usually be nicely poised to cope with reading and writing. Anyone who lacks this will be at a disadvantage.” (J.Fellowes & G.Oakley, 2010, pp4) It is a vital component of every human beings life as it is a means of communication and interaction with their family, friends and

The child’s response affects the way they will continue to communicate. When the child starts putting meaning to the words that is being said Semantics comes into play. This directs them to believe nurture is the dominant role in children’s language development.

Nature and nurture both play a significant role in language development. Language development refers to how children understand, organise, speak and use words in order to communicate at an effective, age-appropriate level (Karen Kearns, 2013, P.105). For centuries, theorists have been debating the roles of nature versus nurture. Although, each child’s language will develop at their own pace and there will be many individual differences based on culture, ethnicity, health and ability. As well as physical, social, emotional and cognitive development in which will contribute to a child’s language development.

Uses key essential words but misses out connecting words (telegraphic speech). Develops an awareness of number names through rhymes and songs that relate to numbers. May say some counting words randomly. Attempt, sometimes successfully, to fit shapes into spaces such as jigsaw puzzles.

It can be quite normal for children between 2 and 5 years of age to hesitate or repeat words and phrases due to the fast rate at which they are learning language.  Most children grow out of this but you can help by:

* Speech is vocalised language; it cannot be written or signed. Different children progress with speech in different ways and different stages. Sometimes speech can be slurred or not pronounced in the correct manner.

At the age of 9months child starts saying simple words like

An 18 month-old child can use approximately 50 words and compare to 24 month-old child having approximately 200 words (Balakas & Murray, 2013). It is found that toddlers have a better understanding of language and have the ability to follow directions than expressing words for themselves

The communication with your child starts way before the youngster can speak. From their cry, smile, and the responses they give you to help you understand his or her needs. Language developments have different stages that children pass through to assist them in the development of speech and languages. There are a plethora of factors which can inhabitants’ a child language development. However, these are amongst the top causes for language development such as a child’s inborn ability to learn language and the language the child hears.

Parental observation helped a great deal in compiling the information as it acted like a progress report where I could monitor how the child’s language developed over a short period of time. As this research was built on the cross-sectional design, parental observations were very useful. The need to get the subject accustomed to the observer and other problems that crop up were avoided by using the parent, a familiar person as the observer.

Throughout a child’s early stages of life, language is used primarily for communicating with parents in order to get what they need. From as early as birth babies communicate through crying in order to tell parents what they want. Parents soon learn to distinguish between the hungry cry, the wet/dirty cry and the tired cry. According to Halliday, 1975, children begin to learn their first language from between six – eighteen months old. He believes children are learning a ‘system of meanings’. He looks at language from a functional point of view and suggests there are seven functions that language serves for young children. The first four of these functions ensure that social, emotional and physical needs are catered to, they are called, Instrumental, Regulatory, Interactional and Personal. Instrumental refers to a child using language to ensure they get what they need or want. The Regulatory function tells others what to do in order to control their behaviour. The Interactional function relates to the use of language in order to interact with the people around the child particularly those seen as important such as parents and siblings or close friends. The personal function relates to how the child uses language to explain feelings, and their own identity. The other three functions are used as children become older and want to know more about the world, tell stories and pass on information.

Isn’t it amazing that a baby starts to learn language before birth? Newborns are actively developing language skills, yet they cannot talk fluently at the very beginning. Adults are unintentionally communicating with babies in a different way than they talk to other adults. People tend to talk to babies using simple and repetitive words, and exaggerated tones. This term is being called as child-directed speech. We can always see an adult talks to baby in this way. For instance, parents tell the kid “you are great” in a lighter voice, use simple words, increased tone. Moreover, all babies do babbling, even babies with listening problems. Babbling is when a baby says repetitive syllabus, and most likely, no one could understand except the baby herself. Bubbling is a must-have experience for all infants to stimulate language skills, so that they can develop normally.

The article For the Love of Language by Geoffrey Cowley was published by Your Child's First Steps on October 2000. The author focuses on the importance of language and how children develop their language skills. Cowley states that the journey towards language starts in the womb and that babbling is the first step towards fluent speaking. Children also start associating names with objects around age one and children around two years old start to connect noun phrases with verb phrases. And lastly, children around seven months do not just seek out associations between words, but also extract principles governing word order. Cowley also uses terms like cochlear implant, mimicry, simple conditioning, operant conditioning, and specific language impairment (SLI).

From a baby 's first word to their first complete sentence, there 's a lot to debate with their language development. The average child has a vocabulary of up to six-thousand words by the time they turn five years old (Brighthubcom, 2016). Language development is one of the most critical roles for an educator in both early childhood and primary settings. It is this ability of language development that is particularly interesting in the nature vs nurture debate. In order for educators to provide effective communication, it is important that they have the knowledge and understanding of the four key concepts of language, such as phonological, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic development and the underlying theoretical perspectives that explain the processes of language acquisition and development.

Then, cooing appears when the child is between six to eight weeks old, where the infant demonstrates happy vowel like sounds (Hoff, 2006). At age sixteen weeks infants begin to demonstrate laughter and vocal play (Hoff, 2006). Between six and nine month old babies begin to produce babbling sounds, then they utter their first word around age one (Hoff, 2006). When children speak their first word it is usually as an isolated unit (Goldin-Meadow, 2006), and not considered a major step in phonological development (Hoff, 2006). Children then learn that their first spoken word is composed of smaller parts, which is known as morphology, and that the word can be used as a building block for larger sentences called syntax (Goldin-Meadow, 2006). A child’s first word goes farther then communicating a message between the child and communicative partner, the word retains symbolic meaning (Goldin-Meadow, 2006). At age eighteen months phonological processes develop, in which the child’s speech characteristics begin to transform (Hoff, 2006). Subsequent to eighteen months the child’s vocabulary grows and with this growth the child is able to phonemically represent a sound with the mental representation of every word that possesses a sound (Hoff, 2006).