Phonological Development

A Sound Beginning is an assessment of phonological awareness at four different levels: Word Level, Syllable Level, Onset-Rime Level, and Phoneme Level. Phonological awareness is the manipulation of sounds in spoken language and is an important building block for reading. The assessment is administered orally that would include the student tapping, deleting, segmenting, and blending different sounds. Felipe’s score for each level is as follows:

The basis of language development theories revolves around the idea that, either nature or nurture are more influential than the other in the development of language in children. Language development as defined by, Menyuk, is the acquisition and growth of a societies chosen method of communication, which occurs due to a culmination of cognitive growth and environmental experiences (2005). Nature, is concerned with the biological makeup of an individual that influences their ability to acquire language including, genes and brain function, alternatively, nurture is environmental factors including, culture, family, and experiences (Fellows & Oakley, 2014). Nature and nurture both play vital yet highly diverse roles in the acquisition of language and its development. Analysis of the process of language acquisition will reveal that both nature and nurture are vital for successful language development of children.

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.

Four year-olds can tell simple stories with an expressive vocabulary of 1,500 to 1,600 words (Owens, 2004). Toddlers at this age have increased mastery of consonants and can produce sentences that are four or five words long. Language transitions to a tool that is used to explore the interrogative “why?” which helps the toddler ask abstract questions and learn more about their environment. Five year-olds use more adult-like language, but aspects of their syntactic structure may be missing. Expressive vocabulary encompasses about 2,200 words by age five (Owens, 2004) and schemas for their vocabulary become more complex. Five year-olds still have difficulty with a few consonant sounds and with consonant blends, but most of the phonemes of the child’s language are fully developed. In early childhood through school-age, the child’s language development will plateau; however, the interaction with social development increases the child’s pragmatic skills, which feeds into more refined expressive and receptive language.

Language development is a huge step in a child’s life. For parents it’s a build block that shows growth within their child. When language begins to develop it allows us to finally “get to know” the child. Before language development, parents had to guess or find ways of knowing what their child wanted or needed. However, during and after language development the child is able to express what they need, and attention. For my field project I collected data by walking around my family’s farm with my nephews and my niece. The ages of my nephews and my niece are 3, 4, 5, 5, 9, and 12. During this walk I picked up telegraphic speech, holophrases, referential style, pragmatics and expressive style.

How do both nature and nurture interact in the promotion of language development in young children?

With over two hundred sounds used throughout the world, English utilizes over forty different sounds. We use these speech sounds to create a form of understand and communication. Vowels and consonants are the classifications of speech sounds while also being able to change the manner and place of articulation to produce different speech sounds. Here is where phonemes which are the smallest sound unit come into understanding and will be incorporated in detail when making connections. Based on the information we have discussed on phonology, it was detailed that preschool children aged three to four are sensitive to some phonological

The purpose of this study is to examine written language produced by typical developing children in Grades 2 through 4. The researchers examined two common academic discourse genres, narrative and expository by analyzing, microstructure and macrostructure of student writing samples. Overall, the researchers are examining the progression of linguistic elements and expository writing development in school-age children’s narratives. Speech language pathologists have a duty to analyze and assess clients who might have a writing disorder. This study applies to communication disorders because in order to know what abnormal is a therapist must study from typical language developing children. By creating baselines and normative data the therapist can then compare and contrast the client to his or her peers. This study will help both clinicians and educators understand the fundamentals of the developing writer and validate, reliable assessment methods. The study will examine microstructure and macrostructure in narrative and expository writing samples produced by elementary school students. This study extends from previous studies and will add onto the existing literature. The study looks at the development and relations among typical writers while looking at microstructure and macrostructure of a child’s writing separately in two different discourses. A total of 93 students initially recruited but by the end of the study only 89 completed the study. The four students left

The question this experiment raised was regarding vocal development in humans and the influence the actions of social partners makes on it. The objective was to determine the relationship between these socializations and vocal development by looking at infants and their caregivers. The more specific questions raised included the “social contingency” and whether it provides opportunities for vocal learning in infants, and whether infants can learn through their caregivers’ responses to the vocalizations they make. Studying infants at approximately eight months old allowed their vocal behavior to be in a transitory state where the sensitive system of acoustic variability could be examined. Having the experiment take place in the large playroom allowed the infants to move around, not feel confined, and not feel forced into interaction with their mothers, allowing it to be more comfortable and natural for the infant. First, infants were assigned to either the contingent condition or the yoked-control condition. Half of the mothers were in the contingent condition group, where they were told to react immediately after the infants made a vocalization. The other half of the mothers were in the yoked-control condition group, and were told to respond by

As human we can communicate via our speaking ability to express our feelings, as a way to deliver the message we want another. These articles that I read discuss the anatomical prerequisite for humans to gain the ability to speak such as the absent and present of the air sac in hominids. Morphological changes of the face structure such as the reduced growth of the palate and the descent of the larynx. The controversial hypotheses of the hypoglossal canal size are indicative of speech, and modern humans have a larger hypoglossal canal size compare to other hominids were examined. These are just the anatomical aspects of the possible contribution to the human speech.

From the moment we are born, our environment prepares us for this journey we call life. We learn to communicate both verbally and non-verbally. In my opinion and based on three studies, socioeconomic status, the child’s gender, the amount of language they hear from their caregivers, word mapping, and social intent all effect the child’s vocabulary size. According to Spencer, Clegg, & Stackhouse, “the links between socioeconomic disadvantage and early language development are well documented with reports of up to 50% of young children from areas of socioeconomic is advantage having language delay. According to Pasek, Golinkoff, and Hennon (2006), research states girls showed a quasi-linear positive gain in language across secondary school, while boys began with a decline and then accelerated.

Our native language consists of a set of phonemes that we learn to discriminate during language acquisition. Infants are born with perceptual sensitivity for phonemes outside of their parents’ native language, which is a result of the fact that they have not yet practiced nor learned the phonetic rules of their language. These feature detectors for phonemes that are not used during language development will atrophy and the native phoneme feature detectors are retained (Eimas, 1975). For example, in English we do not easily discriminate between the voiceless p (such as when it comes in the middle of a word like in “spit”) and aspirated p (which occurs when at the beginning of a word like in “pit”) (Harbeck, 2015). In other languages, this subtle difference actually changes the meaning of a word; Mandarin, Thai, and Hindi for example, use the voiceless and aspirated p as entirely different phonemes. Thus, we would expect a speaker of one of these languages to have a good ability to distinguish these phonemes in a task, while an English speaker may have some difficulty.

The current study looked at the phonological development of native Japanese speakers who speak English as a second language. Two subjects were given a word list of English words to read from and recorded. The recordings were then analyzed based on their divergence from English phonology. The recordings were also shown to native English speakers to rate the foreign accent of the subjects. The current study was conducted under the hypothesis that the speakers’ L1 would interfere with the phonological development in their L2, and looked at other factors such as speakers’ attitude and differences in natural ability.

linguists in the past and the present. One specific reason was to gather and compile

This history of phonological theory has been in bloom since it was generated some 150 years ago. The depth of phonological phenomena has, in actuality, been in abstract existence since the first spoken language was developed as it is a natural component of all human language. In this paper I hope to produce a clear, concise analysis and discussion of the phonological growth of language study through perception and production while introducing the criticisms and problems associated with these theories. The history of phonological theory goes farther back than phonemics, but for the sake of space and time, I will start during the beginning of the 20th century and finish with a contrastive analysis of the present theories of phonology.