“Talking to children has always been fundamental to language development, but new research reveals that the way we talk to children is key to building their ability to understand and create sentences of their own. The exaggerated speech we naturally use with young children is a special register – often called ‘motherese’” (Medical Xpress , 2011). Moreover, child-directed speech (CDS) plays an important role in language acquisition because while modifying and adjusting speech to a child, this keeps their attention and meets the needs of providing understanding to the young addressee.
Child-directed speech (CDS), also referred to as infant-directed speech (IDS) or motherese is a speech register that is characterized by pitch and intonation, slower speech rates with pauses in between words, shorter simple sentences and frequent repetition (O’Brien, 2017). Moreover, the role child-directed speech (CDS) plays in language acquisition is that it modifies and adjusts speech directed to children and keeps their attention as well as meets the needs of providing understanding to the young addressee (Clarke, p. 45).
This paper will examine the cultural variations embedded in child-directed speech (CDS) and how the characteristics of child-directed speech (CDS) differ cross-culturally. Specifically, this essay will show evidence of cultural variation from several case studies by focusing on the differences and similarities in prosodic characteristics within child-directed speech (CDS)
The article’s purpose was to provide normative data for phonological development of British-English speaking children. The article focused on two aspects of speech development: the age of acquisition of sounds such a phonetic acquisition and the age in which error patterns stopped. In addition, this article discussed the effects that age, socioeconomic status and gender may have on speech sound development. The authors hypothesized that girls would display higher levels of phonological accuracy as compared to boys and that children from higher socio-economic families would have higher levels of phonological skills than children from low socio-economic families. It was also hypothesized that phonological skills should develop with age, that
During late infancy stage, an infant’s abilities to process, understand and produce language is important and begins as soon as the child is born. Infants recognize sounds in their environment, such as a mother’s voice. Infants also become aware of their native language, those babbling sounds become clear. “Ma-ma” or Da-da is usually heard and is often repeated. Babbling sounds may not refer to anything specific, “Ma-ma” can be signified as
They consider a child’s daily routine and activities highly influence an important role in their language development. Their theories focus on exploring how children socially interact within environments. They explain how children start to explore how language and communication works by inevitably adapting themselves to environments (Orfano F, 2015). This process confirms children are socially persuaded to be pragmatic. Depending on the context of the situation children listen to sounds and look at symbols movements and expressions from things around them. It acknowledges the importance of the environment in that it purports that children learn language as a result of communicative needs, in social contexts, and with social support. This evidence persuades them to deem nurture as the dominant
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.
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.
Three practices that support the language development of all children is that of “communicating and Sharing” (Lally, 2006, p.32) in which a caregiver is observant of the infant and follows the infant's cues in that “Babies show us from the beginning that soothing words and lullabies can calm them.” (Lally, 2006, p.32) thus forming a bond of communicating what the infant's emotions are and sharing them in their reaction to a caregiver.
Fallows begins her article by recounting a walk she took with her grandson, immediately making herself both relatable and personally involved in the subject matter. She explains how she noticed all of the other parents using their phones rather than interacting with their babies. Due to the fact that Fallows is a linguist, she began to wonder about the impact that interacting with your phone rather than your child has on their speech development. Once she began to research the subject she found a study published in the Pediatrics journal and two studies published in the
The topic for today’s reading was, Behavioral Language Assessment: Part 2 (VB-MAPP). In one of the assigned readings, Assessing Your Child, we read how most speech pathologists look at language as either expressive or receptive, and that talking is a learned behavior controlled by environmental variables such as motivation, reinforcement, and antecedent stimuli. As we talk, we receive some sort of acknowledgement for our speech and this is how language begins to take shape in typically developing babies. Speech pathologist call expressive language to what is known as the four primary verbal operant (the mand, tact, echoic, and interverbal), and receptive language to the nonverbal operant (imitation, and visual performance).
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.
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.
After the first couple of months, infants become more interactive with their surroundings. They are very curious and have the desire to get in touch with the world. In order to engage in such activity, they begin by utilizing their sense of touch by placing numerous objects in their mouth. In the upcoming months, infants start to use different senses such as hearing and sight to get in touch with their surroundings. Before they are even able to speak, their caregivers speak to them in differentiated speech and vocalizations as opposed to adults. The intonation and rhythm in the adult’s voice is usually different around young children, causing them to be able to get their attention. Over the years, speech language pathologists have conducted a large number of studies where it demonstrates children’s’ fascination with speech generated by humans. Levi, as summarized by the ASHA leader, conducted a study where the children successfully recited words after distinguishing the familiar and unfamiliar voices of the speakers.
When you are sensitive to your childs' level of conversation and support that level with your responsive language, your child will feel comfortable about talking with you and will develop her language skills to the maximum of her ability. She will also find it easier to communicate - to listen, to understand and to respond. All of this will build her language on a day to day basis while establishing a positive and nurturing
At 18 months, the virtual child had over 50 words at her command that she was able to use to make two-word sentences such as “Mama up” and “Doggie outside.” In their effort to further encourage the child’s development of her language skills, the parents applied B.F. Skinner’s operant conditioning theory (Berk, 2012). They would respond, using slightly longer sentences such as “Yes, the doggie is outside” before introducing descriptive and useful new words. The parents would encourage imitation and respond with positive reinforcement, which would further enthuse the child to develop her language skills (Berk, 2012). When the child was 2 years old, the parents would converse with the child at any given opportunity and would read books of her choice which further influenced her language development. Research has found that when mothers are more responsive during the first few years of a child’s life enable their children to achieve language development milestones at an earlier stage than children whose mothers were less responsive (Leigh, Nathans & Nievar, 2011). The mother had a more influential role in the virtual child’s language development as she would allow the child to explore the surrounding environment through daily walks and teach the child new words as they did. It was due to parental involvement and an encouraging, safe environment, the virtual child developed her language skills not only due to influence but to a desire to learn new
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.
However, Pinker (1994) then goes onto note that the particular sub-stage of reduplicated babbling occurs around 7-8 months, and states that the children will exercise phonemes and syllable patterns that are not specific to a singular language, but rather are seen as common across a variety of languages. Yet, Pinker (1994) does also argue that the children are able to distinguish between phonemes of their own mother tongue, which has been seen from birth, and this is seen to be more prominent by the time the child reaches the age of around 10 months. Pinker (1994) refers to this as the children no longer being ‘universal phoneticians’, and states that the children will no longer distinguish foreign phonemes.