An introduction to

Psycholinguistics
Week 2
Teacher: Zeineb Ayachi
How children learn language
The development of speech production
 Layout 1/2

 The development of speech production

1.1.1. From vocalization to babbling to speech
1.1. 1.1. Vocalization to babbling
1.1.1.2. Babbling to speech
1.1.1.3 Explaining the acquisition order of consonants and vowels
 1.1.2 Early speech stages: naming, holophrastic, telegraphic, morphemic
1.1.2.1 Naming: one-word utterances
1.1.2.2 Holophrastic function: one-word utterances
1.1.2.3 Telegraphic speech: two- and three-word utterances
 Layout 2/2

1.1.2.4 Morpheme acquisition

1.1.3 Later speech stages: rule formation for negatives and other complex structures
 Introduction 1/2

 We have minds and in our minds we have the means for producing and comprehending speech.

 But how did we come to have such abilities?

 At birth we cannot comprehend speech, nor can we produce speech.

 Yet, by the age of 4 years we have learned vocabulary and grammatical rules for creating a variety of
sentence structures including negatives, questions, and relative clauses.

 And although 4-year-olds still have passives and some other elaborate syntactic structures to learn, along
with a never-ending stock of vocabulary items, they have already overcome the most difficult
obstacles in language learning.

 This is true of children the world over, whatever the language may be.

 Introduction 2/2

 Indeed, the language proficiency of the 4- or 5-year-old is often the envy of the adult
second-language learner, who has been struggling for years to master the language.

 It is one of the fundamental tasks of psycholinguists to explain how children learn

language.

 We will deal with language production and language comprehension separately and then
then consider how they are related.
 The development of speech production

1.1.1 From vocalization to babbling to speech

1.1.1.1 Vocalization to babbling
 Prior to uttering speech sounds, infants make a variety of sounds – crying, cooing,
gurgling.
 Infants everywhere seem to make the same variety of sounds, even children who are born
deaf
 The ability and propensity/tendency to utter such sounds thus appear to be unlearned.
 Later, around the seventh month, children ordinarily begin to babble, to produce what may
be described as repeated syllables (‘syllabic reduplication’), e.g. ‘baba’, ‘momo’,
‘panpan’.
 The development of speech production

 While most of the syllables are of the basic Consonant + Vowel type (‘baba’ and ‘momo’),
some consist of closed syllables (end with a consonant ex; cap, dish. Open syllables
end with a vowel; me, pa. )

 The production of sounds using the intonation contours of the first language is obviously a
learned phenomenon because when infants babble they follow the intonation contours
of the language which they hear.

 This is something that deaf infants deprived of hearing speech do not do.
 The development of speech production

1.1.1.2 Babbling to speech

 It is from the advanced stage of babbling that children move into uttering their first words.

 Often this occurs at around 1 year of age but can occur much earlier or much later.

 When children begin to utter words, somewhat surprisingly only some of the sounds that they have
uttered in babbling appear in speech.

 There is, then, some discontinuity between babbling and meaningful speech where the kinds of sounds
that occur in babbling are not always immediately realized in meaningful speech.
 The development of speech production

 Why is there some degree of discontinuity from babbling to the production of speech
sounds?
 the discontinuity issue involves the distinction between intentional and nonintentional
vocalization.
 Babbling is non-intentional in the sense that particular sounds are not under central
cognitive control;
 the infant does not intentionally make the particular babbling sounds that occur.
 They seem to happen by the chance coordination of speech articulators
 The development of speech production

 The case of meaningful speech is quite different.

 Here, sounds must not be uttered at random but must match previously heard sounds that
are conventionally associated with certain objects, needs, and so forth.
 In order to accomplish this feat, it is necessary that the child discover which sound is
created by which speech articulators.
 It is this knowledge that the child must acquire in order to speak meaningfully.
 The development of speech production

1.1.1.3 Explaining the acquisition order of consonants and vowels

 In the meaningful speech phase, it appears that consonants are acquired in a front-to-back
order, where ‘front’ and ‘back’ refer to the origin of the articulation of the sound.
 Thus, /m/, /p/, /b/, /t/, and /d/ tend to precede/k/, and /x/.
 Conversely, vowels seem to be acquired in a back-to-front order, with /a/ (ball) and /o/
(tall) preceding /i/ (meet) and /√/ (mud).
 The development of speech production

1.1.2 Early speech stages: naming, holophrastic, telegraphic, morphemic

1.1.2.1 Naming: one-word utterances
 The mere uttering of speech sounds by the child, e.g. ‘mama’, may or may not indicate
word knowledge.
 Children can be said to have learned their first word when
ü (1) they are able to utter a recognizable speech form, and when
ü (2) this is done in conjunction with some object or event in the environment.
 The development of speech production

 The speech form may be imperfect, e.g. ‘da’ for ‘daddy’, and the associated meaning may
be incorrect, e.g. all people are called ‘da’, but,

 as long as the child uses the speech form reliably, it may be concluded that the child has
acquired some sort of word knowledge.

 First words have been reported as appearing in children from as young as 4 months to as
old as 18 months, or even older.
 The development of speech production

 It appears that children first use nouns as proper nouns to refer to specific objects, after
which they may or may not extend the meaning correctly for common nouns.

 For example, while ‘dada’ may first be used to identify one particular person, it may or
may not be extended to include all men or all people.
 The development of speech production

1.1.2.2 Holophrastic function: one-word utterances

 Children do not only use single words to refer to objects; they also use single words to
express complex thoughts that involve those objects.
 A young child who has lost its mother in a department store may cry out ‘mama’, meaning
‘I want mama’.
 Or a child may point to a shoe and say ‘mama’, meaning ‘The shoe belongs to mama’.
 Research has shown that the young child can express a variety of semantic functions and
complex ideas by the use of single words
 The development of speech production

 It is quite remarkable how inventive children can be in the use of single words.
 Researchers have noted that children may describe a complex situation by using a series of
single-word holophrases.
 For example, ‘peach, Daddy, spoon’ was used to describe a situation where Daddy had cut
a piece of peach that was in a spoon
 we often use the traditional term ‘utterance’ rather than ‘sentence’ in order to avoid
disputes as to whether what the child says is truly a sentence or whether it is
grammatical.
 The advantage of the term ‘utterance’ is that it describes what the child says without
having to worry about assigning sentencehood or grammaticality to what was said.
 The development of speech production

1.1.2.3 Telegraphic speech: two- and three-word utterances

 Around 2 years of age or so children begin to produce two- and three-word utterances.

 Regarding purpose, the child uses language to request, warn, name, refuse, brag, question,
answer (in response to questions), and inform. In order to gain these ends,

 the utterances involve such semantic relations and concepts as agent, action,
experiencer,receiver, state, object, possession, location, attribution, equation, negation,
and quantification.
 The development of speech production

1.1.2.4 Morpheme acquisition

 Once two- and three-word utterances have been acquired, children have something on which to elaborate.

 They start to add function words and inflections to their utterances. Function words like the prepositions ‘in’
and ‘on’, the articles ‘the’, ‘a’, and ‘an’, the modals ‘can’, and ‘will’, and the auxiliaries ‘do’, ‘be’, and
‘have’, begin to appear, together with inflections such as the plural /s/ on ‘cats’, and /z/ on ‘dogs’, and
tense markings such as the /t/ past tense form on ‘worked’.

 A morpheme, it should be noted, is a root or a part of a word that carries a meaning.

 Thus, for example, the single word ‘elephants’ consists of two morphemes, ‘elephant’ and Plural (s), as does
the single word ‘ran’, which consists of ‘run’ and Past.

 Incidentally, ‘elephants’ consists of eight phonemes /e/, /l/, /@/, /f/, /∂/, /n/, /t/, and /s/
 The development of speech production

1.1.3 Later speech stages: rule formation for negatives and other complex structures

 With the production of longer utterances, simple structures are elaborated to yield more
complex ones.

 Negative sentences, question forms, passives, and relative clauses are just a few of the
many complex rules that children acquire in their first five years.