Language Development in Early Childhood (2-6 Years)
5.3 Language Development in Early Childhood
Introduction
Language is fundamental for cognition in early childhood, from 2 to 6 years old. It’s a major cognitive achievement during these years. Children begin this period with short sentences and a limited vocabulary, but by age six, they can understand and discuss almost anything.
Brain maturation, particularly in specific areas, and the necessity of language for social interaction make ages 2-6 the primary period for language learning. Early childhood is a sensitive period for many language skills, where vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation are learned quickly and easily. Children at this age are often called “language sponges” because they absorb every bit of language they encounter.
Desire to Communicate
The social context is crucial because children are strongly motivated to be social. They are eager to communicate and don’t want to feel ashamed of making mistakes. Language is highly dependent on social context. Individual conversations with an adult are often the main reason why one child’s vocabulary might be much larger than another’s at the same age.
Vocabulary
In early childhood, new words are added rapidly. Vocabulary expands quickly by age 7, and most children can understand far more language than they actually use.
How Does Rapid Vocabulary Expansion Happen?
Children develop an interconnected set of mental categories for words, which enables rapid vocabulary acquisition. This process is called fast mapping because children, upon hearing a word once, create a mental placeholder without needing to hear it in various contexts or know its exact definition.
Fast Mapping:
A quick and imprecise process by which children learn new words by creating mental categories arranged by meaning. Generally, the more evidence children have about a new word’s meaning, the better their fast mapping. After learning a word, children use it to describe other objects in the same category.
Five-year-olds can learn any word or phrase if it’s explained with specific examples using familiar words and if the context allows them to imagine the word’s meaning.
Difficulties in Language
Young children may not fully understand all the words they hear, even when they try to.
- Abstract nouns and metaphors: These are particularly difficult because they lack a concrete referent. Additionally, fast mapping is logical and literal, allowing only one meaning for a word or phrase.
- Words implicitly expressing comparisons (high/low, near/far, deep/shallow): These are difficult to understand because their meaning depends entirely on the context.
- Words expressing relations of place and time: Words like “here,” “there,” “yesterday,” and “tomorrow” can be challenging.
Meaning of Words
When children use certain words, adults might mistakenly believe they understand the implications of what they’re saying.
Milestones in Language Development During Early Childhood
3 Years:
- Uses a productive vocabulary of about 1,000 words.
- Constructs simple sentences of 3 or 4 words, typically in subject-verb-object order.
- Plays with words and sounds.
- Masters vowel and most consonant sounds.
- Follows two-step instructions.
- Talks about the present but uses some future verb forms.
- Regularizes the past tense of irregular verbs.
- Uses articles, plurals, and some prepositions and conjunctions.
4 Years:
- Uses a productive vocabulary of about 1,600 words.
- Increases sentence complexity, typically using 4 to 5 words.
- Correctly uses affirmative and negative declarative, interrogative, and imperative sentences.
- Remembers stories and the immediate past.
- Names primary colors and some coins.
- Uses past tense forms of irregular verbs more accurately.
- Articulates most consonants correctly, in addition to previously mastered phonemes.
- Asks many questions.
- Asks questions about their immediate environment.
- May have difficulty answering “why” and “how” questions.
- Interprets sentences based on word order.
5 Years:
- Has a productive vocabulary of about 2,200 words.
- May still have difficulty with the “r” sound, despite articulating most consonants correctly.
- Includes temporal terms like “yesterday,” “today,” “tomorrow,” “before,” and “after.”
- Uses subordinate clauses but may struggle with temporal, causal, and other complex conjunctions.
- Follows three-step instructions.
- Can tell stories, make jokes, and discuss emotions.
- Has acquired about 90% of grammar.
6 Years:
- Uses a productive vocabulary of about 2,600 words, but understands between 20,000 and 24,000.
- Can construct complex sentences that are generally well-formed.
Grammar
Grammar includes the structures and rules of a language, word order and repetition, prefixes and suffixes, intonation, and pronunciation. We can distinguish between expressive language (what an individual says) and receptive language (what they understand).
Receptive language is broader because understanding a set of words is easier than expressing ideas. The difference lies in grammar, which is less crucial for listening than for speaking.
Overregularization:
Children learn grammar rules so well that they tend to overapply them, even when exceptions exist. This is called overregularization and occurs because many rules have exceptions.
Learning Two Languages: Bilingualism
In today’s world, bilingualism is an advantage, even a necessity, and early childhood is the best time to learn at least two languages. Shortly after vocabulary expansion begins, children can master not only the vocabulary but also the grammar of two languages, using the correct word order, pauses, and gestures specific to each.
During this sensitive period, neurons and dendrites adapt to every speech sound the child hears.
Some Errors Children Might Make When Learning Two Languages:
Children hear the pronunciation of sounds and differentiate the nuances of each language’s accent but may not imitate them perfectly. Each year, the auditory cortex matures and becomes attuned to the specific sounds of familiar languages, potentially ignoring unfamiliar sounds. Therefore, parents and teachers should be mindful of their pronunciation when speaking to a child. If a child mispronounces a word, the adult should correct them and speak clearly, rather than copying or imitating the error.
Fully Bilingual:
A person who speaks two languages fluently, without greater proficiency in one. Full bilingualism ideally occurs naturally in children whose parents speak to them in two languages.
The principles of language learning—the language explosion, fast mapping, overregularization, and parental stimulation—apply equally to learning one or two languages. However, learning two languages requires twice the language exposure.
Learning to Read
Emerging Literacy:
The initial skills that enable children to learn to read, such as letter recognition and understanding page sequencing. Language learning is the foundation for emergent literacy, providing the first steps toward reading. Reading is key to almost every educational domain.
While memorizing the alphabet or recognizing letters was once considered essential for learning to read, it’s now understood that a child’s vocabulary and knowledge of sounds are more important. Therefore, it’s best to read with an adult. Songs and poems are also pathways to reading.