Understanding Child Language Development: From Crying to Speech
Understanding Child Language Development
What is Psycholinguistics?
Psycholinguistics is the study of language and speech as a window into the nature and structure of the human mind.
What is Developmental Psycholinguistics?
Developmental psycholinguistics examines how speech emerges over time and how children construct the complex structures of their mother tongue.
Crying: An Automatic, Iconic, and Symbolic Response
Crying is an automatic response to noxious stimuli, triggered by the autonomic nervous system as a primary reflex. Initially, crying is completely iconic, meaning there is a direct and transparent link between the physical sound and its communicative intent. The degree of discomfort is directly proportional to the intensity of the acoustic signal. However, in the first month or two of a child’s development, crying becomes more differentiated and symbolic.
- Iconic: Refers to the transparent link between the physical sound and its communicative intent.
- Symbolic: Means that there is not a direct relation to the child’s sense of discomfort; the cries are subtle, indirect, and almost associated with its needs.
Cooing: The Beginning of Vocalization
After several weeks of extensive interaction with their caretakers, children start to coo. This involves making soft, gurgling sounds, seemingly to express satisfaction.
Babbling: Exploring Sounds and Syllables
The babbling stage refers to the natural tendency of children, around two months old, to burst out in strings of consonant-vowel syllable clusters, almost as a kind of vocal play. Some psycholinguists distinguish between two types of babbling:
- Marginal Babbling: An early stage similar to cooing where infants produce a few, somewhat random, consonants.
- Canonical Babbling: Usually emerges around eight months, when the child’s vocalizations narrow down to syllables that begin to approximate the syllables of the caretaker’s language.
Segmental Phonemes and Suprasegmental Sounds
- Segmental Phonemes: Correspond to the individual consonants and vowels that represent the infant’s mother tongue.
- Suprasegmental Sounds: Refer to the musical pitch, rhythm, and stress that accompany the syllables we produce and play an important role in conveying grammar, meaning, and intention.
Idiomorphs: Inventing Words
Idiomorphs are words that children invent when they first grasp the magical notion that certain sounds have a unique reference. For example, a one-year-old girl used “ka ka” to mean “milk.”
Egocentric Speech: The Child’s Perspective
Egocentric speech refers to children’s natural tendency to be the center of their universe and talk about what surrounds them, especially at the beginning of life.
Who is Piaget?
Jean Piaget was a Swiss developmental psycholinguist and philosopher known for his epistemological studies with children. He placed great importance on the education of children.