Softcopy notes were given, I just copy paste the key points
Learning a Language Involves…
- Learning the language’s sounds and sound patterns, its specific words, and the ways in which the language allows words to be combined
- Using the finite set of words in our vocabulary, we can put together an infinite number of sentences and express an infinite number of ideas—a process described as generatively
Required Competencies for Learning Language
- Phonological development
- Semantic development
- Syntactic development
- Pragmatic development
To learn language, children must also be exposed to other people using language—spoken or signed. Sometime between age 5 and puberty, language acquisition becomes much more difficult and ultimately less successful.
Infant-Directed Talk (Child-Directed Speech)
The distinctive mode of speech that adults adopt when talking to babies and very young children. Infants prefer IDT (CDS) to speech directed to adults
Prosody
Infants know a great deal about language long before their first linguistic productions.
Fetuses appear to be sensitive to prosody, the characteristic rhythm, tempo, cadence, melody, intonational patterns, and so forth with which a language is spoken.
Phonemic Perception
Infants are born with the ability to discriminate between speech sounds in any language. Beginning at around 7 months, however, infants gradually begin to specialize, retaining sensitivity to sounds they hear and losing the capacity to discriminate among sounds to which they are not exposed.
Sensitivity to Language Patterns
In addition to focusing on the speech sounds that are used in their native language, infants become increasingly sensitive to many of the numerous regularities in that language:
- Stress patterns
- Distributional properties
- Minute pauses
Vocalizations
At around 6 to 8 weeks of age, infants begin producing drawn out vowel sounds. As the repertoire of sounds they can produce expands, infants become increasingly aware that their vocalizations elicit responses from others and they begin to engage in dialogues of reciprocal sounds with their parents.
Babbling
Sometimes between 6 and 10 months of age, infants begin to babble by repeating strings of sounds comprising a consonant followed by a vowel. A key component of the development of babbling is receiving feedback about the sounds one is producing. As infants’ babbling becomes more varied, it conforms more to the sounds, rhythm, and intonation patterns of the language they hear daily
Word Production
Most infants produce their first words between 10-15 months of age. The period of one-word utterances is referred to as the holophrastic period. Overextension, using a given word in a broader context than is appropriate, represents an effort to communicate despite a limited vocabulary.
Vocabulary
A spurt in vocabulary growth typically occurs at around 19 months, although there is great variability. The rate of vocabulary development is influenced by the sheer amount of talk that they hear.
Creating Sentences
Most children begin to combine words into simple sentences by the end of their second year. Children’s first sentences are two-word utterances that have been described as telegraphic speech because nonessential elements are missing. Once children are capable of producing four-word sentences, generally at around 2½ years of age, they begin to produce sentences containing more than one clause.
Learning Grammar
The strongest support for the idea that young children learn grammatical rules from their production of word endings. Further evidence is provided by overregularization, speech errors in which children treat irregular forms of words as if they were regular. Parents play a role in children’s grammatical development by modeling correct grammar and expanding incomplete utterances.
