LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT IN CHILDREN

 Language development

Language development during infancy every child is born with certain inherent capabilities to acquire language.

⚫ During the first-year verbal communication develops by virtue of sensitivity to language. cognitive and social skills and environmental support

⚫ The first skill to develop is phonological. It enables recognition and utilization of sound units and combining them into words clauses and phrases.

Most of the infants are not able to generate a complete sentences till the age of two and the ability continue to develop through childhood years and adolescents and further refinement takes place till adulthood.

Prelinguistic phase

⚫ A process of prelinguistic development gradually takes place before the child even

acquire the first steps of verbal communication. Babies actively produce different sounds right from the birth onwards to attract attention from their caregivers Babies sounds and gestures go through the following sequences during their first tear

 ⚫ Crying is the first verbal output in a persons life Its gift and a skill that comes inherently with all babies and manifests right at the moment of birth even the most naïve and innocent cries can signal different meanings such as hunger distress or pain

⚫ Cooing is another milestone in language development that most babies acquire at about

1 to 12 months. It is a vowel like utterance made by babies, for example the sound "ooo... "uuu.." which is quiet pleasant to hear and often described as baby's first attempt to vocalize. It usually occurs when they are interacting with their caregivers. • Babbling may be said to be the first real attempt of a child to speak. It is the ability of the child to combine and use both vowel and consonant sounds for the first time, a milestone achieved somewhere between the age of three to six months.

 ⚫ It includes strings of combinations of vowels and consonants such as ba or da

⚫ They further continue to refine this ability in subsequent months. By seven months the infant can repeat well-formed syllables like "dada...", "baba.," "na.na..." etc which is known as canonical babbling (Bukatko, 2008) ⚫ Using gesture as a communication tool is another important milestone that appears at the age of 8-12 months.

⚫ By this age children start using gestures like showing, pointing or giving as a means to communicate and attract the attention from other people. 

⚫ Though not able to speak in words at this age they can use different gestures to communicate with others like waving bye, nodding to say "yes" and moving the head from left to right and right to left to say "no", pointing fingers to kitchen when hungry ete

Phonology

 Phonology deals with sounds in a language. Traditionally it has focused mainly on phonemes-the smallest contrastive linguistic unit which can bring a change in the meaning of words.

 ⚫ For instance, the words 'hit' and 'him' carry entirely different meanings just because of the exchange of phonemes /t/ and /m/. Phonology is the study of these fundamental sound units and combinations of unit sounds that make up language (Bukatko, 2008).

 ⚫ It includes the rules governing the structure and sequence of speech sound as how sounds are used and rules about how different sounds are combined (Menn & Stoel- Gammon, 2005).Syllables are the smallest unit of speech perception made up of two or more phonemes. Some of them are meaningful but others are not. Example 'at' is a meaningful syllable but 'ab' is not.

Morphology

⚫ Morphology is the study of language's morphemes and other linguistic units such as root words, affixes, parts of speech. Santrock (2007), defined morphology as the system of meaningful units involved in a word formation.

⚫ A morpheme is a unit of sound that conveys specific meaning. For instance, the word distasteful consist of three morphemes where 'dis' indicate negation, "taste" indicates a meaningful word and ful' means quality. Not all morphemes are words by themselves; it can be prefixes, words and suffices. Morphemes are similar to syllables but all morphemes convey meaning.

Morphology

⚫ Morphology is the study of language's morphemes and other linguistic units such as root words, affixes, parts of speech. Santrock (2007), defined morphology as the system of meaningful units involved in a word formation. 

⚫ A morpheme is a unit of sound that conveys specific meaning. For instance, the word distasteful consist of three morphemes where 'dis' indicate negation, "taste' indicates a meaningful word and ful" means quality. Not all morphemes are words by themselves; it can be prefixes, words and suffices.

⚫ Morphemes are similar to syllables but all morphemes convey meaning.

Syntax

It is the system or the definite rules that govern the making of meaningful phrases and sentences. It involves the way words are combined to form phrases and sentences which are proper and logical. Word order is very important in determining meaning in English language. For example, the sentence "Ravi saw David" has a different meaning than "David saw Ravi."

Semantics

The semantics is the study of meaning conveyed by words, phrases, sentences and texts. In basic terms semantics deals with the meaning of signs and the relationship between different linguistic units and compounds. Every word has a set of semantic features, or required attributes related to meaning. For example, the word boy and man share many semantic features but they convey differ meanings with respect to age.

Pragmatics

Pragmatics is the system of using appropriate conversation and knowledge of how to use language effectively in different contexts (Berk 2013). It involves speaking to have some kind of impact on others. It is the ability to comprehend the subtle meanings of spoken language. It also deals with how we modify our sentences and our way of speech to suit the prevailing situation.