Lust, Barbara;
Child language: acquisition and growth
Cambridge University Press, 2006, 389 pages
ISBN 0521444780, 9780521444781
topics: | language-acquisition
(adapted from Lenneberg 1967, 128–130) Motor Development Vocalization and Language
0–6 mo 3 mo Supports head when prone Less crying than at 8 weeks; smiles when talked to; cooing 4 mo Plays with rattle; head Responds to human sounds more self-supported definitely 5 mo Sits with props Cooing begins to be interspersed with more consonantal sounds; all vocalizations are very different from the sounds of the mature language of the environment
6 mo Sitting; bends forward and Cooing changing into babbling uses hands for support; resembling monosyllabic utterances; cannot yet stand without neither vowels nor consonants have very help; no thumb apposition fixed recurrences 8 mo Stands holding on; grasps Reduplication frequent; intonation with thumb apposition patterns distinct; utterances can signal emphasis and emotions 10 mo Takes side steps, holding Vocalizations are mixed with sound-play on; pulls to standing such as gurgling or bubble-blowing; tries position unsuccessfully to imitate sounds 12 mo Walks when held by hand; Identical sound sequences replicated walks on feet and hands, with higher relative frequency of knees in air; seats self on occurrence and words are emerging; floor definite signs of understanding some words and simple commands
18 mo Grasp, prehension, and Has a repertoire of three to fifty release fully developed; words; babbling now of several gait stiff, propulsive, and syllables with intricate intonation precipitated; creeps pattern; little ability to join any of downstairs backwards the lexical items into spontaneous two-item phrases; understanding is progressing rapidly 24 mo Runs, but falls in sudden Vocabulary of more than fifty items; turns; can quickly alternate begins to join items into two-word between sitting and stance; phrases; all phrases appear to be own walks stairs up or down, creations; increase in communicative one foot forward only behavior and interest in language 30 mo Jumps into air with both Fastest increase in vocabulary; no feet; stands on one foot for babbling; utterances have communicative about two seconds; takes intent; frustrated if not understood by few steps on tiptoe; can adults; sentences and phrases have move digits independently; characteristic child grammar; manipulation of objects intelligibility not very good; much improved understands what is said Year 3 Tiptoes well; runs smoothly Vocabulary of some 1,000 words; about with acceleration 80 percent of utterances are intelligible even to strangers; grammatical complexity of utterances is roughly that of colloquial adult language Beyond 3 Jumps over rope; hops on Language is well-established; dominant foot; catches ball deviations from adult norm tend to be in arms; walks line more in style than in grammar
Year 1 0–2 mo Distinguishes maternal voice, speech and non-speech Evidences Categorical Perception Perceives wide set of sound distinctions corresponding to possible phonetic contrasts along many major dimensions of phonetic variation Discriminates between different numbers of syllables Discriminates canonical and non-canonical syllables Discriminates certain prosodic differences in stress and accent 2–3 mo Discriminates certain allophonic variations between sounds, e.g., the allophones of [t] and [r] in “night rate” vs. “nitrate” Distinguishes bisyllables with initial stress from those with final stress, e.g., “´bada” from “ba´da” Compensates for changes in speaking rates 4 mo Prefers to listen to words over other sounds “Duplex Perception” is evident 5 mo Capable of linking auditory and articulatory information (Kuhl and Meltzoff 1982, 1984) 6–7 mo Pair of syllables recognized as unit when “supported by rhythmic familiarity” regardless of syllable ordering (Morgan and Saffran 1995) When acquiring English, distinguishes English words compared to Norwegian words, but not compared to Dutch (Jusczyk, Friederici et al. 1993); infant appears to know some aspects of possible patterns of words in specific language First evidence that early perception of sound distinctions is being narrowed to more closely reflect the Specific Language Grammar being acquired; certain distinctions weaken or disappear when not in the specific language being acquired (Werker and Lalonde 1988; Polka and Werker 1994) “Magnet Effect”: recognition of specific language “prototype” vowel sounds (Kuhl et al. 1992) Word segmentation skills apparent: infant recognizes words in sentences which were heard in isolation (monosyllabic words like “dog” or bisyllabic words like “doctor”) and recognizes words in isolation which were heard in sentences Recognizes recurrence of a three-sound sequence of continuous synthesized speech (Saffran, Aslin and Newport 1996) 8 mo Recognizes words from stories read two weeks earlier (Jusczyk and Hohne 1997) Recognizes phonotactic patterns of specific language, e.g., strong–weak patterns in English, and listens longer to these 9 mo Distinguishes English from Dutch words (Jusczyk, Luce and Luce 1994) Uses phonotactic information to segment speech into words (Mattys and Jusczyk 2001) Prefers language-specific phonotactically well-formed strings Integration of segmental and suprasegmental information in recognition of units Distinguishes passages with pauses between words from those with pauses within words Integrates multiple sources of information to locate word boundaries in fluent speech, phonotactic and prosodic 10–11 mo Uses context-sensitive allophones in segmenting words Loses response to distinctions of some allophonic sound variations 12 mo Retains discrimination of phonetic contrasts which are phonemic in the infant’s native Specific Language Grammar; but has ceased to demonstrate discrimination of many, if not most, others Onset of first words in production (appendix 3) Year 2 14 mo Does not use phonetic detail in a task requiring the pairing of words and objects, suggesting “functional reorganization” (e.g., /bih/ vs. /dih/)