STAGES OF LANGUAGE
DEVELOPMENT

Małgorzata Szulc-Kurpaska

Biological foundations of language

Eric Lenneberg 1967

The Biological Foundations of Language



The behaviour emerges before it is
necessary.



(The law of anticipatory maturation)



Its appearance is not the result of a
conscious decision.

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Biological foundations of language

3



Its emergence is not triggered by
external events (though the
surrounding environment must be
sufficiently ‘rich’ for it to develop
adequately). 

Biological foundations of language



There is likely to be a ‘critical period’
for the acquisition of behaviour.



Direct teaching and practice have
relatively little effect.

4

Biological foundations of language

5



Child: Want other one spoon daddy.



Father: You mean, you want the other spoon.



Child: Yes, I want other one spoon, please daddy.



Father: Can you say ‘the other spoon’?



Child: Other...one...spoon.



Father: Say ‘other’.



Child: Other



Father: ‘spoon’



Child: spoon.



Father: ‘other spoon’.



Child: other...spoon. Now give me other one spoon?

Biological Foundations of language

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

There is a regular sequence of
‘milestones’ as the behaviour develops,
and these can usually be correlated with
age and other aspects of development.

Stages of language development

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

The incremental nature of first language
development



The length of the utterances increases step
by step



The grammatical complexity gradually
increases

Caretaker speech

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Motherese, Fatherese, Parentese
Two functions:



To communicate with the child



To direct child’s behaviour

Caretaker speech

9



Features of caretaker speech:



higher pitch



explicit intonation



careful articulation



slow pace



using gestures and facial expressions



simplified vocabulary



diminutives, 'baby talk', onomatopoeic words



short utterances

Caretaker speech

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

simple sentences



grammatical correctness



topic referring to the 'here and now'



general questions and imperatives



attention getters



repetitions



paraphrases



comprehension checks



expansions



redundancy

Stages of language development



Crying



Cooing



Babbling



Intonation patterns



1-word utterances



2-word utterances



Word inflections



Questions, negatives



Complex constructions



Mature speech

Birth
6 weeks
6 months
8 months
1 year
18 months
2 years
2 and ¼ years
5 years
10 years

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Stages of language development

12



Babbling drift



a child’s babbling gradually moves in the
direction of the sounds he hears around
him

One-word utterances

13



Four theories



the child has overgeneralised the word ‘ba’; that is the child
has learned the name ‘ba’ for ‘bath’ and has wrongly assumed
that it can apply to anything which contains liquid



Russian psychologist Lev Vygotski (1893-1934) suggested that
when children over-generalise they do so in a quite confusing
way – they appear to focus attention on one aspect of an
object at a time



according to David McNeill, the child is uttering holophrases
– single words that stand for whole sentences



Lois Bloom put forward another hypothesis – the meaning of a
one-word utterance varies according to the age of the child

Two-word utterances



Roger Brown



Adam, Eve and Sarah

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Eve

Adam

Two words

20 months

26 months

Three words

22 months

36 months

Four words

28 months

42 months

Two-word utterances



Telegraphic speech (18-28 months)



One explanation (Martin Braine)



Pivot grammar



a small number of words such as allgone, this,
more, no which occurred frequently, never alone
and in a fixed position- pivots, because the
utterance appears to pivot round them;



many more words which occurred less frequently
but in any position and sometimes alone (often
nouns), e.g. open class words, since an ‘open’
class is a set of words which can be added to
indefinitely;

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Two word utterances

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

Relations



Mummy push



Agent action



Eat dinner



Action and object



Mummy pigtail



Agent and object



Play garden



Action location

Two word utterances

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

Relations



Cookie plate



Entity and location



Mummy scarf



Possessor possession



Green car



Attributive and entity



That butterfly



Demonstrative and entity

Two word utterances

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

Operations



This (is a) truck



Nomination



More milk



Recurrence



Allgone milk



Non-existence

Grammatical morphemes

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

In the acquisition of grammatical
morphemes:



-ing progressive and –s plural are early acquired



past irregular is acquired earlier than past
regular



copula ‘be’ is acquired earlier than auxiliary
‘be’



uncontractible ‘be’ is acquired earlier than
contractible ‘be’



3rd person present tense is late acquired

Grammatical morphemes

20



Why is the plural

–s

early early acquired

and the third person singular present
tense

-s

late acquired?



Because plural ‘s is more frequent than
third person singular present tense.



Overgeneralisation – the use of a
grammatical form in all contexts even if
it does not apply, e.g. childrens, wented,
goed.

Grammatical morphemes

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

A grammatical morpheme is acquired when it
is used in 90% of obligatory occasions over w
two week period



Obligatory occasion instances where an
adult native speaker would use a particular
grammatical morpheme



Bilingual Syntax Measure an instrument
for collecting data on the acquisition of
grammatical morphemes (it contains a series
of pictures to which questions are asked)

Question formation



Intonation questions?



After the second birthday, a child places the wh-
word in front of the rest of the sentence



What Mummy doing? (FRONTING)



A second stage 3-4 months later the child adds an
auxiliary verb such as can or will to the main verb



Where you will go? (FRONTING)



Before the age of 3, the child realises that the
subject noun must change places with the
auxiliary



Where will you go? (INVERSION)

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Negation formation

23



‘Put no, or not in front of the whole sentence’



No play that (EXTERNAL NEGATION)



‘Put the negative after the first noun phrase and
before the rest of the sentence’ (At this stage can’t
and don’t seemed to be treated as alternatives to
no)



He no bite you (INTERNAL NEGATION I)



The negative was placed in the third slot in the
sentence, after the noun and auxiliary and
copula and before the rest of the sentence.



Paul can’t have one (INTERNAL NEGATION II)

Operating principles (Slobin 1973)

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

Pay attention to the ends of words



The phonological forms may be systematically modified



Pay attention to the order of words and morphemes



Avoid interruption and rearrangement of linguistic
units



Underlying semantic relations should be marked overtly
and clearly



Avoid exceptions



The use of grammatical markers should make semantic
sense

Phonological
development

25



The ‘fis’ phenomenon



A researcher spoke to a child who called
his inflated plastic fish ‘a fis’. In imitation
of the child’s pronunciation, the
researcher said: ‘This is your ‘fis’?’. ‘No,’
said the child ‘my fis’. He continued to
reject that adult’s imitation until he was
told, ‘That is your fish’. ‘Yes.’ he said,
‘my fis’.

Phonological
development

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

Fricatives are replaced by stops, e.g. see
is pronounced as [ti:]



Velars are replaced by alveolars, e.g.
gone is pronounced [don]



Consonant clusters are avoided e.g. sky
is pronounced [kai]



Consonants at the ends of words are
omitted, e.g. hat is pronounced [ha]

Phonological
development

27



Unstressed syllables are dropped, e.g.
banana is pronounced [nana]



As words become longer sounds in one
part of a word can alter the
pronunciation of sounds in other parts,
e.g.dog is pronounced [gog] or [dod];
window is pronounced [wouwou] or
[wawa]



[w] and [j] are used instead of l and r,
e.g. leg is pronounced as [jeg]

Semantic development

28



Overextension – a word is extended to
apply to other objects that share a certain
feature, such as common property of
shape, colour, size



Underextension – the word is used with a
narrower meaning than it has in the adult
language



Mismatch – no apparent basis for the
wrong use of a word by a child, in one case
a telephone was referred to as a tractor

Complex structures

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

Chomsky: Is this doll easy to see or hard
to see?



Lisa: Hard to see.



Chomsky: Will you make her easy to see?



Lisa: If I can get this untied.



Chomsky: Will you explain why she was
hard to see?



Lisa (to doll): Because you had a blindfold
over your eyes

Slajd z punktami



Punkt 1



Podpunkt (wcisnij tab zeby wciac)



Punkt 2 (kolejne punkty dodajesz
enterem)

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Slajd z punktami



Punkt 1



Podpunkt (wcisnij tab zeby wciac)



Punkt 2 (kolejne punkty dodajesz
enterem)

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Slajd z punktami



Punkt 1



Podpunkt (wcisnij tab zeby wciac)



Punkt 2 (kolejne punkty dodajesz
enterem)

32

Slajd z punktami



Punkt 1



Podpunkt (wcisnij tab zeby wciac)



Punkt 2 (kolejne punkty dodajesz
enterem)

33

Slajd z punktami



Punkt 1



Podpunkt (wcisnij tab zeby wciac)



Punkt 2 (kolejne punkty dodajesz
enterem)

34

Slajd z punktami



Punkt 1



Podpunkt (wcisnij tab zeby wciac)



Punkt 2 (kolejne punkty dodajesz
enterem)

35

Slajd z punktami



Punkt 1



Podpunkt (wcisnij tab zeby wciac)



Punkt 2 (kolejne punkty dodajesz
enterem)

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Dziękuję za uwagę

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