Language Development
QUICK LOOK AT THE CHAPTER AHEAD
Children are adept at using both receptive and expressive language.
Learning language is an exercise in rule learning.
Language development seems to follow a predictable pattern.
In the course of acquiring their language, children experience several language irregularities.
Children may determine the meaning of a word by a process called fastmapping.
They also use a procedure called syntactic bootstrapping for word meaning.
A process known as TESOL is used to help immigrant children learn English.
TERMS
Expressive language
Fastmapping
Overextensions
Overregularities
Receptive language
Syntactic bootstrapping
Telegraphic speech
TESOL
From about ages 2 to 6 years, children’s language undergoes a tremendous word spurt. This steady progression in vocabulary development is evident in Table 35-1. Children of 5 years seem to know about 2000 words, but that is not the limit of their vocabulary. These same children understand many more words than they use. From the first year, children demonstrate receptive language (i.e., they receive and understand the words). In early childhood, they produce language themselves, called expressive language.
These same children understand many more words than they use.Today, many schools in the United States are enrolling children of immigrant parents. In an effort to help with the inevitable language problems, a technique known as TESOL is being widely used to facilitate language development. TESOL refers to Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. Teachers are urged to use children’s families and communities as resources when using the TESOL model.
TESOL refers to Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages.
THE PROCESS OF LANGUAGE ACQUISITIONBy the time they are ready to enter kindergarten, most children have a vocabulary of almost 10,000 words. They use questions, negative statements, and dependent clauses, and they have learned to use language in a variety of social situations. Children of this age detect the meaning of new words by using such techniques as fastmapping, which enables them to use the context of a sentence to discover a word’s meaning, and syntactic bootstrapping, which means they use the grammatical structure of the entire sentence to determine a word’s meaning.
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