Toddlerhood ages
1 - 3 yrs of age
- time of exploration
A baby’s first word marks
the beginning of a transition from preverbal to verbal communication, and ushers in a new and exciting period of language development.
- average at 12 months
- usually people and objects in babies everyday lives
A lexical entry contains
a series of symbols that compose the word, the sound of the word, the meaning of the word, and its part of speech
3 criteria to be considered a true word
- baby must produce the word with clear purpose
- a true word must have recognizable pronunciation similar to the adult form of the word. ( @ 18 months its only 25% intelligible
- a true word is a word a child uses consistently and extends beyond the original context.
phonetically consistent forms (PCFs)
describes the idiosyncratic word like productions children use consistently and meaningfully but that do not approximate adult forms.
- not true words
toddlers come to rely less on gestures and more on words when making
inferences about how to categorize or label new objects.
14 months old: use both words and gestures
22 months: rely on words but not gestures alone
referential gestures
children who are beginning to transition from the prelinguistic stage to the one-word stage
- is one that indicates a precise referent and has stable meaning across different contexts.
Toddlers who use more gesture + speech combinations at 18 months also demonstrate
greater sentence complexity at 42 months of age
when children begin to use two-word utterances
- they stop combining two referential gestures
- recognize that that when different speakers say two identical words, they are the same word.
children’s gesture use at 14 months is
a significant predictor of their vocabulary size at 42 months, above and beyond the effects of parent and child word use at 14 months
Mirror neurons ( visuomotor neurons)
activate when people perform actions (including communicative actions) and when they observe other people perform actions.
- are responsible for the evolution of gestures and language in humans.
- when adults read and produce spontaneous speech, the excitability of the hand motor cortex increases in the left hemisphere of the brain.
measure of ToM development
- False-belief tasks assess whether children demonstrate understanding that another’s beliefs can differ from one’s own beliefs.
- language appears to play a vital role
- toddlers (18 to 21 months of age) who spend more time in coordinated joint engagement (active coordination of atten-tion between objects and social partners) and toddlers (27 to 30 months of age) who spend more time in symbol-infused joint engagement, including conversations and pretend play, demonstrate higher scores on false-belief tasks in the preschool years (between 42 and 66 months of age)
customary age of production
describes the age by which 50% of children can produce a given sound in multiple positions in words in an adultlike way
age of mastery
describes the age by which most children produce a sound in an adultlike manner.
phonological processes
- systematic, rule-governed patterns that characterize toddlers’ speech
- an effort to simplify their inventory of phonetic elements and strings
- include syllable structure changes, assimilation, place-of-articulation changes, and manner of articulation changes.
- suppressed usually by 3 if not after 5 yrs of age
Syllable structure changes
- changes to syllables in words.
repeat, or reduplicate: stressed syllable in a word (Water + wawa)
cluster of consonants: fewer sounds (stong instead of strong)
Assimilation
process by which children change one sound in a syllable so it takes on the features of another sound in the same syllable.
Place-of-articulation changes
when children replace a sound produced at one location in the mouth with a sound produced at a different location in the mouth.
fronting
children often replace sounds produced farther back in the mouth (e.g., /k/) with sounds produced farther forward in the mouth (e.g., /t/), so a child’s pronunciation of cake becomes “take”
Manner-of-articulation changes
children replace a sound produced in a particular manner with a sound produced in a different manner
- stopping: replace an affricate sound with a stop sound.
transitional period
- 18 months of age (vocabulary spurt)
- developmental time frame during which language abilities are emerging and changing
- toddlers’ successful learning of novel nonneighbors (new words that are not phonologically similar to known words) and difficulty in learning novel neighbors (new words that are phonologically similar to known words).
partial phonetic information.
toddlers become increasingly adept at recognizing words after hearing only parts of the words
Grammatical morphemes begin to appear in children’s speech between
ages 18 and 24 months—at about the time when they have learned their first 50 words.
- first grammatical morpheme children tend to produce is the present progressive -ing, @ 18 months master by 28 months
- in and on, which children start to use at about age 2 years
two-word stage
which toddlers begin to combine words to make utterances, marks the true beginning of syntax, or the rules that govern the order of words in a child’s language.
- commenting (“Baby cry”), negating (“No juice”), requesting (“More juice”), and questioning (“What that?”).
