LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT

Language Development in Children

Abstract

In this study we try to explore the concept of “Language development” in a holistic context. The main focus of the research is on “language development” and its development in “children”. The research also analyzes many aspects of “language development” and tries to gauge its development on “children”. Finally the research describes various factors which are responsible for “language development in children” and tries to investigative the various stages of “language development in children”.

Language Development in Children

Introduction

Language development relates to the processes involved in the acquired, or untaught, ability of human beings to understand and produce speech communication. The study of the development of language ability encompasses many fields of inquiry, including linguistics, sociolinguistics, behavioral psychology, and speech and language proficiency (Bloom, 1970). The process of language development in children including the surrounding interactions and the environment in which language development takes place, plays a role in the formation of one's identity.

Phonemic and Phonetic Awareness

Phonemic and phonetic awareness are the two linguistic concepts that relate directly to language development. A phoneme is the smallest linguistic unit of sound for a given language. Despite ongoing debate among linguists about the number of phonemes in the English language, most can agree on the presence of 36 distinct speech sounds. Accounting for different dialects of English spoken as a first language, including American and British, fewer linguists agree that the number can be increased up to 46 distinct phonemes. Linguists believe the developed awareness of the phonemic units present in a child's home language forms the foundation upon which the child develops language. With the acquisition of phonemic awareness, a child is able to expand his or her awareness of the components of spoken communication to use larger units of sound that account for rhymes, syllables, and onsets, for example.

Infants as young as 2 days old consistently respond to speech, especially that of the mother's or primary caregiver's. Initially, the infant's response, indicated by his or her becoming quiet and establishing eye contact with the speaker, is more indicative of an emotional bond between child and speaker (Owens, 1996). Eventually though, the child becomes aware of consistent sounds, rhythms, and changes in pitch. Within the first year of life, infants are able to distinguish between sounds that are present in language to which they are most exposed and sounds that are present in other languages.

In the first year, the child may not produce speech, per se, but the child is able to recognize most speech sounds in the language and make meanings from those sounds. What most children are able to do at the age of 4 or 5 months is babble-vocalize imitative and nonimitative strings of sounds. Relatedly, the child will soon develop the ability to connect sounds to meanings in phonetically consistent forms. Although these sounds serve as words for infants, they are usually not representative of phonetic productions in adult language. Nevertheless, phonetic awareness fosters in the child an understanding between speech sounds and meanings (Dore, ...