The subject line of your discussion should be the title of the video that you watched.  Be sure to include a minimum of a 250-word response using your observations and a minimum of one source to support your claims.  Your reference(s) should appear at the end of your discussion and be formatted according to APA.  

 

 

 

Video Observation Discussion

We have learned in Chapters 5 and 6 that we are able to understand children’s language development stages by observing their processes and interactions.  Preview the three videos listed below from Chapter 6 of your text, which are focused on children’s language interactions. The children shown are in various stages of language development. Choose one of the three videos to conduct an observation and identify the child’s language development stage.  

 

 

 

Write your observations of the child, which should support your conclusion of developmental stage.  Support your responses with the evidence from the textbook.  

 

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Chapter 6.2 Babbling

 

Babbling If the earliest vocalizations are the warm-up, babbling can be thought of as “dress rehearsal” for language (see The Impor- tance of Babbling). “Although precisely how babbling relates to language development is not yet clearly understood, psychol- ogists and linguists have sug- gested that babbling serves at least two functions: as practice for later speech and as a social

 

Crawling is an important developmental stage; it helps infants develop muscular strength and large motor skills. It also provides a way of expanding their experiences.

 

Pixland/Thinkstock

 

CHAPTER 6Section 6.2 From 6 Months to 1 Year

 

reward” (Mihalicek & Wilson, 2011, p. 324). At first, infants’ babbling may sound like ran- dom noises with only a few of the sounds resembling language, but gradually the noises start to take on the characteristics of the language or languages around them. In fact, over the next months and extending into the stage when first words appear, it is possible to see steady growth toward real words.

 

By the time they are 6 months old, babies begin to produce recognizable syllables such as ba, ma, and da. Within 2 months, most babies will begin to reduplicate these sounds, creat- ing baba, mama, and dada. Many parents will hear these combinations of sounds as words, but it is unlikely at this point that babies intend any meaning. Rather, they are rehears- ing the sounds they hear and are beginning to differentiate those that correspond to the language around them from those that do not. During the final stage of babbling, babies begin to create two-syllable utterances (some of which may be words) by adding one syl- lable to an entirely different one, thus producing forms such as ma me. In most children, this final stage of babbling occurs around 10 months and is coincident with first words.

 

The Importance of Babbling Although it is hard to say with any precision exactly how babbling relates to later language develop- ment, much of what we know about babbling in infants constitutes evidence that it does play an important role. We know that •  babbling gives babies practice in using the articulatory system—especially the mouth, tongue, and lips—that they will eventually use to talk; • early babbling sounds pretty much the same all over the world; •  children who are deaf do babble, but they tend to start a little later. If their parents sign to them, they may start to “babble” with gestures; and •  one of the first identifiable speech sounds is m, a sound that a contented baby can make while nursing. To hear different kinds of babbling sounds, go to the Weblinks section at the end of the chapter and find the link under “Babbling.”

 

First Words Babbling is articulatory practice for producing real words, but using real words intention- ally to express meaning is a result of the categorization and concept development that has been going on since birth, as we learned in Chapter 5. The age at which children begin to produce real, intentional words varies, but it is usually around 1 year, although there is no cause for concern if the first words do not appear until 16 or even 18 months. Some infants simply take a longer time with warm-up and rehearsal, and there is undoubtedly a great deal of categorization conceptualization going on as well, learning that is important to language acquisition but which is unobservable. Whatever language the child speaks, the first words will be concrete content words (mama, cookie, doggy). That is because children’s first words tend to grow directly out of their experience.

 

CHAPTER 6Section 6.3 From 1 to 2 Years

 

Researcher Margaret Harris and colleagues (Harris, 2004) studied four children from the age of 6 months until 2 years old to determine how their first words were used and, in particular, the degree to which they reflected their mothers’ use of the words. They asked parents to keep a word diary for each child, recording the use and context of each word. The researchers also filmed interactions between the mothers and children at 2-week intervals. Once they were sure that a child was using a word and not just babbling, they examined the mother’s utterances over the previous month to discover how many times the mother had used the word and the context in which she had done so. Studying a total of 40 words, they discovered that in 33 instances, the child’s use was identical to the mother’s, and in only 3 instances out of the 40 did the child’s use bear no resemblance at all to the mother’s. In an earlier study, Harris had con- cluded that “78 per cent of maternal utterances to 16-month-old infants referred to objects on which the child was currently focusing attention” (Harris, 2004). Therefore, it is not surprising that children’s first words are so firmly rooted in their interaction with the world around them. These words are usually the names of familiar objects or persons—mama, daddy, nana, cookie, and jump. At this stage, the sounds of those words may be imperfect, as we saw in Chapter 3. Isabelle, for example, could articulate mama and daddy almost perfectly, but nana (for banana) left off the first syllable. Cookie was pronounced “kookoo” and jump was “yum.”

 

When children begin to use a word, often they will use it only in a single context. Margaret Har- ris gives the example of a child named James who “initially used the word mummy only when he was handing a toy to his mother and there only when pointing up to a picture on a frieze” (Harris, 2004, p. 85). Not all early words are used in lim- ited contexts, however. One of the most common examples is the word more, which children often use in a variety of contexts—to request another cookie, more milk, or the repeat of an activity.