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Chapter 4
In the Beginning: Communication Development from Birth to 2 Years
Chapter Overview
The next three chapters trace language development from birth through the school-age years. In this chapter, we
consider language development from birth through two years. We emphasize that the child is a communicator from
the beginning of her life, and the changes in her communication system over the first two years are dramatic. She
Learning Outcomes
• Discuss the social and cultural factors within the language learning environment.
• Discuss the nature of interactions parents use with infants prior to and after
birth to create a nurturing
communication environment.
• Describe the child-directed communication strategies parents use with their children.
Key Terms and Concepts
• Infant-directed (ID) singing, p. 121
• Contingent responding, p. 124
• Joint reference, p. 125
• Characteristics of infant-directed speech or parentese, p. 125-128
• Signature tunes, p. 127
• Expansion, p. 130
• Extension, p. 131
• Conversations, p. 131
• Cooing, p. 150
• Marginal babbling, p. 151
• Reduplicated babbling, p. 151
• Echolalia, p. 151
• Variegated babbling, p. 152
• Jargon babbling, p. 152
• Vocables or protowords, p. 153
• Perlocutionary stage, p. 153
• Illocutionary stage, p. 154
• Locutionary stage, p. 154
• Deictic gestures, p. 154
• Representational gestures, p. 154
• Imitation, p. 155
• Pointing, p. 155
• Early communicative functions, p. 156
• Protodeclarative, p. 156
• Protoimperative, p. 156
• Overextension, p. 158
• Underextension, p. 158
• Halliday’s communicative functions, p. 161
• Dore’s speech acts, p. 161-162
• Primitive speech acts, p. 161
• Substantive words, p. 162
• Agents, p. 162
• Objects, p. 162
• Relational words, p. 162
• Presupposition, p. 164
• Conversational turn taking, p. 164
• Pivot words, p. 170
• Communicative context, p. 171
• Rich interpretation, p. 171
• Semantic-syntactic rules, p. 171
• Pragmatic function of language, p. 173
• Mathetic function of language, p. 174
• Informative function of language, p. 174
Points of Emphasis
1. It is important to highlight again the impact of the home environment and home language on the developing
child. Of course, the impact of these for the child begins before birth, and you should recognize that the first
two years are critical for language acquisition.
3. There are seven major variables that influence the acquisition of language and language behaviors: (1) race and
ethnicity; (2) social class, education and occupation; (3) region; (4) gender; (5) situation or context; (6) peer
group association or identification; and (7) first-language community or culture.
4. Low-income households not only are disadvantaged in terms of wealth, but also are impoverished in terms of
the opportunities that children need for optimal growth and development.
5. A person’s socioeconomic status (SES) includes family income, parental education and occupation of the
parents. It also includes other types of capital, such as “human, social-cultural, social-political,
financial/material, and environmental/natural.”
a. Human capital involves parents’ investment in their children, which is influenced by their culture and is
6. Socioeconomic status (SES) is based on family income, parental education, and the occupation of the parents.
As related to child development, SES is likely to be a strong factor in all aspects of the child’s life. When
7. Research shows that much is going on prior to birth related to communication between a mother and her baby.
Especially in the last trimester, the fetus is taking in information through listening, tasting, and moving.
8. Before the child sends intentional messages, she communicates. Human beings communicate even when they
do not intend to communicate.
9. Infant-directed singing occurs in all human cultures and is considered a universal caregiving behavior. Songs
10. Characteristics of rhymes serve to capture and hold the attention of children, provide prolonged joint
interaction, develop coordination of the rhymes with accompanying gestures, contribute to the social
relationship of the participants and focus infants on the variation in word structure to create new meanings.
11. Experiences with stories provide a framework for children’s future ability to tell stories and to listen effectively
to more complex stories as they grow.
12. There are two essential components of preverbal behavior during infant’s first year, which account for
contingent responding that becomes linked successively and allows for mutual reciprocity and understanding.
13. Joint reference suggests that a caregiver and child are focusing on the same object or event at the same time.
14. Many researchers believe that the unique characteristics of infant-directed speech, or parentese, facilitate the
acquisition of language. See Figure 4.2 on p. 128 for characteristics of parentese.
15. Simply hearing language is not enough. The child’s communicative interactions with his caregivers facilitate
language acquisition and overall language development.
16. Conversations between parents and their children show developmental trends.
a. The interplay of expectations and reactions between a parent and child when more than one language is
being used in the home can heavily influence the language productions of the child and allow the child to
adjust her own use of the languages in suitable contexts.
i. Code mixing is the use of various combinations of words or phrases from more than one language.
17. We know that quantity and quality of language input is important, especially during infancy and the toddler
years. The basic and essential ingredients are listed on p. 132-133.
18. Recent research has proved that the amount and frequency of infant-adult interactions plays a vital role in
optimal development.
and 10.
iii. Children who are advanced in language have parents who talk significantly more to them than do
children who are not advanced in language.
b. A natural language study conducted by the LENA Research Foundation used a digital language processor,
which captures a full day of conversation between each child and his or her caregiver. Data available from
this study confirm findings from Hart and Risley and add important insights.
i. Figure 4.3 on p. 135 summarizes key findings from the LENA Foundation study.
ii. Researchers are also using the LENA technology to study interactional patterns of children, including
children who have disabilities, and adults in a wide variety of settings.
19. As children hear auditory information, speech and language development depends on the formation of auditory
patterns through the ability to attend specifically to speech, discriminate between speech sounds, detect and
20. Each language is governed by phonotactic rules that allow for permissible arrangements of sounds. The
auditory systems of children help them receive, perceive and store this linguistic information for interpretation
and then retrieve the codes as they learn to express speech and language.
21. Fast mapping is a process whereby children hear and understand words in the absence of direct teaching and is
associated with the large vocabulary spurt that children achieve at about two years of age.
22. There is not complete agreement among language experts about how children attach meanings to words, but
there are three views for our consideration that refer only to the semantics of word learning.
a. Semantic feature hypothesis: Each word has its own set of semantic features that distinguishes it from other
words. Features are perceptual characteristics such as shape and size.
b. Functional core hypothesis: Early word meanings are learned primarily on the basis of the function of
23. The process of expanding and fine-tuning word meanings is called slow mapping or extended mapping.
24. Prelinguistic vocalizations by babies occur in a predictable sequence across the first year:
a. Reflexive cries (0-1 month)
b. Vegetative sounds (0-1 month)
c. Cooing (1-4 months): vowel-like sounds
d. Differentiated crying (1-4 months)
e. Laughing (4 months)
f. Transitional or marginal babbling (5 months): single-syllable productions of vowel- and consonant-like
sounds
25. Development of the three stages of a speech act include:
a. Perlocutionary stage (0-8 months): infant is responding in a reflexive manner to her environment
26. There are documented early indicators of intentionality, which provide information about early communication
skills in prelinguistic and linguistic infants and toddlers. These are gestural behaviors which emerge in an
27. Researchers have uncovered a developmental sequence to imitation that reflects infants’ acquisition of the
understanding of another person’s goal and their ability to use trace memory and to generalize what they learn.
28. By the time infants have reached their first year, pointing becomes a way to interact further with people, things,
and events in the infants’ surroundings. There is some debate as to whether pointing at this age shows
communicative intent or whether it is for the self only.
29. The child’s first words are used in reference to things that matter most in her own world. She names people,
objects, and actions that are of immediate interest. Children also use social greetings or request simple actions.
Children in the first-word stage must use the same words to express many different functions.
a. Overextension and underextension are common characteristics in the language of young children.
30. One way to classify nonlinguistic utterances and single-word utterances is by function.
a. Halliday expanded his list of early communicative functions to capture the functions of single words (Table
4.5, p. 161).
31. Words can be categorized in other ways besides function.
a. Bloom suggested that early words are of two basic types:
i. Substantive words refer to objects or events that have perceptual or functional features in common.
32. A presupposition is an assumption the speaker makes concerning what the listener knows about the subject of
the conversation. The child in the single-word stage is just beginning to develop presuppositional skills, which
continue to develop throughout the preschool and school age years.
33. By the time the child is 18 months old, she is demonstrating some of the basic rules of turn taking in her
conversations with other people, including turn taking, assuming knowledge and taking into account a partner’s
perspective.
34. Roger Brown developed a specific stage model. Brown’s stages of syntactic development are widely used by
language experts to describe the development of grammar.
a. Brown tracked syntactic development of English by measuring the average number of units of meaning
35. Brown’s Early Stage 1 occurs in 12- to 22-month-olds with an average MLU of 1.0-1.5.
a. In this stage, children use one-word utterances, so only one morpheme is used at a time. Whole words are
36. Brown’s Late Stage 1 occurs in 22- to 26-month-olds with an average MLU of 1.5-2.0.
a. We know that the child typically begins to put two words together between the ages of 18-24 months.
b. These 2-word combinations represent the beginning of syntax.
i. The child discovers and applies rules for putting words together in a manner that creates meaning
greater than the added meanings of the words along, which is the definition of a sentence.
c. The significance of two-word utterances can be examined and described on three levels: syntactic, semantic
and pragmatic.
i. There are at least two ways to describe syntax in two-word utterances.
ii. Researchers who suggest that early two-word utterances reflect the child’s understanding of meaning
relations and rules for word order refer to the rules used at this juncture in development as semantic-
syntactic rules. Other experts have proposed several semantic classification systems they believe will
more adequately describe children’s two-word combinations (Table 4.9, p. 172), and other researchers
have identified additional two-term relations.
iii. The functions or intentions identified from Halliday’s work are now combined and modified into at
least three new functions: pragmatic, mathetic and informative. A child at this stage abides by some of
the basic rules of conversation.
d. There is evidence that the child will begin to produce 3- and 4-word combinations at approximately 24
months.
37. For as long as people have systematically studied language and language development, there have been
questions about the relationship between comprehension and production. There is appealing logic in the
Discussion Topics
• Encourage students to discuss states or areas of the United States that are more impacted by poverty and reasons
for which this could be attributed. Then discuss the different types of capital (human, social-cultural, social-
political, financial/material and environmental/natural) and categorize the students’ brainstormed reasons within
this framework.
• Discuss how the health, safety and educational factors of low-SES children impact their future. Encourage
students to share factors of their own SES that have influenced their schooling, career choice and overall life
circumstances.
• Encourage a discussion regarding infant-directed singing, rhymes and stories and why they are commonly
embedded into play with infants, toddlers and preschoolers.
• Discuss the characteristics of parentese and the role it plays in early infant-adult interactions. Do any of these
findings surprise you? What evidence do we have that early infant-adult interactions are culturally embedded?
• Compare and contrast the hypotheses that have been proposed to account for the development of word
meanings.
• Describe the attainments of communication functions in early language including intentionality, gestures, and
imitation.
• What is the value of a stage view of language development? What are the potential dangers of adhering too
rigidly to this view in studying the development of any set of behaviors in human beings?
Suggested Activities
• Using suggestions from p. 119 and/or your own suggestions, create a brochure, presentation or community
project with the goal of supporting low-SES families/children.
• Using the findings from the 1995 Hart and Risley study (described on pp. 133-134) and Figures 4.3-4.10 (pp.
135-141) from the LENA Foundation studies, make a pamphlet for parents discussing the importance of parent
conversations with their children during the early years. Include strategies and examples to support parents in
these interactions.
• Create a brochure to be distributed to pediatricians summarizing the expressive milestones children reach during
their first year.
• Using Patrick’s language sample (Figure 4.15 on pp. 159-160), trace the utterance-function categorization to
Tables 4.5 and 4.6 on pp. 161-162. What information do these function categories suggest about Patrick’s use of
language at one year of age?
Assignment Suggestions
• Video Example 4.1 (p. 119): Children who live in low-socioeconomic (SES) families benefit from participation
in Head Start and its related programs. Watch the video to learn about these programs and their goals.
• Video Example 4.2 (p. 129): Joint attention, contingent responding, and parentese are three ways that caregivers
establish and maintain interactions with infants. As you watch the video, observe these three types of interaction
strategies.
• Video Example 4.4 (p. 153): Children use variegated babbling and jargon during purposeful activities. In the
video, you will notice that the 1-year-old child is having a pretend conversation the telephone, complete with
the intonation of his native language.
• Video Reflection 4.1 (p. 158): Watch the video of a parent interacting with her 19-month-old son, Sam, and
then answer the questions. Sam is just beginning to acquire spoken words.
• Video Reflection 4.2 (p. 173): Watch the video of a parent teaching her child to produce two-word semantic
relations, then answer the questions.
• Readers may assess their understanding by completing these brief, self-check quizzes:
o 4.1 (p. 119): social and cultural factors in language acquisition
o 4.2 (p. 124): parent-infant communication
o 4.4 (p. 145): child-directed speech
o 4.6 (p. 165): development of first words
o 4.7 (p. 177): word combinations in early and late stage 1
• Chapter Review 4.1 (p. 179)
Websites to Explore
• The website of The Heritage Foundation offers information, facts and perspectives on poverty in America on a
page titled “Poverty and Inequality.”
• An article by Dr. Ruby Payne titled “Understanding and Working With Students and Adults from Poverty” on
Michigan’s website discusses the “hidden rules” that govern the culture of generational poverty.
• The website for the LENA Foundation provides information regarding the latest research, their language and
autism screening program and how the LENA Pro works.
