Language Development

The English word infant is derived from the Latin word meaning unable to speak, reflecting the general sense that the transition from infancy into childhood is marked by the production of the child's first word. However, modern methods for measuring infant behavior and brain activity suggest that there is a great deal of language learning that goes on before first word production. The book, Language Development, by LouAnn Gerken, Ph.D. examines both classic and current studies that trace the development of human language from before birth to the early childhood years. By focusing on areas of language development in which a unified set of theoretical issues has been explored, the book presents a theoretically and empirically more coherent approach to language development than other books in this discipline. The book also considers the theoretical questions that drive language scientists to pursue these studies: What are the biological underpinnings of language? Why has it proven so difficult to build a computer that learns language? Is language learning like or unlike learning of other abilities such as math or music? How should we best characterize developmental language disorders? This book is aimed at the junior and senior undergraduates and the graduate students enrolled in Language Development across psychology, linguistics, and communication disorders. For practitioners engaged in working with language development/disorders, this is the perfect book to stay up-to-date. Each chapter in this book includes valuable highlights of "thought questions" to help students ponder the content of the chapter. Lucid narration of contents has been significantly augmented by ample usage of tables and illustrations.

• Chapter 1. Introduction
  • Why Study Language Development?
  • The Nature of Language
  • Meaning Units
    Combinable Meaning Units
    Combinable Submeaning Units
  • The Combinatorial System Used in Human Language
    Phonology (Submeaning Units)
    Lexical Semantics (Meaning Units)
    Morphology and Syntax
    Grammar
  • Theories of Language Development
    What Are We Trying to Explain?
    Why Are Theories Important?
    Overview of the Theories
    Ruling Out an Unconstrained Learner
    Associative Learning—Making Connections Among Experiences
    Hypothesis Testing—The Learner as Scientist
    Triggering—A Minimal Role for Experience
    Summary of Theories
  • Organization of the Book
• Chapter 2. Overview of Phonology
  • What Is Phonology?
  • Segmental Phonology
    Phones and Phonemes
    A Note About Notation
    Articulatory Features
    Acoustic Manifestations of Articulatory Features
    Variability in Acoustic Manifestations of Articulatory Features
    Orderings of Phonemes
  • Prosody
  • Summary
• Chapter 3. Phonological Perception
  • Prenatal Speech Perception
  • Infant Speech Sound Discrimination
    Early Exploration
    Some Puzzling Findings Lead to a Reananlysis
  • How Does Speech Perception Change Over Development?
  • Finding Phonological Patterns in Auditory Words
  • Phonological Perception of Words
  • Summary
• Chapter 4. Phonological Production
  • Precursors to Linguistic Production
    Oral Babble
    Manual Babble
  • Protowords and Early Words
    Sound Properties of Early Words
    Early Words by Signing Children
  • The Relation of Children’s Early Words Productions and Adult Forms
    Substitution Processes
    Assimilation Processes
    Syllable and Word Shape Processes
    Other Important Relations Between Adult and Child Forms
  • Theories of the Relation Between Adult and Child Forms
    Perceptual Theories
    Articulatory Theories
    Innate Phonology Theories
    Experience with the Target Language Theories
    Summary of Theories of the Relation Between Adult and Child Forms
  • Prosodic Properties of Early Productions
  • Language Disorders Involving Phonology
    Disorders Involving the Production of Consonants and Vowels *:Disorders Involving the Production of Prosody
  • Summary
• Chapter 5. The Lexicon
  • What Is the Lexicon?
  • The Segmentation Problem
    Single-Word Utterances
    Words at Ends of Utterances
    Statistical Cues
    Occurrence of Words Adjacent to Frequent Function Morphemes
    Language-Specific Stress Patterns
    Language-Specific Typical Sound Sequences
  • The Mapping Problem
    The Whole Object Assumption
    The Taxonomic Assumption
    The Mutual Exclusivity Assumption
    The Shape Bias
    Statistical Constraints
    Syntactic Constraints
    Children’s Mapping Errors
    The Mapping Problem Across Languages
  • Summary
• Chapter 6. Overview of Syntax and Morphology
  • What Is Morphosyntax?
  • Four Components of Morphosyntax
    Syntactic Constituents
    Syntactic Categories
    Structural Positions
    Thematic Roles
  • Four Debates Concerning the Development of Morphosyntax
    Far Do Children Generalize from Morphosynctactic Input?
    Can Associative Learning Models Account for Generalization?
    Do Children Make Generalizations That Are Not Supported by the Input?
    Do Children’s Morphosyntactic Errors Reflect Possible Human Grammars?
  • Summary
• Chapter 7. Children’s Sensitivity to Sentence Forms
  • Syntactic Constituents
  • Syntactic Categories
    Children’s Early Utterances as Evidence for Syntactic Categories
    Children’s Use of Distributional Cues to Discover Syntactic Categories
    Are Syntactic Categories Innate?
  • Word Order
    Word Order in Child Production
    Word Order in Infant Perception
    Phrase Order in Infant Perception
  • Summary
• Chapter 8. Assigning Meaning to Sentence Forms and Four Debates About Morphosyntactic Development
  • Assigning Thematic Roles
    Using Word Order to Assign Thematic Roles
    Using Sentence Type to Assign Thematic Roles
    Using Morphological Case Markers to Assign Thematic Roles
    Learning the Thematic Role Requirements of Particular Verbs
    Summary of Assigning Thematic Roles to Structural Positions **How Far Do Children Generalize from Morphosyntactic Input?
  • Can Associative Learning Models Account for Generalization?
    Past Tense Overgeneralization
    Children’s Generalization of Abstract Patterns
  • Do Children Make Generalizations That Are Not Supported by the Input?
    Hierarchilcal Structure in Question Format
    Anaphoric One
  • Do Children’s Morphosyntactic Errors Reflect Possible Human Grammars?
  • English-Speaking Children’s Subjectless Sentences
    Children’s Pronoun Case Errors
    Summary of Children’s Morphosyntactic Errors
  • Summary
• Chapter 9. Issues in the Biology of Language
  • We Need More Data
  • What Do We Know so Far?
    The Raw Materials for Language
    Learning About the Form of the Input
    Mapping Forms to Meanings
  • The Development of Language in Two Atypical Populations
    Specific Language Impairment
    Williams Syndrome
    Summary of Two Atypical Populations
    Age Effects on Language Learning
    Age Effects in Second Language Learning
    Age Effects in First Language Learning
    Creating Language Structure
  • Summary
• Chapter 10. Some Methods Used in Language Development Research
  • Some Behavioral Methods Focusing on Infant Form Discrimination
    Contingent Sucking Rate Procedure
    High Amplitude Sucking Procedure
    Headturn Preference Procedure
    Central Fixation Preferential Listening Procedure
    Visual Habituation Procedure
    Conditioned Head Turn Procedure
  • Behavioral Methods Focusing on Infants’ Ability to Associate Form and Reference
    Intermodal Preferential Looking Procedure
    Looking While Listening Procedure
    Switch Procedure
  • Methods Measuring Brain Activity
    Event-Related Potentials
    Magnetoencephalography (MEG)
    Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI)
    Near Infrared Spectroscopy (NIRS)
  • Methods for Testing Child Comprehension and Sensitivity to Morphosyntax
    Picture Selection Procedure
    Act-Out Procedure
    Grammaticality Judgments
    Truth-Value Judgments
  • Methods for Testing Language Production
    Spontaneous Speech
    Imitative Speech
    Elicited Production
• Index