Child Development

1. STAGES OF CHILDREN
DEVELOPMENT AND THE
RELATED THEORIES OF
DEVELOPMENT :
LANGUAGE
BY:
AMZAR
NUR MURNI
NOR ILLYANA

2. WHAT IS LANGUAGE?

3. DEFINING LANGUAGE
• A form of communication, whether spoken, written, or
signed, that is based on system of symbols.
• Consists of all the words use by community and the
rules for varying and combining them.
• Infinite generality is the ability to produce an endless
number of meaningful sentences using a finite set of
words and rules.
• Phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and
pragmatics.

4. HOW LANGUAGE DEVELOPS

5. INFANCY
• Infant language development are crying(birth),
cooing (1-2 months), babbling (6 months), making the
transition from universal linguist to language-specific
listener (6-12 months), using gestures (8-12 months),
recognition of their names (as early as 5 months), first
word spoken (10-15 months), vocabulary spurt (18
months), rapid expansion of understanding words (18-
24 months), and two-words utterance (18-24 months).

6. EARLY CHILDHOOD
• Advances in phonology, morphology, syntax,
semantics, and pragmatics continue in early
childhood.
• The transition to complex sentences begins at 2-3 years
and continue through the elementary school years.
• Currently, there is considerable interest in the early
literacy of children.

7. MIDDLE AND LATE CHILDHOOD
• Children become more analytical and logical in their
approach to words and grammar.
• Challs’s Model proposes 5 stages reading, ranging
from birth/first grade to high school.
• Current debate involving how to teach children to
read focuses on the phonics approach versus the
whole language approach.
• Researches has found strong evidence that the phonic
approach should be used in teaching children to
read, especially in kindergarten and in the first grade
and with struggling readers, but the children also
benefits from the whole language approach.

8. • Children’s writing emerges out of scribbling.
• Advances in children’s language and cognitive
development provide the underpinning for improve
writing.
• Strategy instructions is especially effective in improving
children’s writing.
• Bilingual education aims to teach academic subjects
to immigrants children in their native languages, while
gradually adding English instruction.
• Researchers have found that billingualism does not
intefer with performance in either language.
• Success in learning a second language is greater in
childhood than adolescene.

9. ADOLESCENCE
• Language changes include more effective use of
words, improvement in the ability to understand
metaphor, satire, and adult literary works, and
improvement in writing.
• Young adolescence often speaks a dialect with their
peers using jargon and slangs.

10. BIOLOGICAL AND
ENVIRONMENTAL INFLUENCES

11. STAGE:
INFANT-TODDLER

12. “The Behaviourist Perspective”
Theory
• Children say their first word at 12 month of age with a
range of about 8 to 18 months.(Whitehurst,1982)
• By the age of 6, children are speaking in elaborate
sentences and skilled conversationalist.
• The first theory is “The Behaviourist Perspective”(B.F.
Skinner,1957).
• He proposed that language, just like any other
behaviour, is acquired through operant conditioning.
• As the baby makes sounds, parents reinforce those
that are most like words with smiles, hugs, and speech
in return.
• For example, baby is babbling words.

13. • Some behaviourist rely on imitation to explain how
children rapidly acquire complex utterances, such as
whole sentences and phrases.
• Young children do not just copy the speech of others.

14. “The Nativist Perspective” Theory
• Linguist Noam Chomsky, 1957, he believes that
grammatical rules are much too complex to be
directly taught or independently discovered by a
young child.
• He argued that all children are born with a Language
Acquisition Device (LAD). No matter which language
children hear, they speak it in a rule-oriented fashion
from the very beginning.
• Careful study of children’s first word combination
reveals that they do not follow grammatical rules.
• Lastly, language acquisition is no longer regarded as
accomplished quite as quickly as nativist theory
assumes.

15. “The Interactionist Perspective”
Theory
• Emphasizing that innate abilities and environmental
influences interact to produce children’s extraordinary
language achievement.
• 2-6 months
 infants coo, making pleasurable vowel sounds.
Around 2 months, babies begin to make vowel-like
noises like cooing because of their pleasant “ooo”
quality.
• 4 months on
 infants and parents established joined attention,
and parents often verbally label what is the baby is
looking at.

16. • 6-14 months
 infants babble, adding consonants to the sounds of
cooing period and repeating syllable.
 games such as “peek-a-boo” provide practice in
conversational which highlight the meaning and function
of spoken words.
Around 6 months, there is vowel combination such as
“banaanaa”.
As adult interact with infants and they listen to spoken
language, babbling increases and its range of sound
expand.
• 7 months
 babbling of hearing infant starts to include many
sounds of mature spoken languages.

17. • 8-12 months
infants use preverbal gesture such as showing and
pointing to influence the behaviours of others.
• 12 months
 infants say their first recognizable word.
• 18-24 months
 vocabulary expands from about 15 to 200 hundred
words.
• 20-26 months
 toddlers combine 2 words

18. STAGE:
CHILDREN

19. VOCABULARY DEVELOPMENT
• Researchers had discovered that they can connect a
new word with an underlying concept after only a
brief and counter, a process called “fast-mapping”.
• Pre-schooler figure out the meanings of new words by
relying on special rules, called the principle of contrast.
• Pre-schooler also extend language meanings through
metaphore.

20. GRAMMATICAL DEVELOPMENT
• By the age of 3 ½ years, children have mastered a lot
of grammatical rules but somehow committed errors
called “over-regulation”.
• Even though they make errors, their grasp of grammar
is impressive.

21. BECOMING AN EFFECTIVE
CONVERSIONALIST
• At the beginning of the early childhood, they are
capable of effective conversation.
• They know a great deal about culturally accepted
ways of adjusting speech to fit the age, sex, and social
status of speakers and listeners.
• Pre-schoolers communication vary considerably across
context supporting language learning in the early
childhood.
• Adults provide subtle indirect feedback about
grammar by using two techniques (expansion and
recast).
• Adults respond to children’s nature desire to become
competence speaker by listening, elaborate,
estamulate them to talk further.

22. STAGE: ADOLESCENT

23. • A review of research demonstrates that both oral and
written language continue to develop through
adulthood.
• Studies show that such skills as the abilities to interpret
metacognitive verbs, to make word associations, and
to understand syntax improve with age.
• Adolescents use emotive, connotative, and socially
coded language

24. • Their socially coded language of swearing shows how
conscious they are of how they are perceived
linguistically.
• Adolescent language development can be achieved
by:
 student initiative;
 incorporation of prior knowledge;
 inclusion of the learner's cultural context
 interaction between school and society.

25. THANK YOU 
Q & A SESSION