Unraveling the Mysteries: A Comprehensive Look at Language Development Theories

Language, a uniquely human attribute, is a complex system of communication that employs symbols in a structured manner to convey meaning. It empowers us to share our thoughts and intelligence through speaking, reading, and writing. While mastering a language can be challenging, especially for adults learning a second language, children exhibit a remarkable ability to acquire language quickly and effortlessly. This article delves into the various theories that attempt to explain this fascinating phenomenon of language acquisition.

The Intricacies of Language

Every language has underlying structural rules that make meaningful communication possible. Every language is different. In English, an adjective comes before a noun (“red house”), whereas in Spanish, the adjective comes after (“casa [house] roja [red].”) In German, you can put noun after noun together to form giant compound words; in Chinese, the pitch of your voice determines the meaning of your words; in American Sign Language, you can convey full, grammatical sentences with tense and aspect by moving your hands and face.

Levels of Linguistic Structure

Language can be broken down into several key levels:

Phonemes: These are the smallest units of sound that differentiate meaning in a language. For example, the words "bake" and "brake" differ by only one phoneme, yet have distinct meanings. English utilizes approximately 45 phonemes. Babies can discriminate among the sounds that make up a language.
Morphemes: Morphemes are the smallest units of meaning in a language, comprised of one or more phonemes. Altering a morpheme can change the entire meaning of a word. Some morphemes are individual words (such as “eat” or “water”). These are known as free morphemes because they can exist on their own.
Semantics: Semantics refers to the rules that govern how we derive meaning from morphemes.
Grammar: Grammar encompasses the rules of a language. Speakers internalize these rules and exceptions.
Syntax: Syntax refers to the rules by which we construct sentences in a language. Each language has a different syntax. The syntax of the English language requires that each sentence have a noun and a verb, each of which may be modified by adjectives and adverbs.
Pragmatics: Pragmatics involves how we use language socially, communicating effectively and appropriately with others, including turn-taking, staying on topic, and using appropriate tone and eye contact.
Contextual Information: Meaning isn't fixed; it depends on context. We use our knowledge and nonverbal cues to interpret language.

Early Language Development: A Timeline

Children begin to learn about language from a very early age. In fact, it appears that this is occurring even before we are born. Newborns show a preference for their mother’s voice and appear to be able to discriminate between the language spoken by their mother and other languages. Here's a glimpse into the stages of language production in infants:

Cooing: Almost immediately, babies begin to coo, producing one-syllable combinations of consonants and vowels (e.g., "coo" or "ba"). Interestingly, babies replicate sounds from their own languages.
Babbling: Around 7 months, infants start babbling, engaging in intentional vocalizations that lack specific meaning. They often repeat consonant-vowel sequences like "ma-ma-ma" or "da-da-da". By the time they are 1 year old, the babbling uses primarily the sounds of the language that they are learning. These vocalizations have a conversational tone that sounds meaningful even though it isn’t.
Gesturing: Children communicate information through gesturing long before they speak, and there is some evidence that gesture usage predicts subsequent language development.
Receptive Language: At around ten months of age, the infant can understand more than he or she can say, which is referred to as receptive language.
Holophrasic Speech: Around 12-13 months, children begin using their first words, often employing one-word expressions known as holophrasic speech. For example, the child may say “ju” for the word “juice” and use this sound when referring to a bottle. The listener must interpret the meaning of the holophrase, and when this is someone who has spent time with the child, interpretation is not too difficult.
Telegraphic Speech: By toddlerhood, children have a vocabulary of about 50-200 words and begin putting those words together in telegraphic speech, such as “baby bye-bye” or “doggie pretty”. In this form of speech, words needed to convey messages are used, but the articles and other parts of speech necessary for grammatical correctness are not yet used.

The Role of Caregivers

Adults often use "baby talk" or child-directed speech, characterized by exaggerated vowel and consonant sounds, a high-pitched voice, and expressive facial expressions. Infants are frequently more attuned to the tone of voice of the person speaking than to the content of the words themselves and are aware of the target of speech.

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Vocabulary Explosion

A child’s vocabulary expands between the ages of two to six from about 200 words to over 10,000 words. This “vocabulary spurt” typically involves 10-20 new words per week and is accomplished through a process called fast-mapping. Words are easily learned by making connections between new words and concepts already known. By fifth grade, a child’s vocabulary has grown to 40,000 words. It grows at a rate that exceeds that of those in early childhood.

Major Theories of Language Development

Several theories attempt to explain how children acquire language. These include the behavioral theory, the nativistic theory, the semantic-cognitive theory, and the social-pragmatic theory.

1. Behavioral Theory: Language as Learned Behavior

The behavioral perspective, championed by B.F. Skinner, posits that language is a set of verbal behaviors learned through operant conditioning. Skinner (1957) proposed that language is learned through reinforcement. Operant conditioning involves reinforcing a desired behavior immediately after it occurs. Behaviorists believe that children learn language through imitation, reinforcement, and copying adult language behaviors. They view the child as a reactor to external forces that shape their language development. A young child will try to imitate sounds and words he hears his parents say the best he can. When a child says a word that sounds close to what the parents say, they accept and reinforce it. In other words, they begin shaping the word until the child can eventually say the word as well as the parents do. For example, when a child says "mama" when his mother starts to pick him up, the mother is delighted to hear the child say this and gives the child a hug and kiss, saying "Mama, that's right, I'm Mama!" The mother's affectionate response makes it more likely that the child will say "mama" again.

2. Nativistic Theory: The Innate Language Faculty

Noam Chomsky (1965) criticized this behaviorist approach, asserting instead that the mechanisms underlying language acquisition are biologically determined. The use of language develops in the absence of formal instruction and appears to follow a very similar pattern in children from vastly different cultures and backgrounds. It would seem, therefore, that we are born with a biological predisposition to acquire a language . Chomsky introduced the nativist theory of language development, emphasizing the role of innate structures and mechanisms in the human brain. This theory, also known as Universal Grammar, posits that language is an innate capacity of humans. According to Chomsky, children are born with a language acquisition device (LAD), a biological ability that enables them to acquire language rules and structures effortlessly. He suggested that all human languages share a deep structure rooted in a set of grammatical rules and categories. Chomsky argued that the linguistic input received by young children is often insufficient (or “impoverished”) for them to learn the complexities of their native language solely through imitation or reinforcement.

3. Semantic-Cognitive Theory: The Interplay of Language and Cognition

The semantic-cognitive theory emphasizes the interrelationship between language learning and cognition. Children demonstrate certain cognitive abilities as a corresponding language behavior emerges. The semantic meaning that a person wants to communicate determines the words and word order (syntactic form) the person uses. For example, children know what they want to communicate (cognition) but do not always use the correct semantics or grammar.

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4. Social-Pragmatic Theory: Language as a Tool for Communication

The social-pragmatic theory considers communication as the basic function of language. This perspective is first seen in infant-caregiver interactions in which the caregiver responds to an infant's sounds and gestures. The prerequisites for the social-pragmatic theory are:

The infant must have a caregiver in close proximity to see, hear, or touch
The caregiver must provide the infant with basic physical needs such as food, warmth, and exploring the environment
The infant must develop an attachment to the caregiver
The infant and caregiver must be able to attend to the same objects or actions simultaneously
The infant and caregiver engage in turn-taking in both verbal and nonverbal behaviors

In ideal parent-child communication, all of the five prerequisites are met in most interactions.

Clinical Applications of Language Development Theories

Clinicians apply these theories in various ways to understand and address language development in children:

Behavioral Theory: Clinicians use a behavioral approach to study children's language by observing, describing, and counting specific language behaviors. This basic stimulus-response model first teacher children to imitate a sound and then reinforces the sound production with verbal praise (e.g. "Great job!").
Nativistic Theory: When children do not use certain language structures that are appropriate for their age, they most likely have not acquired them naturally and would need to improve in therapy. Helping children learn how to combine words, phrases, and sentences lets them convey messages to others.
Semantic-Cognitive Theory: Clinicians use the semantic-cognitive theory by describing children's strategies for gaining new information. For example, the complexity of a sentence, the amount of information in the sentence, and the rate at which the sentence is said may significantly affect the way a child understands a sentence. A child with delayed or disordered language could benefit from a clinician who can adjust one or all of these variables.
Social-Pragmatic Theory: Caregivers can make language easier in many ways, including playing social games that are stimulating and exciting for infants (e.g. peekaboo), taking turns in activities where the caregivers speaks and expects the infant to respond in a similar way, and reading books with young children. Clinicians can assess and treat a child's language impairments from a social-communicative and contextual perspective.

The Influence of Environment and Socioeconomic Factors

Research by Betty Hart and Todd Risley in the late 1990s and early 2000s indicated that children from less advantaged backgrounds are exposed to millions of fewer words in their first three years of life than children who come from more privileged socioeconomic backgrounds. They found that the average child in a professional family hears 2,153 words per waking hour, the average child in a working-class family hears 1,251 words per hour, and an average child in a welfare family only 616 words per hour.

The L4L Theory of Language Learning

Languages are always learned in specific socio-cultural contexts. Learners do not just learn “language,” they learn particular ways of using language in particular contexts. This is the case for multilingual and monolingual learners. Our L4L theory of language learning “integrates insights from ethnographic research on language and literacy (Heath, 1983; Levine, et al., 1996; Ochs, 1988), pragmatic development studies (Blum-Kulka, 2008; Ninio & Snow, 1996) and functional linguistics research (Berman & Ravid, 2009; Schleppegrell, 2004) to conceptualize language learning as inseparable from context… Three key developmental implications emerge from these combined insights. First, language development continues throughout adolescence and, under normal circumstances, language learning continues for as long as learners expand the language-mediated social contexts that they navigate. Second, being a skilled language user in one social context does not guarantee linguistic dexterity in a different social context.

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Cultural and Linguistic Diversity

Regardless of the theory of language development that is followed, children mature and grow within the context of their caregivers, whether they are parents, family members, or other members of the community. These people provide an environment with communication for the maturing child that reflects the range of meanings, values, perceptions, and beliefs of the cultures they are a part of. The United States is considered multicultural, like many other countries. Multicultural refers to a society that is characterized by a diversity of cultures, languages, traditions, religions, and values, as well as socioeconomic classes, sexual orientations, and ability levels where, ideally, individuals are respected and valued for their contributions to the society as a whole. Speech-language pathologists and audiologists need to be able to understand and appreciate the cultural-linguistic diversity of client populations in order to better serve them. Cultural diversity is not determined by a person's origin or color of skin, but by many other factors including linguistic background, level of education, socioeconomic status, and religious beliefs. Any of these factors could influence speech and language development. Many children in America are come from families who have recently immigrated to America. These families often continue to speak their native language at home and in social environments. This typically causes children to develop the family's native language as their first language.

Languages have a variety of forms and dialects that can vary in phonology, vocabulary, and grammar. Within a language, no dialect is better than another, however, standard dialect can be associated with higher education levels and is used in education environments. Standard dialects for one language can even vary from country to country. For example, America, England, Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore all use English, but have very different dialects.

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