ece315 week 5 final project

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As you advance in your studies, you will continue to build your knowledge base in hopes of reaching your professional goals. This assignment is a culmination of the learning gained throughout this course, with hopes for you to build upon this as you grow in your academic journey. As a professional, you will want to showcase the knowledge you have gained, as well as demonstrate who you are as a unique, reflective practitioner entering the professional world. This project will allow you to develop a language-focused component that you would be able to add to your personal ePortfolio for future professional use. An ePortfolio is an organized collection of your work that is able to be accessed electronically. An ePortfolio may contain examples of some of your best work that you are able to share with others electronically, including potential employers. As you complete more courses, you are able to add more to your ePortfolio resulting in a reflective collection of who you are as an educator. The goal is for you to be able to use this as you enter the professional world. You can learn more about the creation of an ePortfolio at Virtual Educators.



For the Final Project, you will organize a language acquisition section that could later be added to your professional ePortfolio.



Choose one of the following ePortfolio methods to showcase your language acquisition learning.

  • Power Point Presentation
  • Google ePortfolio: This is an actual working website that you can enable for others to view.
Summarize each of the following components, created earlier in the course and revised using the feedback received. Be sure to explain the purpose of each. For example, you can summarize why you included your design of a language-rich environment for children as it relates to the support of language acquisition. For each bullet, you must include your summary and the actual assignment.
  1. Guided Introduction (Week One)
  2. A summary of your beliefs regarding language acquisition
  3. Language-Rich Environment (Week Two)
  4. Stages of Language Development Analysis (Week Three)
  5. Literacy Lesson Plan (Week Four)
  6. Language Reflection (You will choose another project complete within this course that you feel is a valuable reflection of your learning.)
  7. A summary of how you will support children’s language acquisition in your professional role
  8. Language Resource File in APA format (Week Five)
Your ePortfolio should be creative, but also professional and demonstrate the knowledge you have obtained. It is helpful to be thoughtful with your content and creative with your delivery.



Your Final Project should be submitted as one project. The ePortfolio should address the material using college-level writing and critical thought. In addition, it should include graphics, visuals, and media, as appropriate. Contents should be designed to clearly and concisely address the material with research justification. Your ePortfolio must be formatted according to APA style, including a title page and a reference page. You must use a minimum of five resources in addition to the course text. There is no length requirement for the ePortfolio so long as all of the required components have been included.



Please use the chapter attached and use in-text citations to complete the assignment.

Reference:

Piper, T. (2012). Making meaning, making sense: Children’s early language learning. San Diego, CA: Bridgepoint Education.




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1 Goodshoot/Thinkstock The Nature of Language Learning Objectives By the end of this chapter, you will be able to accomplish the following objectives: • Define language and describe the difference between language and communication. • Explain the four attributes of language. • Describe how cognition relates to language. • Explain the difference between language and dialect and the connection between culture and language. • Explain why language acquisition is a natural process that can be difficult to teach. pip80380_01_c01_001-024.indd 1 10/26/12 10:38 AM Introduction CHAPTER 1 Introduction J acob spends more than half of each 24-hour day sleeping. When he is awake, he is often content to sit on the kitchen floor trying to fit lids onto plastic containers, with only limited success much of the time. When he fails, he will sometimes throw the objects or cry out in frustration. He is incapable of dressing himself, although he will extend his arm in an effort to assist—sometimes. He pulls himself up by holding onto the leg of the kitchen table, and if he walks, it is only when he can hold onto something—a hand, a piece of furniture, or an oversized toy. Even then, his steps are unsteady. Sometimes Jacob curls up on the living room floor and falls asleep cuddling a soft furry stuffed animal. Other times, he flatly refuses to sleep at all. Jacob is 14 months old, and he is typical of other children his age. He has come a long way from the newborn who slept between 16 and 18 hours a day and couldn’t turn over much less walk, didn’t yet know his name or the name for anything else in his world, and whose only vocalization was crying. Today, he certainly knows his name and a great deal more. He responds to much of what is spoken to him. He can point to his body parts when they are named. He understands when his mother tells him it is time for a nap or lunch; and when the phone rings, he will say “Dada,” having learned that it is likely his father checking in. He has at least four other identifiable words of his own—mama, teddy, nana, and truck, although his pronunciations of teddy and truck are imperfect. In just six months’ time, he will be running as much as he is walking, holding onto nothing or nobody, and his interests will have expanded to include almost everything in his environment. Animals, trees, cars, and puzzles will fascinate him. Linguistically, he will have been very busy, indeed. His productive vocabulary, or those words he is heard to speak, will be close to 100 words, articulated well enough that most people can understand him, and he will be used to making complete sentences. It’s true that most of those sentences will have only two words, but to the toddler Jacob, they will constitute full sentences. He will be fairly effective at communicating his meaning, and when he can’t, he may show signs of frustration. His receptive vocabulary, or those words he understands but does not necessarily produce, will be much larger. As a language learner, he is making giant strides, but he is by no means finished. By the time Jacob blows out six candles on his birthday cake, he will have learned, on average, five new words per day, giving him a receptive vocabulary between 10,000 and 20,000 words (Rhodes, D’Amato, & Rothlisberg, 2010). He will be able to use most of those words in complex sentences that seem to run on forever. He will make mistakes occasionally, but those mistakes are likely to be evidence that he has over-learned a rule or two. For example, he might say, “I didn’t broughted that,” marking the verb bring for past tense not once, but two times. He will be able to recite the alphabet, identify a number of written words, and write his name. Jacob’s is a remarkable accomplishment, yet there is nothing remarkable about him at all. He is a typical human child growing up in circumstances and an environment that are not at all unusual. That is exactly what is so fascinating about human language. It is complex and difficult, yet children learn it largely without purposeful intervention by other humans. pip80380_01_c01_001-024.indd 2 10/26/12 10:38 AM CHAPTER 1 Pre-Test Language is so much a part of the human experience that Steven Pinker calls it an instinct. Moreover, it is this instinct that has made possible much of human accomplishment: “A common language connects the members of a community into an information-sharing network with formidable collective powers. Anyone can benefit from the strokes of genius, lucky accidents, and trial-and-error wisdom accumulated by anyone else, present or past” (Pinker, 2010, p. 3). In this chapter, we introduce the aspects of language and language learning that will be covered in greater detail throughout the remainder of the book. Beginning with a definition of language, we go on to describe the attributes of language that set it apart from other forms of communication including its unique association with thought and cognition and the many varieties of language that exist. Pre-Test 1. The primary means by which humans communicate is a. texting. b. facial cues. c. language. d. body movements. 2. Representing ideas or symbols with words is a. semanticity. b. representation. c. pictograph. d. syntax. 3. Language a. is unrelated to thought. b. follows thought, but does not lead it. c. is strongly linked to thought. d. leads thought, but does not follow it. 4. “Standard” dialect a. is free of jargon and slang usage. b. uses popular slang of the time. c. includes grammatical inaccuracies. d. consists of the most correct dialect. 5. The story of Helen Keller demonstrates that pip80380_01_c01_001-024.indd 3 a. people can overcome obstacles to learn languages. b. sign language uses different cognitive structures than does spoken language. c. even those who lack an innate desire to learn develop language skills. d. children do not need stimulation to learn a language. 10/26/12 10:38 AM Section 1.1  What Is Language? CHAPTER 1 Answers 1. c. Language. The answer can be found in Section 1.1. 2. a. Semanticity. The answer can be found in Section 1.2. 3. c. Is strongly linked to thought. The answer can be found in Section 1.3. 4. a. Is free of jargon and slang usage. The answer can be found in Section 1.4. 5. a. People can overcome obstacles to learn languages. The answer can be found in Section 1.5. 1.1  What Is Language? B efore we can discuss language and how children learn to function effectively with it, it is necessary to consider just what language is. We know it when we hear it and we know when we are using it, but defining it proves a little more difficult. That is because language is a complex system that humans all over the world learn in its many varieties. Basically, it is a mode of communication, or the means by which messages are transmitted, and it has, as we shall see, certain unique properties. Closely connected to cognition and thought, language is part of what sets us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. To appreciate the unique complexity of the human brain that created language as well as the complexity of language itself, and, most importantly, to begin to appreciate the enormity of children’s accomplishment in acquiring language, it is important to understand just how special human language is. Defining Language Language is the principal means by which humans communicate, but not the only one. Communication is the activity of a sender conveying a message, usually with meaningful information, to a recipient, and the communication may occur across space and time. Figure 1.1 illustrates the interactive nature of communication, which is complete when the recipient has received and understood the intended message. pip80380_01_c01_001-024.indd 4 10/26/12 10:38 AM CHAPTER 1 Section 1.1  What Is Language? Figure 1.1: Interactive model of communication Encoder Source Decoder Message Feedback Source’s field of experience Decoder Source Encoder Receiver’s field of experience This graphic represents the interactive model of communication in which both encoder and decoder are human participants. Source: Adapted from Wood, J.T. (2009). Communication in our lives (4th edition). Belmont, CA: Thompson-Wadsworth. In humans, language is the usual medium for communication, but crying, screaming, gestures, bodily movement (as in pantomime), and facial expressions can also be used to communicate, either on their own or supplemental to spoken language. Communication as a means for transmitting information is not unique to humans—many other animals have means to communicate, but as we shall see, these differ in fundamental ways from human language. Human Language vs. Animal Communication Many species of animals can communicate, and some species do so with more complex systems than others—dolphins and whales, for example, use systems that more closely resemble human language than birds or bees, although each is capable of communicating what its species needs to communicate. Even the most complex of these systems, however, pales in comparison to what a 2-year-old child is able to do. Many pet owners do not agree. Mrs. K. is a case in point. Mrs. K. was a widow who lived alone with her dog, Calvin. She insisted that Calvin not only responded to her commands or requests but that he initiated some kind of exchange, that he could, in her view, “talk.” Calvin could sit, fetch, or lie down in response to the appropriate verb or gesture, just as any well-trained dog will do. He fetched his leash when she went to the closet for her coat or boots. He clearly understood some of what she said, and he was able to signal his wishes. pip80380_01_c01_001-024.indd 5 10/26/12 10:38 AM CHAPTER 1 Section 1.2  Four Attributes of Language Mrs. K. insisted that the dog didn’t just respond to her, but sometimes initiated “conversations.” For example, he would retrieve and bring her his leash when he wanted to go for a walk, and she maintained that his bark when he wanted to go out was different from his bark warning her of an approaching car. Mrs. K.’s neighbor wasn’t convinced and asked, “What does he do when he’s hungry?” Mrs. K. responded that he would go to his food dish and either wait or emit a short bark to remind her. Could Calvin communicate? Yes. But is this language? No. This dog communicates with his owner by bringing her his leash when he wants go out. How is this not a representation of language? Humans are not alone in their ability to communicate. Bees are able to exchange information with other bees about the location of tasty pollen and about potential dangers. Not only are humans not alone in their ability to communicate, they are not the only animals to vocalize. Bird songs, for example, appear to have some degree of structural complexity that might bear some resemblance to natural language. Velvet monkeys use calls to warn of predators, using distinctive calls to distinguish one predator from another—a different call to warn of a snake than to warn of a leopard or other four-footed creature, for example. So what is the difference between animal communication and human language? The distinction between the systems animals use to communicate and the language that humans use rests primarily in the complexity of human language in comparison to other systems. In Chapter 2, we will see how human language is characterized by layer upon layer of complexity, but there are four attributes of language that essentially define its uniqueness. Exactostock/SuperStock 1.2  Four Attributes of Language T here are four attributes of language that set it apart from other systems of communication: arbitrariness, semanticity, productivity and displacement. Before examining these attributes more closely, we should note that our emphasis here is on spoken language, or oral-aural. It is important to note, however, that there are modes of language other than the oral-aural. Some human languages are visual-gestural, meaning that they are perceived visually and transmitted via gesture. American Sign Language is an example of a visual-gestural language. These languages, like spoken languages, have internal structure; they are not the same as pantomime, which is a way of acting out or pip80380_01_c01_001-024.indd 6 10/26/12 10:38 AM Section 1.2  Four Attributes of Language CHAPTER 1 drawing pictures with the hands, without the use of words. Visual-gestural languages do have words. In fact, except for the way they are transmitted and received, visual-gestural languages have the same four attributes as spoken languages. Arbitrariness: Form and Meaning Are Unrelated First, and foremost, language is completely arbitrary. It is one of the unique design features of language that a word’s meaning is not predictable from its form, or vice versa. With the possible exception of a few onomatopoetic words (i.e., words that sound like what they mean, usually representations of animal sounds such as baa), there is nothing in the way a word sounds or looks that makes its meaning clear. Water, agua, l’eau, or nựớc all stand for the same thing, depending on the language, but there is nothing that makes one of them a better representation of H20 than any other. In contrast, the waggle dance of the bee is not characterized by such arbitrariness—it is iconic in that its form This sign illustrates both arbitrary and iconic forms of directly represents its meaning. communication. Which is language? Universal signs for No-Smoking and the sign shown in the folBelinda Images/SuperStock lowing image are two examples. Semanticity: Ideas Are Represented With Words Semanticity in language refers to its capacity for representing ideas, objects, or events with symbols. A case might be made for semanticity in bees’ communication, because in their movements they represent an object (pollen or nectar) or possibly an event (danger lurking). Semanticity in human language, however, refers to the unique relationship between an arbitrary symbol and something in the real world. The noun car to represent a vehicle with wheels and some kind of an engine, the verb walk to indicate the action of moving one foot ahead of the other in progression, the adjective red to describe the color of a stop sign or a fire engine (in some places!)—these are wholly arbitrary designations agreed upon by speakers of English. French has different words to represent the same tangible objects, actions, or attributes, as do Italian, Spanish, Japanese, and so on. pip80380_01_c01_001-024.indd 7 10/26/12 10:38 AM CHAPTER 1 Section 1.2  Four Attributes of Language Productivity: Infinite Sounds, Words, and Arrangements Productivity in language refers to the capacity of speakers to produce an infinite number of distinct utterances. Productivity is possible because language is discrete (i.e., it consists of separate elements that can be rearranged and recombined to form new and unique utterances). This is true at all levels of description—the three distinct sounds in cat can be reordered to produce tack (remember that we’re talking about sounds not letters). At the word level, it is easy to demonstrate how productive language is. Even if we could identify the number of possible verbs that could be paired with all the nouns in English, there would still be adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, and so forth that could be added to the sentences. Then, even if we could, using some complex mathematical formula, compute the number of all possible one-, two-, three-, four-, or five-word sentences in the language, the language still possesses the ability to add an and or a but or an or and keep that sentence going. This property is called recursion and is one important aspect of productivity. Another aspect of productivity is the capacity of the language to add words and to change or add meanings to existing words. Many words have entered the lexicon in recent history. Modern English is approximately 500 years old, so “recent” may refer to any time in the past few decades. Daycare and airbag are recent additions, as are a great many words associated with space travel and wireless technology. The word processor has taken on new meanings in the computer age (as, indeed, has computer), and while cell has long existed in English, its use to refer to a small wireless telephone is much newer. Indeed, human language is created by humans and serves the changing needs of humans. Displacement: Discussing Things That Happened Last Week Displacement involves the ability to talk about things not in the immediate environment. By talking with someone who is not present, this child is demonstrating another aspect of displacement. Photodisc/Thinkstock pip80380_01_c01_001-024.indd 8 Displacement, the fourth attribute that sets human language apart from animal communication systems, refers to its capacity to generate meaningful utterances not tied to the immediate environment. Language gives us the ability to talk about what happened last week, last year, or, indeed, about things that never happened at all. Not even the staunchest believer in animal language claims that they can talk about the superiority of the daisy pollen last season or speculate about how the drought in Florida will affect honey futures on the New York Stock Exchange. While many animals, possibly all, have some form of communication system, none, not even the most sophisticated of these meets the four basic criteria of arbitrariness, semanticity, productivity, and displacement that define human language. Humans are able from a very early age to communicate imaginatively, as illustrated in A 5-Year-Old’s Language Use, because human language is inextricably linked to human cognition (i.e., to thought). 10/26/12 10:38 AM Section 1.3  Language and Cognition CHAPTER 1 A 5-Year-Old’s Language Use Claudine, who is 5 years old, was 3 when her sister Monique was born. With a Francophone mother and an Anglophone father, both Claudine and Monique have been acquiring two languages since birth. Understanding a child just learning to talk is often a challenge, so often Claudine would be asked to “translate” Monique’s speech that was incomprehensible to adults, because Claudine appeared to understand her sister. On one occasion when Monique had just turned 2, the following dialogue occurred: Grandmother: Claudine, can you tell me what Monique is saying? Claudine: She wants to play in the water. Grandmother: What language was she speaking? Claudine: I don’t know. Grandmother: Then how do you know she wants to play in the water? Claudine: Because she always wants to play in the water. Grandmother: So you were guessing? Claudine: Yep. [Speaking to Monique] Do you want to play in the water? Monique: Yes. Grandmother: Can you ask her in French? Claudine: Why? She already told me. She wants to play in the water. Reflection Questions:  hat does this dialogue tell you about the role of context in Claudine’s language? How does this dialogue W illustrate semanticity, productivity, and displacement? What does it tell you about Claudine’s awareness of language? 1.3  Language and Cognition D efinitions of cognition differ slightly, depending on the dictionary, medical professional, psychologist, or educator one consults. All agree, however, that cognition refers broadly to the mental process of knowing, which involves awareness, perception, reasoning, memory, and conceptualization. We will examine these aspects of cognition in greater detail in Chapter 5 where we also look at how brain development relates to language and cognition. To begin understanding the interrelatedness of language and cognition, it is useful to look at an example provided by Isabelle learning to make pancakes. By the time she was 30 months old, Isabelle knew the recipe for pancakes. She learned it by helping her grandmother make them. Her grandmother, allowing Isabelle to participate as much as possible, would also talk them through the task. “First, we crack the eggs and put them into the bowl. How many eggs?” Isabelle would always answer “two.” “Then we add the oil,” and they would continue. It was clear that Isabelle couldn’t have learned and remembered how to make pancakes either as an exclusively kinetic process—by watching and doing—or as an exclusively verbal one. At that age and for another year or so, if she pip80380_01_c01_001-024.indd 9 10/26/12 10:38 AM Section 1.3  Language and Cognition CHAPTER 1 had been asked to recount the recipe on the phone, she would have had difficulty doing so. Unlike Martha Stewart or Wolfgang Puck, she could not have said to beat two eggs, add one tablespoon of oil and six ounces of milk, and so forth. But in the kitchen, she would go to the refrigerator, get out the eggs and lay aside two for her grandmother to crack. She knew that the milk was mixed with the eggs and oil before the dry ingredients were added, and although she didn’t know in formal terms how much baking powder to use, she would demonstrate “this much” in the palm of her little hand. If her grandmother left out a step, such as spraying the griddle with a nonstick spray, Isabelle would tell her to do it. Moreover, when she assisted with the making of the pancakes, she invariably “talked her way through it,” saying as she had heard her grandmother say, “First we break the eggs into the bowl, and then . . .” right to the point that the pancakes were ready to turn. “You have to watch for the bubbles,” she would say every morning, “and then it’s time to turn them over.” Yet, when she tried to recite the recipe in the absence of the real objects (i.e., outside the situation), she did so very imperfectly. By the time she was 5, however, she could recite the recipe with a high degree of accuracy without being in pancake-making mode. Her cognitive development had reached the stage at which she could remember and retell a fairly complex process without the kinetic assistance she had needed earlier. In learning how to make pancakes, Isabelle was using language to shape, store, and recall the experience of making pancakes—strong evidence that language and memory develop in tandem. Isabelle shows us what we know, almost intuitively: There is a strong link between language and thought. Without thought, there can be no language, and although thought is clearly possible without language, language development and cognitive development are so intricately related that some psychologists and educators believe that they run along a parallel and predictable course in children. Opinions about the exact nature of the relationship between linguistic and cognitive development are wide ranging, and intellectuals from many different disciplines—from philosophy to physics—weigh in. We will examine some of those views in far more detail in Chapters 5, 6, 7, and 9. For now, what we need to remember is that language, particularly talk, helps to shape thought. As teachers, we know that language is not just critical to but likely lays the foundation for conceptualization in all the other subjects in school. We know that all academic success depends on reading ability, but what we should also appreciate is that oral language development is essential to success in reading as well as to cognitive growth. In fact, children’s reading and writing can only be built upon a foundation of oral language, so we must pay particular attention to the tandem nature of linguistic and As she makes cookies with her granddaughter, this cognitive development. grandmother is helping her to develop cognitively and linguistically. Blend Images/Corbis pip80380_01_c01_001-024.indd 10 10/26/12 10:38 AM CHAPTER 1 Section 1.4  Varieties of Human Language 1.4  Varieties of Human Language A nimal communication systems seem to be fairly consistent across the entire species, but human language has many varieties. Linguists use the term language variety to refer to different languages (e.g., Mandarin, English, and Portuguese) as well as to the way a specific group of speakers within a language speak (e.g., Appalachian English or New England English) and sometimes to differences among individuals, which they refer to as idiolects. We will concentrate here on the first two. How many distinct languages are there? That is impossible to answer. One answer is “fewer than last year,” because languages are becoming extinct at a rapid rate. It is not only language loss that makes the tally difficult, though. No one is sure how many distinct languages exist in Africa among tribal populations, and sometimes there is disagreement about what constitutes a distinct language and what is simply a dialect. Still, the Linguistic Society of America estimates put the number at somewhere between 6,500 and 7,000 languages (Anderson, n.d.). Even in the United States, where English is the only language spoken by more than 285 million people, many other languages are spoken. In fact, Hispanics make up an estimated 19% of the U.S. population according to 2010 U.S. Census data, and as high as 35–45% in some states. The 2010 U.S. Census reports that more than 35 million people speak Spanish or Spanish Creole (the “mixed language” that occurs when speakers of two languages are in close contact). The next most popular language in the United States is Chinese with an estimated 2.6 million speakers, with Tagalog, French, Vietnamese, and German following closely behind (see Table 1.1). With this kind of diversity, it is unlikely that any teachers will know all of the languages spoken in their classrooms. Table 1.1: Languages spoken by speakers over the age of 5 in the United States Language Number of Speakers English only 285,797,345 Spanish or Spanish Creole 35,468,501 Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese) 2,600,150 Tagalog 1,513,734 French 1,305,503 Vietnamese 1,251,460 German 1,109,216 Korean 1,039,021 Source: United States Census Bureau, 2010. Within distinct languages there is also variation, the principal one of which is dialect. A dialect is a variety of language defined by either geographical factors or social factors such as class, religion, and ethnicity. So while most Americans speak English, they speak many varieties of it. pip80380_01_c01_001-024.indd 11 10/26/12 10:38 AM CHAPTER 1 Section 1.4  Varieties of Human Language Dialects Among native speakers of English, most dialectal variety is associated with geographical regions (see Figure 1.2). Such variation initially occurs because of geographic isolation, and then further change occurs over time as new people join the community and their language influences the local language. The difference between American and British English provides a good example. Broadly, we speak of them as separate dialects, and they are, but both have evolved many dialects of their own. The dialect of British English spoken by the original British settlers influenced the dialect spoken by people living along the East Coast of the United States, and that depended on where in England they came from. As those settlers moved away from the East coast and became geographically isolated, their language evolved in different ways, was influenced by settlers from other countries, and thus developed its own character. As people joined the community, they learned but also brought their own flavor to the local dialect. The people of southeastern Pennsylvania, for example, speak a dialect of English influenced by the German language. This is not to say that everyone speaking the dialect of that region is of German heritage, but rather that they have adopted the local way of speaking. Similarly, the dialect of English spoken in some Miami neighborhoods is heavily influenced by Haitian Creole and Spanish, although many of the people in the community are from neither a Haitian nor a Spanish-language culture. Figure 1.2: Regional dialects of the United States Northern New England Northern North Central Boston area Northeastern Western NYC area Pitts. Phila.area North Midland Ohio-plains South ArkansasOklahoma West Texas Virginia Appalachian North Carolina South Carolina Midland Mississippigulf GeogiaFlordia Southern This map shows the main dialect regions of the continental United States. Source: Dr. C. George Boeree, 2004. Dialects of English. pip80380_01_c01_001-024.indd 12 10/26/12 10:38 AM Section 1.4  Varieties of Human Language CHAPTER 1 How Dialects Differ Most people think about differences in dialect as affecting the sound of the language— the “accent” one uses when speaking. Certainly, sound is the easiest aspect of a dialect to identify. Where I live in Florida, for example, I regularly recognize New Yorkers from the cadence of their speech. If I lived in New York, I’d probably be able to differentiate Brooklyn from the Bronx or Queens in terms of accent. Many Northerners don’t hear the difference between North Carolina and Georgia accents, but put them instead into the category of “Southern” along with Mississippi, Virginia, West Virginia, Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Texas. To those who live in these areas, however, a Virginia accent is as different from a Louisiana accent as it is from a New Jersey accent. The different geographical accents are remarkably resilient and have generally resisted the influence of the media. If television had had the effect it is sometimes assumed to have, for example, after the more than six decades it has been in American homes, we would expect it to have eradicated most accents. It has not. But dialect affects other parts of the language as well. When I left my Ozark home and moved to New England, I lost my Ozark accent very rapidly. I made a conscious effort to “fit in” with my college classmates, and by Christmas I had lost the elongated syllables that characterized my original dialect. (I used to joke that when my mother said dance, it had three syllables.) Once I lost the accent, I was never identified with any particular region because I had not replaced the Ozark sound with a particular New England one, but something more generic. In New Hampshire or Maine, people usually assumed I was from Connecticut or somewhere else in New England. What marked me as a non-New Englander was not the way I “sounded” but the words I used. It was a lexical difference that gave me away. One day in the faculty lounge of the high school where I was teaching English, I referred to the container for my lunch as a “paper sack” instead of a “brown bag,” which is what all my peers carried. Interestingly, it is at the word level that the mass media have had a marked influence. Situation comedies, cartoons, and even political commentary have introduced new words, or more commonly, new uses for existing words into the national lexicon. Until recently, the word demagogue was rarely used as a verb. During the last presidential campaign, however, politicians began to accuse one another of “demagoguing” issues, whether Social Security or Medicare. Tweeting, retweeting, sexting, and LOL may not be in the Oxford English Dictionary this year, but in 10 years they may well be, and if they are, it will be the result of their frequent use by younger people for whom they are already in common usage. Any discussion of dialect eventually leads to the question of whether or not there is a standard dialect. While the term usually refers to the variety of language used by the media, by political leaders, and the one taught in school, it is also associated with “prestige” language. Standard Dialect If there is a standard dialect in the United States, it is the one used in the mainstream print media and, principally, in the publishing industry, particularly textbooks. The standard dialect is the “grammatically correct” one that most teachers demand in students’ written work. It is generally devoid of jargon (language associated with a particular occupation, hobby, or sport) and slang (language used in informal settings, often indicative of the relationship between the speakers). (See Jargon and Slang for more on the distinction.) pip80380_01_c01_001-024.indd 13 10/26/12 10:38 AM Section 1.4  Varieties of Human Language CHAPTER 1 The spoken language, however, is a different matter. A few decades ago, so-called “East Coast Broadcast English” was considered the standard. Following the same strict rules of usage and as accent-free as possible, broadcast English was supposed to be geographically neutral. In recent years, however, broadcast media have become more tolerant of regional accents, and anyone who surfs through the many channels available on satellite radio knows that there is a broader acceptance of what would be considered nonstandard grammar as well. Jargon and Slang Although the terms jargon and slang are sometimes used interchangeably, they are not the same. Both differ from standard usage mainly at the word level, but jargon refers to language associated with a particular field of study, job, sport, or hobby. Terms such as audible, crackback block, and balanced line, for example, have particular meanings associated with football. Jargon is intelligible to its users but may leave outsiders scratching their heads. Professional jargon is sometimes used to impress those outside the profession. “Rhinitis sounds a lot more serious than ‘a runny nose.’ Rhinoplasty sounds a lot more serious and professional than a ‘nose job’” (Mihalicek & Wilson, 2011, p. 412). Slang, on the other hand, is far less formal. While jargon might be appropriately used in résumés or letters of reference, slang would not. Slang also tends to be a less permanent feature of a dialect or language, although some slang vocabulary finds its way into the standard dialect—fan, originally a shortened form of fanatic, has entered the mainstream as have websites and TV (instead of television). There are two kinds of slang. One is common slang, the neutral, informal usage that will be understood by virtually any speaker of the language. The other is in-group slang, which Mihalicek and Wilson define as the informal language that . . . can be used to keep insiders together and to exclude outsiders. . . . Slang responds to a need in people to be creative in their language use and to show group membership (often unconsciously). These observations liken slang to some feature in the nature of being human and of interacting with humans. For these reasons, slang is found in all languages (even in Ancient Greek of 2500 years ago, for instance). (2011, p. 412) Reflection Questions: Look at the following terms. Identify those that are jargon and the field from which they come. Identify those that are slang and whether they have common or in-group usage. Do any have multiple meanings depending on the group using them? Do any of the terms qualify as both slang and jargon? Torte Dust-up Fed-up Vitals ASAP FAQs Mirandize Shrink STAT Backup Clean Skin AWOL pip80380_01_c01_001-024.indd 14 10/26/12 10:38 AM Section 1.4  Varieties of Human Language CHAPTER 1 Just as speakers around the world function in two languages, many people function in more than one dialect. In the university where I work, for example, a significant number of students speak a variety of English that is heavily influenced by Haitian Creole. However, when they are in class interacting with their professors, they switch to a much more standard English, the same language expected of them in their writing. Any language variety that does not conform substantially to the standard is considered a nonstandard dialect. Both standard and nonstandard imply value judgments that we must try to avoid. It is simply not the case that one dialect is superior to any other. Nor is one more “correct” than the other. As teachers, whether our students are in kindergarten or graduate school, we have a responsibility to honor the language they bring with them, whether it be a different distinct language or a different dialect. We have the right to insist that they learn the standard dialect for writing—eventually—but we have to find ways of respecting and honoring dialectical variation at the same time. Sometimes it requires a little extra effort on the part of the teacher who may be unfamiliar with some of the dialects children bring to the classroom, but we need to think of the standard dialect as one that is being added to rather than replacing the child’s own dialect. It is important to respect those differences rather than try to change them, a topic to which we will return in Chapter 7 and again in Chapter 10. Language and Culture Language evolves to meet the needs of the people who speak it. A people who live in a fishing economy develop the vocabulary they need to talk about catching and selling fish. People who live on a tropical island create, over time, the language appropriate for talking about heat, sand, and hurricanes. To a significant degree, then, language is culturally determined because different cultures have different perceptions, different beliefs, and different communicative needs that their languages must serve. Within cultures, there are subcultures, or cultural groups that exist within a larger cultural community. Subcultures have particular interests, and they often develop ways of using the dominant language that serves their needs but may be unintelligible to those outside the group, demonstrating again how language is culturally determined. For example, people who surf the waves use words and expressions that are relevant to surfing but have little meaning to those who have no interest in the activity and which bear little resemblance to the vocabulary used by people who surf the Internet. The hip-hop subculture is another that has developed a rich dialect, which is used in lyrics and to talk about the music. It has also influenced mainstream English. Each group has shaped the language to fit its particular needs and to identify itself as a member of the subculture. We do not have to look to subcultures, however, to find examples of how language use evolves. Children born in this century have learned words such as computer, remote control, cell phone or even iPhone at a much younger age than their parents or grandparents simply because those words are relevant to the world in which they were born. These are living examples of how flexible and expansive language is, of how it is created by and modified to meet the needs of the people who use it. pip80380_01_c01_001-024.indd 15 10/26/12 10:38 AM Section 1.4  Varieties of Human Language People who fish a lot may form a subculture with its own language. They may have language for talking about fishing that people who live away from the water may not know. CHAPTER 1 Culture shapes language, but is the reverse true? Does the language a people speak influence how they perceive the world? There have been theorists who believe this to be the case. Benjamin Whorf, for example, held a rather extreme view that perception was limited by language; most linguists in the latter half of the 20th and in the 21st centuries have found his evidence suspect. Still, there is no doubt that an inextricable relationship between language and culture exists (Swoyer, 2010). For our purposes, what is important to remember is that many BananaStock/Thinkstock bilingual children are also bicultural, comfortable in both the minority and the dominant culture. On the other hand, those children who begin school as beginners in English are likely to be acquiring both a new language and a new culture. As they acquire the language of their community, children are also acquiring the community’s customs as well. Cross-cultural communication thus presents great potential for misunderstandings or miscommunication; since language is culturally bound, no exact translation is ever possible, so until learners understand the culture of a new language, it is likely they will make mistakes in communicating in that language. Even among people who speak the same language, customs and thus the language used, can vary. Anyone who has ever listened to teenagers talk at the mall knows this to be true! The teenage boy heard to say, “Dang, Girl, I ain’t seen you for a minute!” actually means that it has been a long time since he has seen the girl. The girl who tells a friend to watch out for the 5-0 is warning about the presence of police. Slanguage, as language use of this kind is called, is only one kind of dialectic variation. Geography also accounts for differences, such that a teacher who has grown up and been educated in the rural Midwest has the potential for miscommunication with her students in urban Chicago or New York City. The Structure of Language Students who pursue graduate degrees in linguistics often spend many hours working out the intricate “rules” that govern the structure of different languages. In phonology classes, they might spend weeks writing accurate descriptions of the sounds that are meaningful and how they can be combined in Finnish or Aleut. In syntax classes, they might work for an entire semester writing the “rules” for word order in Old English or modern day Urdu. Can they speak all or, indeed, any of these languages? Usually not. But most students of pip80380_01_c01_001-024.indd 16 10/26/12 10:38 AM Section 1.4  Varieties of Human Language CHAPTER 1 linguistics are fascinated by the intricacies of language structure. Although not everyone has such an intense level of interest in the structural properties of language and would rather have a root canal than spend two hours in a traditional “grammar” class, most of us do possess some curiosity about how the language we speak is put together. Each language, and to some degree each dialect, is structured differently. We tend to think of the differences between languages as differences in the words, but the differences between languages occur not just at the word level. Most of us know that Spanish uses the word casa to refer to what English speakers call a house or home. There is also a difference in word order. In English, for example, adjectives usually come before the noun they modify (as in the big, old, blue car), but Spanish is a little more complicated. Some adjectives come before the noun (mucho tiempo or “much time”), but others come after the noun. So the same sentence would be rendered El gran coche azul de edad, or literally, “the big car blue of age.” In Chapter 2 we will look at some of the properties of English syntax and other aspects of language structure that children ultimately learn so that we will have a common basis and vocabulary for discussing and understanding the process of language development in children. Some animal communication may possess structure. Scientists who study bird song, for example, believe that there is structure to the song of birds. Perhaps there is, as it might be possible to identify structure in the movement of bees. None, however, is as complex as the structure of human language. Usually, when we think about language structure, we think about sentence structure. Linguists refer to this as syntax. In fact, language is intricately structured at every level, from individual sounds, to syllables, morphemes, or minimal units of meaning, and words. It would take an entire book to describe, even in a rudimentary way, the structure of English at any one of these levels. We will nevertheless have a cursory look at how English is structured in the next chapter. The complexity of human language mirrors the complexity of the human brain, but as complex as language is, children learn most of it without being taught. So why are we bothering to study language and language acquisition? The simple answer is that early learning sets the stage for later learning, and teachers and early caregivers play an important role in that learning. The remaining chapters in this book provide information that helps to make clear why that is true. Following Chapter 2, which examines the enormity of the task in terms of structure, Chapter 3 examines the task from the meaning-centered perspective of the child. For example, both language environment and innateness play significant roles in language learning, but the relative importance of each depends to some degree on the theoretical perspective one adopts. Chapter 4 considers some of the same issues in second language learners, both simultaneous bilinguals, which refers to children who acquire two languages from birth, and successive (or consecutive) bilinguals, which refers to children who learn a single language at home and add a second language later, usually in school (Lightbown & Spada, 2006; Meisel, 2011). In Chapters 5 and 6 we see how language and cognition develop in tandem and look at the developmental milestones that help teachers to know when a child is on track and when a special intervention might be required. pip80380_01_c01_001-024.indd 17 10/26/12 10:38 AM CHAPTER 1 Section 1.5  Language Is Easy to Learn (but Hard to Teach) Language involves much more than learning to articulate clearly and produce well-formed sentences. Chapter 7 explores the different functions that language plays in children’s lives and looks at how they learn the conventions of conversation and how to tell stories. In acquiring the structures and functions of language, some children face greater challenges than others, and in Chapter 8 we identify some of those challenges and gain some insights on how to distinguish a slight developmental difference from a possible disorder. As teachers, our ultimate goal is to provide children with the best education possible. Because language and cognition are interdependent processes, as we shall see in Chapter 9, so are language and the development of academic skills. Helping children to develop those skills requires that we understand how home language and school language differ, whether that difference be in function—children use language to achieve different outcomes at home and at school—or in culture. Chapter 10 examines how teachers can build on the language of the home to set children on the path to success in school. Early childhood educators help children to continue growing in oral language and early reading skills. Tetra Images/Corbis 1.5  Language Is Easy to Learn (but Hard to Teach) C hildren the world over learn language—often two or three languages at a time— and while some parents are of the mistaken belief that they somehow “teach” their children to talk, the truth of the matter is that children don’t need to be taught. The evidence is compelling: The order and speed of language acquisition (i.e., the speed and order in which parts of a particular language are learned) is very similar in all children who acquire that language despite the environment in which they acquire it. If parents were responsible for the feat, it would mean that they had followed a common curriculum, either for parenting or language teaching. We know, of course, that this is not the case. Parents and caregivers vary greatly in the amount of talk they direct to their children and in the amount and kind of talk to which children are exposed. We can chart language development broadly but with a great deal of accuracy precisely because children are predisposed to learn language. In fact, if parents did have to teach their children to talk, the task would be daunting, and most would fail. What they do need to do is to talk with their children. Even though children would likely learn some language just from hearing it and figuring out meaning from context, the most effective way—what constitutes “exposure”—is purposeful, meaningful talk. Although some scholars might quibble with the assertion that language is “natural,” at least in the same way that biological processes such as cell differentiation or cell aging are, pip80380_01_c01_001-024.indd 18 10/26/12 10:38 AM Section 1.5  Language Is Easy to Learn (but Hard to Teach) Helen Keller is an extreme example of the human ability to acquire language. Despite being blind and deaf, Keller developed a form of language that enabled her to communicate with others. Science Faction/SuperStock CHAPTER 1 there is no doubt that the human brain is designed to acquire language. True, children are not born talking—language is a learned behavior—but all that children with normal or near-normal physical and mental abilities need to accomplish that learning is exposure. A language-rich environment (i.e., one in which the child is exposed to a great deal of talk about many subjects and to books from a young age) is ideal, but even children from linguistically impoverished environments learn language. Most of the English-speaking world is aware of the story of Helen Keller and the extreme circumstances she overcame to acquire a form of language. Certainly, much of her accomplishment is attributable to her teacher, Anne Sullivan, but without an innate need to communicate, she would not have been able to gain such impressive capabilities. Many less-extreme cases exist that demonstrate the human capacity to learn language. In my book, Language and Learning: The Home and School Years (Piper, 2007), I tell the story of Grace who acquired normal spoken English in a home where both her parents were nonhearing and communicated only through sign language. Children can and do overcome major obstacles to acquire language, and in Chapter 8 we will meet some children who, like Grace, do just that. As teachers, we have particular reasons for caring about language and language learning. Over the years as I have studied children’s language learning, both as a linguist and as a parent and grandparent, I have continued to marvel at the enormity of the young child’s accomplishment in learning the language. As I have talked and written about how children are predisposed to acquire language, students have often posed the question, “If language is so natural and easily learned, what is there to teach?” Answering that will take the remainder of this book, but basically, these are the reasons: • If by “language teaching” we mean drilling parts of speech or teaching 5 year olds to parse sentences into nouns, verbs, and modifiers, then we absolutely should not teach it. • However, if we take “language teaching” to mean creating a rich verbal environment that exposes children to a variety of language—new words, different functions, an array of structures and usage—then understanding how language is acquired becomes very important to a teacher. • Language is the medium by which children learn everything in the curriculum. • Children build literacy on the foundation of oral language. • Language development is inextricably linked to cognitive development. Growing language fosters cognitive growth as well. pip80380_01_c01_001-024.indd 19 10/26/12 10:38 AM Post-Test CHAPTER 1 Conclusion L anguage is uniquely human, and children are born with the necessary “equipment” to learn it. Other animals use rudimentary systems of communication, but language differs in the intricacy of its structure and its capacity for complex communication. This chapter defined language in terms of arbitrariness, semanticity, displacement, and productivity, properties that distinguish it from other communication systems. The fact that human cognitive and linguistic development are so intricately bound together, that human language does not exist independent of culture, that it has many varieties and is as complex as the human brain itself—all these set human language well above other systems of communication. While children do not need to be taught language, teachers need to pay attention to language development, because it is closely linked to cognitive development and foundational to all future learning. Post-Test 1. Which of the following species uses language that most closely resembles human language? a. Dogs b. Whales c. Bees d. Snakes 2. “Buzz,” “croak,” “bark,” and “wham” are all examples of a. synonyms. b. palindromes. c. semantics. d. onomatopoeia. 3. The broad mental process of knowing, including memory and perception, defines a. metacognition. b. cognition. c. processing. d. language. 4. Subcultures are pip80380_01_c01_001-024.indd 20 a. subversive cultures. b. cultures embedded within cultures. c. the lowest form of culture. d. cultures that borrow aspects from several other cultures. 10/26/12 10:38 AM Critical Thinking Questions CHAPTER 1 5. In language learning, a. children must be explicitly taught the rules and use. b. parents follow similar methods for teaching. c. there is no evidence for a predisposition for learning. d. the order and speed of learning tends to be the same in all children. Answers 1. b. Whales. The answer can be found in Section 1.1. 2. d. Onomatopoeia. The answer can be found in Section 1.2. 3. b. Cognition. The answer can be found in Section 1.3. 4. b. Cultures embedded within cultures. The answer can be found in Section 1.4. 5. d. The order and speed of learning tends to be the same in all children. The answer can be found in Section 1.5. Key Ideas • Communications systems exist in many species of animals. • Language is the uniquely human system of communication. • Language is an arbitrary system characterized by its semanticity, displacement (or the ability to talk about abstract ideas or things not present), and productivity (or the ability to create an infinite number of new utterances). • Language is intricately related to human cognition. • Human language does not to be taught; children will acquire it given adequate exposure. • Humans are born with the capacity for language but not language itself. • Language and culture are inextricably linked. Critical Thinking Questions 1. What are some new words or new uses of words that have entered the language because of television or the Internet during your lifetime? 2. Bees, in communicating the location of nectar, cannot deceive other bees—they cannot lie. What does the fact that humans have the ability to lie say about the difference between human language and animal communication systems? 3. What evidence can you provide for the statement, “Thought is clearly possible without a language”? 4. Language is often the medium for human communication. What are other means of communication that humans use, and to what degree do they meet the criteria for language? 5. Spend some time in a preschool class and identify how the teacher’s interactions with the children help them to expand their language. 6. Children’s receptive vocabulary is always larger than their productive vocabulary. Why must this be true? pip80380_01_c01_001-024.indd 21 10/26/12 10:38 AM Key Terms CHAPTER 1 Key Terms arbitrariness  One of the four attributes of human language, referring to the fact that words are not predictable from their meanings. The animal known in English as pig is represented by other words in other languages. cognition  The mental process of knowing, which involves awareness, perception, reasoning, memory, and conceptualization. phonology  The branch of linguistics concerned with the description of the sound system. productive vocabulary  The words that a child speaks, as opposed to those he understands but may not be heard to speak. communication  The activity of a sender conveying a message to a listener. productivity  An attribute of human language, referring to the capacity of language to create an infinite number of new and unique utterances. dialect  A variety of language defined by either geographical factors or social factors, such as class, religion, and ethnicity. receptive vocabulary  The words a child understands but may not necessarily produce in speech. displacement  An attribute of human language, referring to the fact that language is capable of generating meaningful utterances not tied to the immediate environment. recursion  An aspect of language productivity that allows a speaker to add infinitely to a sentence. idiolect  The idiosyncratic speech of individuals. jargon  Language associated with a particular occupation, hobby, or sport. language variety  A term linguists use to refer to different languages (e.g., Mandarin and English) as well as to the way a specific group of speakers within a language speak (e.g., Appalachian English or Boston English) and sometimes to differences among individuals. semanticity  One of the four attributes of human language, referring to the capacity of language to represent ideas, objects, or events with symbols. simultaneous bilinguals  Children who learn two languages from birth or before the age of 2 to 3 years. slang  Language used in informal settings, often indicative of the relationship between the speakers. morpheme  The smallest unit of language that carries meaning. standard dialect  A term used to refer to the variety of language used by the media, by political leaders, and the one taught in school, and sometimes considered to be the “prestige” variation of a language. nonstandard dialect  Any language variety that does not conform substantially to the standard. successive (or consecutive) bilinguals  Those who add a second language after the first is largely established. pip80380_01_c01_001-024.indd 22 10/26/12 10:38 AM CHAPTER 1 Weblinks syllable  A unit of pronunciation consisting of a single vowel and any consonants that cluster around it. syntax  The branch of linguistics concerned with sentence structure. word  A unit of language consisting of one or more spoken sounds, or their written representation, that is a principal carrier of meaning. A word must contain at least one morpheme but may have more. Weblinks Although animal communication is not the subject of this chapter or this book, many find the topic fascinating. This website offers further information on dolphin communication. http://www.dolphins.org/marineed_communication.php This site provides a thorough discussion about how language and communication differ. http://www.psych.ualberta.ca/~chrisw/Psych357/L28Animals.pdf A concise description of language and how it differs from speech is available on the American Speech-Language Hearing Association site: http://www.asha.org/public/speech/development/language_speech.htm Visit this site for an interesting perspective on the uniqueness of human language and on how languages are related: http://sciencenetlinks.com/science-news/science-updates/human-language/ For an account of the Whorfian hypothesis of linguistic relativity: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/relativism/supplement2.html For a description of how American dialects differ and a dialect map of the continental United States: http://www.ling.upenn.edu/phono_atlas/NationalMap/NationalMap.html pip80380_01_c01_001-024.indd 23 10/26/12 10:38 AM pip80380_01_c01_001-024.indd 24 10/26/12 10:38 AM 2 Associated Press How It’s Built: The Structure of Language Learning Objectives By the end of this chapter, you will be able to accomplish the following objectives: • Describe how consonants and vowels sounds are organized in English and how we know which are important. • Define morpheme and explain the difference between lexical and function morphemes. • Identify the main constituents of a sentence, and explain the importance of word order in English. • Define and explain the difference between semantics and pragmatics. pip80380_02_c02_025-052.indd 25 10/26/12 10:44 AM Introduction CHAPTER 2 Introduction A fter her first day of preschool at age 29 months, Isabelle and her father had the following conversation about the rabbit named Bela who shared the classroom with Isabelle and nine other children: Isabelle: Papa, Bela bite Jason. Papa: Who is Jason? Isabelle: At my school. Papa: Oh, and Bela bit him. Isabelle: Yes. Bela bitted him. Even though her language was still a work in progress, Isabelle had already, without being aware of it, mastered much of the language structure that will be described in this chapter. In Chapter 1, we began to see how impressive a feat this is. In 29 months, Isabelle had grown from an infant who did not yet know her name and whose only vocalization was crying, to a little girl who could make herself understood talking about something that had happened in the past. True, some of her forms were imperfect, but she was already well on her way to being a proficient language user. In order to understand and appreciate what she and children the world over accomplish in the first few years and how teachers can build on that accomplishment in the school setting, it is useful to understand how language is organized. Many people consider themselves experts on language by virtue of the fact that they have been using it successfully for a number of years and may have become quite proficient in it. Attaining proficiency does not require speakers to have a conscious knowledge of the formal structure of language—and certainly most children do not—but it takes a linguist to understand and explain the underlying mechanics of language that we all take for granted (Bauer & Trudgill, 1998). Actually, it would take many linguists and several volumes because there are so many aspects of language to be described. Here, we will take only an introductory look at how language is structured in order to begin to appreciate the magnitude of children’s accomplishment. Children learn language in order to express meaning and to communicate with people around them. The miracle of the infant brain is its capacity to acquire all of the structures of any language spoken on earth. Children do not learn the components of language separately or in isolation. They don’t master the sound system and then move on to learning words and then sentences. Nor do they learn the structures of the language as a cognitive exercise. In order to learn to communicate effectively, children master the complex structures of their language. Watching them do so is fascinating. In Chapter 3 we take a closer look at how children acquire the structures of language. For now, let’s look at how the English language is structured. pip80380_02_c02_025-052.indd 26 10/26/12 10:44 AM CHAPTER 2 Pre-Test Language has several components—sounds (phonology), words (morphology), and sentences (syntax). These are descriptors that adults use. Children, at least at the beginning, are happily unaware of either the structure of language or the need to learn it. Languages differ in many other ways. Have you ever tried to master the sounds of French, the syntax of German, or the tones of Mandarin? Mandarin speakers also struggle with the sounds of English, finding the l/r/w distinctions especially confusing. Speakers of Arabic have trouble mastering English prepositions because there are only about 20 prepositions in Arabic but 57 in English. Beginning learners often try to understand a new language in terms of their first language. Arab speakers of English cannot readily translate and have difficulty getting the troublesome little English words right. Indeed, almost all non-native speakers struggle to some degree with English prepositions. All languages can be described using the same categories and the same descriptors. Phonology is the branch of linguistics concerned with the description of the sound system. Morphology is the branch concerned with word structure, and syntax refers to sentence structure. Semantics refers to meaning, and pragmatics refers to the functional use of language in real-life settings. Pre-Test 1. In comparison to consonants, vowels a. use less air obstruction in their production. b. are more often the reason children are referred for speech therapy. c. exist in greater numbers in the English alphabet. d. are produced with more impediments in air stream. 2. Inflectional morphemes are types of a. function morphemes. b. lexical morphemes. c. content morphemes. d. function words. 3. The two major considerations of syntactic learning are a. the order of words and the relationships among aspects of sentences. b. to whom the speaker is speaking and the time frame of the information. c. the number of words needed and the time needed to communicate. d. the tense of the verbs and the number of objects. 4. Which of the following is true of semantics? pip80380_02_c02_025-052.indd 27 a. Semantics can differ within the same language. b. Words in some languages do not mean the same thing in others. c. Individual and cultural variations do not affect language. d. Language has fairly rigid conventions for communication. 10/26/12 10:44 AM Section 2.1  The Sounds of English: Phonology CHAPTER 2 Answers 1. a. use less air obstruction in their production. The answer can be found in Section 2.1. 2. a. function morphemes. The answer can be found in Section 2.2. 3. a. The order of words and the relationships among aspects of sentences. The answer can be found in Section 2.3. 4. b. Words in some languages do not mean the same thing in others. The answer can be found in Section 2.4. 2.1  The Sounds of English: Phonology A t age 3, Isabelle’s pronunciation of yellow was “lalo.” She couldn’t manage the initial “y” sound, nor did she get the first vowel quite right. It wasn’t that she was unable to produce the “y” sound or the correct vowel—the word yes, for example, with the same vowel and initial consonant, gave her no problem at all. But in the word yellow, she couldn’t quite get all the sounds right. The reason is that the process of learning the sound structure of English is not just a matter of learning individual sounds, it is learning the system—all of the sounds and how they are combined and pronounced in various environments. For a child, the “environment” of a two-syllable word is very different from that of a single syllable, and she simplified the pronunciation according to certain predictable processes. In this section, we will look at the sounds of English, which ones are distinctive and which are not, and some of the rules for combining them. We will also look briefly at stress, or the force with which a syllable is articulated, and intonation, or the rhythm of the language, and the role they play in English. Linguists who study the sounds of a language are called phonologists. In general terms, phonology is concerned with the physical, or acoustic, properties of speech sounds and the rules that govern how those sounds are combined in speech. From the child’s point of view, the business of phonology is figuring out how to produce those sounds that are necessary for making meaning. When children are very young, it is unlikely that they can focus on any unit smaller than the word, at least not directly. As soon as they understand that cat and hat are different words conveying very different meanings, however, they have unknowingly recognized that the /k/ sound is different from the /h/ sound. This is a good example of a minimal pair, or two words that differ by only one sound, which is an important concept in determining which sounds are separate phonemes, or sounds that native speakers perceive to be different, in English. Sounds and letters are different. There is a somewhat predictable relationship between the sounds of English and the letters used to represent them in print. For the most part, the sound /m/ is represented by the letter “m,” and we can usually count on the letter “b” to represent the sound /b/. But the sound-symbol correspondence in English is far from perfect, as any second language learner or anyone who struggles with English spelling can testify. The sound /f/, for example, can be spelled in four different ways, as illustrated by fame, tough, phone, and puff. Moreover, the word of has the letter “f” but the pronunciation is /v/. For now, we are concerned with the sounds of English with only passing reference to the alphabet. How Speech Sounds Are Formed Human speech can be described in acoustic terms, or the nature of the disturbance to the airwaves that occurs when we speak. Each vowel and consonant sound has distinctive acoustic properties that can be measured on a sound spectrogram. How and why do speech sounds differ from each other? Here is an example from a grade-school science class. If we pip80380_02_c02_025-052.indd 28 10/26/12 10:44 AM CHAPTER 2 Section 2.1  The Sounds of English: Phonology take two identical, glass soft-drink bottles and pour 4 inches of water into one, leave the other empty, and then blow into them, as if blowing a flute or piccolo, the sound produced by each will be different. The sound produced by the bottle with liquid will be of a higher pitch than the sound produced by the one without liquid. That is because the resonator (i.e., the soft-drink bottle) has changed with the addition of liquid; vibration occurs above the level of the water only. The water has effectively shortened the resonator and caused the sound to have a pitch. The human head is also a resonator, and because we are all a little different from each other, our voices and speech sounds tend to be unique. But there is enough similarity that we can understand each other because we produce the speech sounds of our language in more or less the same way. Each speech sound is distinguished from the others by the shape of the resonator (i.e., the vocal apparatus) during speech. When we speak, the airstream—the same one used in breathing—is modulated, or changed, by the articulators as it moves from the lungs upward to exit through the oral or nasal cavity (or both). The articulators, as shown in Figure 2.1, are of two types. Passive articulators, which include the teeth, alveolar ridge, hard palate, velum, uvula, and pharynx (or pharyngeal wall) remain static during speech. Active articulators move to create different speech sounds. The tongue is the most important of these, but the glottis and the lips, particularly the lower lip, also play roles in speech production. Figure 2.1: Articulators involved in speech Nasal cavity (Soft Palate) Velum Aveolar ridge Lips Teeth ity cav al r O Body Apex Root Tongue Pharynx Epiglottis Larynx (vocal cords) Esophagus This figure shows the parts used to form verbal speech patterns. pip80380_02_c02_025-052.indd 29 10/26/12 10:44 AM Section 2.1  The Sounds of English: Phonology CHAPTER 2 How We Know Which Sounds Matter The human vocal apparatus is capable of creating an almost infinite variety of sounds. Every child born with normal hearing and speech organs is born with the capacity to learn the sounds of any language. Anyone who has heard an infant babble will have heard sounds that may be difficult for an adult to reproduce and which may bear little resemblance to the speech sounds that adults use. A child’s job in the first years of life is to figure out which sounds of language are meaningful and how to produce them. Children are not linguists, but in order to understand what they accomplish, it is useful to look at how adult speakers know which Blowing into these bottles would create a different sound for sounds are meaningful in a lan- each because of their different shapes. This is similar to what guage. How is it that we come to happens when we move our tongue or jaw during speech. recognize the two broad categoHemera/Thinkstock ries of speech sounds known as consonants and vowels? Generally speaking, consonants are sounds that are produced with more obstruction of the air somewhere in the vocal tract than vowels, which are produced with a relatively unimpeded airstream. English has many more consonants than vowels, and they are harder for children to learn than vowels. When children are referred for speech therapy, it is often because an adult has identified a problem with how some of the consonant sounds are produced. Unlike consonants, vowels are produced with very little obstruction of the vocal apparatus but simply by changing the shape of the resonator. Vowels get their distinct character from the placement of the tongue in the mouth during articulation and whether or not the lips are rounded. Vowels are highly resonant, making them easier to hear and to distinguish from one another. When Sarah, at 27 months, pronounced butterfly as “fuhfly,” she showed perfect control of the vowels, although she left out the middle syllable, but simplified the consonants to two, “f”and “l.” For a representation of how the change in tongue placement produces actual vowel sounds, see the Weblinks at the end of the chapter for a video. The Consonants and Vowels of English Infants are capable of producing the sounds of any human language. Gradually, they learn which ones are relevant to the language they are learning and which are not. As adult speakers of English, we already know which sounds are meaningful, but children have to figure out what to pay attention to and what can be ignored. If children were linguists, they would look for minimal pairs. Consider these words: cat, hat, bat, sat, mat, fat, gnat, pat, rat, tat, vat. Ten words, all with different meanings, tell us that English has at least 10 consonants, because as we change the first sound of each word, we also change pip80380_02_c02_025-052.indd 30 10/26/12 10:44 AM CHAPTER 2 Section 2.1  The Sounds of English: Phonology the meaning. If we were to consider the words bat, bit, bet, beat, boat, boot, bought, and but, we would readily see that English has at least eight different vowel sounds, because that is what distinguishes one word from the other. Continuing to act as linguists, if we were given the words trite and trout (or light and lout), we would have evidence for two more English sounds. These are also vowels, but they are called diphthongs because they are created by one vowel gliding quickly into another. While children are not little linguists, as they learn the meanings of words and understand that hat, cat, and bat all have different meanings, they sort out the relevant sounds of English. Table 2.1 shows the consonant sounds of standard American English, and Table 2.2 shows the vowels with the phonemic symbols linguists use to identify them. Table 2.1: English consonant phonemes and common spellings Phoneme (symbol) Common spellings Exemplar words /p/ p, pp pit, tipple, sip /b/ b, bb bib, kibble, stub /t/ t, tt, th time, little, thyme /d/ d, dd dust, puddle /s/ s, ss sister, miss /z/ z, zz, s zap, jazz, houses /tʃ/ ch, tch check, which, witch /d�/ j, dg, g jelly, grudge, gel /∫/ sh, ss, t(i),ch(e) shell, session, nation, panache /ʒ/ z, s, g azure, lesion, beige /f/ f, ff, ph, gh father, waffle, phone, rough /v/ v, f vote, evolve, of /θ/ th thick, thin, myth /ð/ th this, that, lather /k/ k, ck, c, ch , q kit, pick, cat, ache, quick /kwIk/ /g/ g, gg, gue wig, wiggle, fatigue /w/ w, wh win, wile, while /l/ l, ll laugh, alive, doll /r/ r, rr range, arrange, far /y/ y yes /m/ m, mm, mn mix, summer, rhythm /n/ n, nn nine, penny /ŋ/ ng long, singer /h/ h high, ahem pip80380_02_c02_025-052.indd 31 10/26/12 10:44 AM CHAPTER 2 Section 2.1  The Sounds of English: Phonology Table 2.2: English vowel phonemes and common spellings Phoneme (symbol) Common spellings Exemplar words /l/ i kit, sit, quit /¡/ ee, ea, ey, ie, ei, e keep, leaf, key, lien, receive, decide / / e, ea set, led, tell, threat, lead (as in “lead pencil”) /eI/ a, ay, ai, ei made, may, maid, weigh /æ/ a, ai sad, matter, plaid / / e u, ou, e cut, bubble, trouble, double, the / / ou, au, o caught, cause, thought /a/ o cot, shot, got /ow/ o, ow, oa comb, shown, coat /uw/ oo, u, ew moo, prune, strewn / / � u, oo put, foot / j/ oy, oi boy, boil /aj/ ie, ai, i, uy tie, Thai, time, guy /aw/ ow, ou cow, bough e � � Some readers will not be able to hear the difference between the vowels in caught and cot. There is no need to have a hearing test, though, since these vowels are the same in some dialects of American English. Whether a child is learning English, Portuguese, or Mandarin, the task is the same— figuring out which sounds are meaningful and learning how to produce them. That is not the only task; part of learning the sound system is learning the stress and intonation patterns of that language. Stress and Intonation Stress refers to the force with which a syllable is articulated. In fact, stressed syllables are not only louder, they also have a slightly higher pitch and are longer in duration than nonstressed syllables. Sometimes, stress is distinctive. Consider the two pronunciations of the word convict. The noun, as in The convict was released from prison, has stress on the first syllable. The verb, however, as in The jury took only two hours to convict the defendant, is stressed on the second syllable. In this way, stress is phonemic because it contributes to the meaning. Stress in these examples occurs at the word level. The stress pattern of each word is part of its identity, just as its phonemes are. So the word bluebell is always stressed on the first syllable, and specifically, on the first vowel of the syllable. That is because syllables, by definition, must have a vowel (and only one vowel), and it is the vowel that carries the stress. pip80380_02_c02_025-052.indd 32 10/26/12 10:44 AM CHAPTER 2 Section 2.1  The Sounds of English: Phonology Learning the stress pattern of a word is part of learning that word, and it is an aspect of phonological learning that causes young children less difficulty than mastering each of the individual sounds. In fact, very early on, at the babbling stage, children “create” words that are nonsensical but somehow sound like the language of the adults around them. They are able to do so, in part, because they have picked up the stress patterns of the words they have heard. As evidence, children attend to stressed syllables more than to unstressed ones. Consider again Sarah’s pronunciation of butterfly as fuhfly. She reduced a three-syllable word to two, and the syllable she left out was the middle, unstressed one. At the same time, her correct pronunciation of the French equivalent, papillon showed that she was capable of producing three syllable words. In the case of the French word, however, the middle syllable carries more stress than the middle syllable of butterfly, so she was not as likely to leave out the syllable. Although English words spoken in isolation have syllabic stress, there is also a level of stress associated with the rhythm of continuous speech. Intonation, sometimes called prosodic stress, refers to the rhythm of the language as it is spoken or read—the rising and falling pitch that occurs in connected speech. Although explaining the rules for assigning English stress in sentences is difficult, learning them appears not to be difficult at all. Even at the babbling stage, before they have sorted out the individual phonemes and before they can articulate words, children babble in streams that have many of the prosodic qualities of the adult form of the language they are learning. Syllables How many syllables does the word chocolate have? In most American English dialects, it has two, although many people would say that it has three because they are aware of the written form and think it should have. If asked to read the word in isolation, many people will carefully produce that middle syllable. If asked to read a sentence such as “Do you want chocolate or vanilla ice cream?” most people will pronounce only two syllables. So what is this thing called the syllable? In English, syllables have several different “shapes,” or structures, depending on the configuration of vowels (V) and consonants (C). The one thing every English syllable must have is a nucleus, usually a vowel but sometimes /r/, /m/ or /ŋ/, or /l/ (as in the second syllable of little). English syllables need not have any consonants. The word amazing, for example, has three syllables, and the first one consists only of a vowel. The other two illustrate two additional syllable shapes in English: vowel-consonant-vowel (VCV) and vowel-consonant (VC). There are eight other possibilities in English, as shown in Table 2.3. Table 2.3: Possible English syllable structures V VC eye, oh am, eyes pip80380_02_c02_025-052.indd 33 VCC CV CCV CVC apt, ilk me, woe play, sty did, make CCVC CCVCC CCCV CCCVC CCCVCC plaid, stall plaids, brains splay, straw splayed, straps, straws screams 10/26/12 10:44 AM Section 2.2  The Building Blocks of Words: Morphology CHAPTER 2 Syllable structures vary from language to language—the only universal is that every syllable must contain a nucleus. Beyond that, languages differ widely. In Mandarin, the usual syllable structure is CV. When Mandarin-speaking adults are learning English, they tend to “drop” the final consonant in words such as cat because that is the syllable form that is most familiar to them. Children with normal hearing tend to be aware of syllable structure and reproduce it fairly accurately, even at a very young age. Evidence can be found in their ability to produce rhymes, which usually require them to create new forms with the same number of syllables, if not the exact same structure. A child’s ability to rhyme bad with sad and mad shows that she can exchange the initial consonant, and when pronouncing glad, the child provides strong evidence that it is the syllable that is the salient unit, and not the individual sounds. In fact, nearly all preschool children can produce rhymes, even nonsensical ones, but if asked how many sounds in a word, they often falter. The components of the sound system—sounds, syllables, stress, and intonation—are not learned in isolation. They are learned in the contexts of words, and words are made up of morphemes. 2.2  The Building Blocks of Words: Morphology A mother, asked if her infant is talking yet, might well respond, “Yes, she has three words already!” To most people, at least those who are neither English teachers nor linguists, the smallest unit of language that has meaning is the word. Certainly, words are essential building blocks of language, and it is true that the word is the smallest unit that can stand alone in speech or writing. The smallest unit of meaning, however, is not the word but the morpheme, and the study of how morphemes are categorized and combined is morphology. English morphology is fairly complex—perhaps even more complex than the sound system. But it is also easier to understand because morphemes are more easily recognized than individual sounds. Most of us know a great deal about the different kinds of morphemes and how they are combined into words. It is the language for talking about them that gets a little complicated. Nevertheless, in order to appreciate what children accomplish in learning to make and use words, it is necessary to understand something about the morphology of English. Identifying Morphemes First, morphemes and words differ, although a word can be a single morpheme. The word of, for example, is a single morpheme, but it is still a word. Often, however, a word consists of more than one morpheme. Words such as helpful, eyeball, and toys consist of two morphemes while helpfully and eyeballs consist of three. How do we know? With of, we know because we cannot break it down further and be left with anything that makes sense. With eyeball, on the other hand, we can clearly see that there are two parts to the word that have meaning: eye and ball. Then, adding a plural suffix, -s, we add a third element of meaning and thus have three morphemes. Similarly, toys has two meaning elements: toy and the plural suffix. pip80380_02_c02_025-052.indd 34 10/26/12 10:44 AM Section 2.2  The Building Blocks of Words: Morphology CHAPTER 2 What the adult knows about morphology, however, is not what the child knows. Returning to the word eyeball, for example, a 3-year-old who knows the meaning of the word and uses it will not be aware that it has two components, nor does she need to. For her, it is a single word, a single morpheme, and it has one specific meaning. For this reason, when linguists or teachers study children’s language in terms of MLU (mean length of utterance), they normally consider compound words such as eyeball, baseball, or cupcake as a single entity. English words can consist of many morphemes. The word predictability, for example, has four: pre- (a prefix meaning “before”), -dict- (meaning “to say”), -able (meaning “capable of”), and -ity (making the word a noun). Notice that these four morphemes have different kinds of meaning. That is because not all morphemes are created equal. Some carry a great deal of meaning, and others are merely grammatical conventions; still others fall somewhere in the middle. Different Kinds of Morphemes Broadly speaking, there are two types of morphemes: content, or lexical morphemes, and functional morphemes. To distinguish between them, let’s return for a moment to the word eyeballs. As noted, it consists of three morphemes. Most of the meaning is borne by eye and ball. We see both morphemes in many other English words such as baseball, ballgame, birds-eye, and eyeglasses. Because they have meaning that can be understood independently of any other morpheme, they are called lexical morphemes. The remaining morpheme is of a different type. It indicates that the noun is plural and is thus called an inflectional morpheme, and is one kind of functional morpheme as shown in Figure 2.2. The function words and the inflectional morphemes are the little workhorses of the language. They do not carry a great deal of dictionary-type meaning, but their presence is necessary for constructing meaningful sentences. They essentially carry out grammatical functions. Function words stand alone as words, but unlike other words in the language, they cannot usually have other morphemes attached. The exception is with the personal pronouns, which can have number or case indicators as in he, him, his, you, your, yours, etc. and certain prepositions that can be combined, such as into and within. All the others stand alone; there is no suffix or prefix that can be added to the or of. Inflectional morphemes serve similar purposes to function words in English sentences; they carry grammatical information. In English, most inflections are suffixes but some require an internal change—the plural of pip80380_02_c02_025-052.indd 35 When this child produces his first word, it will be a lexical morpheme. Why do you think this is true? Exactostock/SuperStock 10/26/12 10:45 AM CHAPTER 2 Section 2.2  The Building Blocks of Words: Morphology mouse, for example. Inflectional suffixes are added to lexical morphemes to indicate more information and include familiar forms such as the past tense marker (usually spelled as -ed) and the plural marker (usually an -s or -es). The most common English inflections are shown in Table 2.4. Table 2.4: Examples of grammatical inflections in English Tense Aspect • s /-es (walks, • ed, with talks, fixes) a form of -d/-ed have (have (walked, walked, has talked, fixed) talked, had • Vowel fixed) change • No change (write/ (have wrote; bring/ brought; has brought; shot)/ sing/sang, Vowel shoot/shot) change (has / sung) • en (with an auxiliary have or be) (written, driven) • ing (with a form of be) (is writing, was singing) Number Possessive Case • s /-es (cats, • s (Bob’s, fits, horses, children’s) boxes) • Vowel change (mouse/ mice; goose/ geese) • en (Oxen) • um (singular in words such as medium datum) • a (plural in words such as media, data) Comparative Superlative • e r (funnier, meaner) • e st (strongest, liveliest) Inflections are not the only suffixes in English. English also has a number of morphemes with sufficient content meaning to be considered lexical but which cannot stand alone. These include prefixes such as bio-, morpho-, phono-, and multi- and suffixes such as -logy, i, and -ful. Because they cannot stand alone but must be “bound” to other morphemes, they are thus considered bound lexical morphemes (see Figure 2.2). English, then, has a number of different ways of forming words: by adding prefixes and suffixes—whether lexical or inflectional—and by compounding (combining lexical morphemes). Other languages, however, have different processes. pip80380_02_c02_025-052.indd 36 10/26/12 10:45 AM CHAPTER 2 Section 2.2  The Building Blocks of Words: Morphology Figure 2.2: How morphemes are categorized Morpheme Significant content meaning? Yes Lexical Morpheme No Function Morpheme Can morpheme stand alone? Can morpheme stand alone? Yes Free Morpheme (Content Word) No Bound Lexical Morpheme Function Word Inflectional Morpheme Can morpheme carry most of the word meaning? Yes Bound Lexical Morpheme No Derivational Morpheme This diagram shows the criteria used for categorizing morphemes. Morphology in English and Other Languages In terms of how they combine morphemes to form words, the world’s languages fall along a continuum with analytic languages at one end and synthetic languages at the other. A strictly analytic language would have one morpheme per word while a strictly synthetic language would combine all the morphemes needed to make the meaning of a sentence. Although there are no strictly analytic nor strictly synthetic languages, Mandarin and Vietnamese are highly analytic while Turkish and Russian are highly synthetic. English is usually categorized as an analytical language, although with its inflectional affixes and compounding, it too has certain synthetic properties. English is the way it is because of its history. Every country that ever invaded the British Isles left behind some of its language. Three Germanic tribes—the Angles, the Jutes, and the pip80380_02_c02_025-052.indd 37 10/26/12 10:45 AM Section 2.3  How Sentences Are Made: Syntax CHAPTER 2 Saxons—arrived in less than friendly fashion around 450 CE and left behind the Germanic foundation of the English language, Anglo-Saxon. Words surviving into modern English include earth, dirt, sheep, and tree, along with many of the 100 most commonly used words in English today as well as most of the words that our mothers tried to keep us from using. The next major influence on English, still felt today, came with the Norman Invasion in 1066. In other words, the Latin influence came through the French language spoken by the invaders. Every language that influenced English had a different way of forming words, and English somehow accommodated most of them, much to the frustration of adult learners of the language. Fortunately, children have no expectations about this, and for the most part, they figure out how morphemes fit together without difficulty. They do experience some confusion. Carter, at age 5, will say, “I forgotted that,” adding the regular past tense form to a verb that already has the irregular form. In all likelihood, he does this because he learned forgot before forget and has yet to make the connection between the two forms. In time, he will sort it out just as he will figure out that the past tense of bring isn’t “bringed,” and the plural of goose is geese. Carter and other children his age are not terribly concerned about the correctness of the form. He How would you help Carter tell his story about the geese flying is far more interested in talking over him? about the geese that he saw flying in formation across the sky iStockphoto/Thinkstock than with the fact that the word goose comes from Anglo-Saxon along with its plural form, largely unchanged. To tell his story about the geese, he needs more than individual words; he needs to be able to combine them into sentences, the next level of language structure. 2.3  How Sentences Are Made: Syntax I n everyday conversation, we sometimes speak in sentences and often speak in fragments. But even when we speak in shortened or truncated forms, we tend to mentally “fill in” the missing parts. In elementary school, most of us were taught that a sentence must have a subject and a verb or, depending on the precision of our teacher, a subject and a predicate. That is true—not terribly helpful, but true. It is just the beginning of the story. English sentence structure, or syntax, is about word order. More precisely, English sentence structure is about how morphemes are combined to form meaningful utterances. Basic Sentence Structure All human languages were created by humans as a way to express meaning, and there are many experiences that all humans have in common. Thus, it is not surprising that all pip80380_02_c02_025-052.indd 38 10/26/12 10:45 AM Section 2.3  How Sentences Are Made: Syntax CHAPTER 2 languages share certain structural properties. They all use sentence structures with a subject, a verb, and an object, but the order in which those elements appear differs from language to language. In some languages, word order is flexible because the role the word plays in the sentence is indicated by an affix—a morpheme indicating whether a noun serves as a subject or an object, for instance. Most of the languages of the world, however, are either subject-verb-object (SVO) or Humans use language to communicate meaning. As diverse as subject-object-verb (SOV) lan- we are, our languages share certain structural aspects. Why do guages. SOV is the most com- you think this is? mon word order in terms of the number of distinct languages Alex Treadway/National Geographic Stock that employ it (Mihalicek & Wilson, 2011). Japanese, Korean, and Turkish are all SOV languages. SVO is the most common word order in terms of the number of people who speak a language, since it is employed by English, all of the Romance languages, and Mandarin. Not all SVO languages have exactly the same structure, but the major constituents tend to be ordered in the same way. There is far more to sentence structure and syntax than the ordering of the major constituents. Look at the following sentences. Can you explain the kinds of differences apparent in them? a. Sarah builds sandcastles. b. Isabelle builds sandcastles. c. Sarah built sandcastles. For the moment, let’s ignore the likelihood that Sarah, at age 2, is more apt to sit down in the middle of her sister’s sandcastle than to build one. Think about the differences between sentences (a) and (b) and between (a) and (c). Sentences (a) and (b) have exactly the same structure but profoundly different meanings: It is Sarah who is building the sandcastle in (a) but Isabelle in (b). The two sentences have different subjects. Sentences (a) and (c) have a syntactic difference that changes the meaning. The morphemes in sentence (a) can be described as follows: • • • • Sarah (a lexical morpheme) build (a lexical morpheme) the present tense inflection, -s, indicating habitual or current activity three additional morphemes: the nouns sand and castle, which form a compound word and the plural inflection, -s. Sentence (c) has the same major constituents as (a), but instead of the present tense marker, there is a past tense morpheme changing build to built. The difference here is syntactic. pip80380_02_c02_025-052.indd 39 10/26/12 10:45 AM CHAPTER 2 Section 2.3  How Sentences Are Made: Syntax The difference between sentences (a) and (b) is easier for children to understand than the difference between sentences (a) and (c). The “players” are different—it is a lexical difference that has a great deal of meaning. With (a) and (c), the difference is grammatical, a change in tense. Because tense is related to time, the difference is one that adults readily understand, but it takes a while for children to learn it. It takes longer to learn not only because it is a very subtle change in form (build to built is not even easy to hear) but because very young children have a shaky notion of past time. There are, then, basically two kinds of syntactic learning that children must accomplish: the order in which words are put together to form sentences and the relationships that exist among the different constituents. In sentences, not all words are of the same magnitude of importance. Consider this sentence from Isabelle at age 5: Papa winned the race. Even though Isabelle regularized the past tense of win to make it sound like other regular verbs such as talks and runs, she had all the elements of a perfectly formed sentence. I have used a bracketing convention that linguists sometimes use to show the major constituents, subject and predicate: [[winned the race]] We learned that English is an SVO language, so we will break down the predicate further. From this point, it is easier to see the syntactic constituents of Isabelle’s sentence using a tree diagram, although the tree and brackets convey the same information. Figure 2.3 represents the basic SVO constituent structure of the sentence. Figure 2.3: Basic sentence structure S (Sentence) Papa winned the race Basic sentence constituents for Papa winned the race. pip80380_02_c02_025-052.indd 40 10/26/12 10:45 AM CHAPTER 2 Section 2.3  How Sentences Are Made: Syntax If Isabelle were asked when her Papa won the race and she answered in a full sentence, the same structure would be expanded as in Figure 2.4, which shows all the morphemes in the sentence and their relationship to each other. Figure 2.4: Constituent sentence structure S NP VP Verb Vtrans Papa win Adverb NP Tense Past Article the Noun N Number race Ø yesterday Constituent structure of Papa winned the race yesterday. Learning Sentence Structure The task of learning sentence structure involves learning the conventions for word order and constituent structure or, from the child’s perspective, which bits of meaning fit together and how. Until children learn at least rudimentary syntactic rules, they cannot make themselves understood, but it is learning that begins very early. When a child barely able to walk says, “Want cookie,” she is already demonstrating SVO word order. Although she has left out the subject noun, it is clearly understood to be “I.” From this point on, syntactic learning progresses very quickly. Graham, at age 2 years 10 months, produced the following sentences: a. Calley hit me ‘cause it hurt. b. Mama give me time-out ‘cause I bit Melissa. Both sentences are complex, meaning that they have two clauses—two units, each with a subject and a verb. In sentence (a), he gets the word order within each of the two clauses right but the order of the two clauses themselves wrong, likely because he has an imperfect pip80380_02_c02_025-052.indd 41 10/26/12 10:45 AM Section 2.3  How Sentences Are Made: Syntax CHAPTER 2 understanding of the meaning of because. ...
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 Guided Introduction
 A summary of your beliefs regarding language







acquisition
Language-Rich Environment
Stages of Language Development Analysis
Literacy Lesson Plan
Language Reflection
A summary of how you will support children’s
language acquisition in your professional role

Guided introduction
 I am about to finish my bachelors degree in early

childhood education. My aim is to guide students who
find it difficult to communicate with others. I want
that parents should feel comfortable while leaving
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education should be provided to each and every child
in my class.

Beliefs regarding language
acquisition
 I believe that language acquisition is essential to the

advancement of kids. Children ought to be presented
to various dialect for their advancement. I additionally
trust that all kids ought to find the opportunity to
learn American Sign Language. I trust it is a standout
amongst the most vital occupations that I will have as
an educator in children. It is up to me to recognize and
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