SPEAKING
Spoken Language Stages
Phonological Understanding: Early Stages
- Crying
- Cooing - open mouth vowel sounds (oo, aah, ee, uh, oh)
- Babbling - consonant vowel combination (gaga, baba, wawa, etc.)
Many early consonant sounds children make are universal - make similar sounds regardless of language spoken
Pre-verbal stages
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Features |
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Sounds of discomfort or reflexive actions
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Comfort sounds and vocal play
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Repeated patterns of consonant and vowel sounds
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Word-like vocalisations that aren't actual words but are consistently used for the same meaning e.g. "mmm" for "give me that"
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Lexical and grammatical stages of development
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One word utterences
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Two-word combination
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Three or more words combined
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More grammatical complex combonations
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Five Strategies of child speech
- Substitution
- Addition (add a vowel to the end)
- Deletion
- Deletion of the final consonant
- Consonant cluster reduction
CDS
Child Directed Speech aims to...
- Attract and hold the child's attention
- Help the process of breaking down language to understandable chunks
- Make the conversation more predictable by talking about the here and now
Some CDS research:
- Clarke and Stewart (1973)
- Katherine Nelson (1973)
- Brown, Cazden and Bellugi (1969)
- Berko and Brown (1960)
Some CDS conclusions:
- CDS does not directly help the child speak, but rather the parent communicate to their child
- In some cultures they skip the 'baby-talk' period and no alterations are made in speech to make it easier for them to understand and still go through the same development stages
- Some argue that baby-talk is harmful to a child learning language
- A child's language improves when an adult speaks to them directly