The Communicative Competence of Young Children

A Modular Approach

Susan H. Foster

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317869382
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

How children first acquire language is one of the central issues in linguistics. This book draws on a wide range of research, including work in developmental psychology, anthropology and sociology, to explore the processes behind child language acquisition to the preschool period.

Chapter One

Background concepts

Introduction

While still unable to tie their shoelaces, most three-year-olds are quite happily using language to ask and answer questions, express fears, doubts and opinions, make friends with others and generally make their mark on the world around them. In three short years their communication with the world around them has expanded from an initial ability to react to discomfort or pleasure, to include, first, a non-linguistic communication system for the expression of desires, opinions and attitudes, and finally a linguistic system for an extraordinarily wide range of purposes in a large number of different social situations.

What exactly is the path of communicative development through the first years of life? How does the development take place? Is it the result of innately specified neural changes? Is it the result of learning from the environment? What role does prelinguistic communication play in the development of linguistic communication? Are there fundamental discontinuities between the prelinguistic and linguistic phases? What are the continuities? It is answers to questions such as these that the following chapters discuss.

Communicative development

While children vary greatly, most children start producing their first gestures towards the end of the first year, their first words around the time of their first birthday, simple sentences around their second birthday, and more complex ones during their third and fourth years. Figure 1 presents a sample of communicative expressions from children three and under. The samples are arranged according to the age of the child producing them. However, it is important to note that children vary considerably in the speed at which they progress in their language development. Age designations can, therefore, be used only as a rough guide to developmental level.

Figure 1: Speech samples

These examples make it apparent that children initially communicate in highly idiosyncratic ways. They use sound combinations that mean something only to their parents and friends, as in (3), or they use sounds, gestures and eye movements that can only be interpreted in context, as in (1) and (2). The goodwill of the adults who are addressed is often crucial to the success of the communication; and, as (4) shows, sometimes even the most willing of adults has difficulty figuring out what children intend.

As they develop the use of words during the first year, children operate with a combination of idiosyncratic words and child versions of adult ones, as (5) and (6) show. Then they begin putting words together, as in (7). Even as they enter the second year, however, gestures and child versions of words are still used quite extensively, as (8) shows. However, as (9), (10), and (11) show, they are also developing rapidly towards the adult constructions, both in terms of length and complexity. The ‘mistakes’ children still make at this stage are very revealing of how their version of the language works. Even at three years old, children are still pronouncing words differently (13), coining new words that do not exist in the adult vocabulary (14), using words in ways adults do not (15), and producing sentences that still fail to conform fully to adult syntax (16).

Determining exactly what has changed in the course of the first three years requires a detailed analysis of the system children are operating with at each successive stage, as well as an account of how the system changes. We must, therefore, first look at the nature of language so that we are aware of what it is children are working towards.

Components of language

Linguists divide language into a number of subcomponents. These are: (1) phonology, (2) the lexicon, (3) semantics, (4) morphology, (5) syntax. Together these subcomponents form the grammar. It should be noted that sometimes the term ‘grammar’ is used synonymously with the term ‘syntax’. In this book, however, the term ‘grammar’ will be used to refer to the combination of phonology, lexicon, semantics, morphology and syntax. A sixth component, pragmatics, lies outside grammar, but is a key component of communicative competence.

(1) Phonology

Phonology is the study of how particular languages make use of the range of sounds that humans produce in speaking: what the inventory of speech sounds is for any given language, and how those sounds can be combined. Also included are such things as stress and intonation which affect the way particular sequences of sounds are said.

We know that children have a certain amount of trouble physically pronouncing the words of the language they are learning, but that does not account for all the differences between children’s pronunciations and adults’. Children also have different systems from adults. A particularly dramatic example of this was documented by Smith (1973) who tells of a child who said ‘puggle’ for ‘puddle’ and ‘puddle’ for ‘puzzle’. This child was perfectly able to produce a ‘d’ in the middle of a word; he simply did not produce it where adults expected him to.

Similarly, in example (13) in Figure 1 the child seems unable to produce an ‘ng’ sound at the end of a word, where the adult word usually calls for it (depending upon dialect), but can produce it in the middle of a word, when the adult word does not (Smith, 1973).

(2) The lexicon

The lexicon is the dictionary of the language. Examples (3) and (6) in Figure 1 show an initial solution to the problem of figuring out the words of the language – a kind of prelinguistic neologizing. The child in (3) uses ‘na’ to mean ‘give me that’; the child in (6) uses ‘keek’ for breakfast. Other examples show that children quickly learn the words of the language, although examples (12), (14) and (15) suggest that only gradually do they come to understand exactly how these words can be used and modified.

There are argued to be a number of different kinds of words in the lexicon. One distinction is between content words and function words. Content words carry the main meaning of the message; these are nouns, adjectives, main verbs and many adverbs. Each of these constitute open-ended sets which can always be expanded when new intentions or discoveries require it. (For example, kleenex, xerox, and space-shuttle have fairly recently been added to the set of nouns.) Function words, on the other hand, form a closed set, usually do not describe things in the way content words do, and include prepositions, articles, auxiliary verbs, conjunctions and bound morphemes. The characterization is not entirely straightforward since prepositions, for example, carry important meaning. Also pronouns are a closed set, but yet they refer to things as nouns do.

Another distinction is among content words: between those that refer to things that can be pointed to, and those that describe abstract things that cannot. In the former group are words such as ‘duck’, ‘bottle’, and ‘Mummy’. In the latter group are words such as ‘love’, ‘hate’, and ‘justice’. This difference is important because it is presumed that the ‘pointable’ words are more readily learnable in the context of a mother-child interaction in which the relevant objects are present.

(3) Semantics

Words, both alone and in combination, carry the meanings that the language can convey. Semantics is the study of meaning. There are two kinds of semantics: lexical semantics and sentential semantics. Lexical semantics is the study of individual word meanings: that ‘clothe’ means to put garments on someone or something; that ‘cake’ means either an object that has been baked from (usually) flour, eggs, sugar and butter, or the act of covering something with a glutinous, mud-like material. Sentential semantics is concerned with how words convey meaning in combination. For example, the sentence ‘Every man loves a woman’ is ambiguous. It either means that every man loves the same woman, or that each man loves a different woman. The individual words in the sentence mean the same thing under either interpretation, but in combination they mean two different things. The development of sentential semantics is mostly beyond the scope of this book, but the development of lexical semantics will be considered fairly extensively. (See Chapters 3 and 4.)

(4) Morphology

As well as having meanings, words have forms. Morphology is the study of those forms: the way words are constructed. The child in example (14) in Figure 1 is being creative with the form of English words. Exactly what the child is doing is a little hard to determine. However, the possibilities include either adding ‘un-’ to the noun ‘clothes’ to produce a new noun ‘unclothes’, and then using that noun as a verb, ‘to unclothes’, or deciding that the verb ‘to clothe(s)’ can have a negative counterpart: ‘to unclothe(s)’. Morphology is the study of how words are constructed out of morphemes, of which there are two kinds. Words such as ‘go’ and ‘make’ can stand alone, and are called free morphemes. However, ‘-ed’, ‘-ing’, and ‘un-’ cannot stand alone as independent words, and are called bound morphemes

A final distinction that must be raised at this point is between derivational and inflectional morphology. The essential difference here can be captured by comparing the -er ending that changes verbs like farm into agentive nouns like farmer with the plural ending -s that simply adds to a noun such as farm the additional information that we are talking about more than one. The first case, the agentive -er, is an example of derivational morphology because its addition ‘derives’ a new kind of word. The second case, the -s plural ending, is an example of inflectional morphology.

(5) Syntax

A different area of language is illustrated in examples (7), (10) and (16). These demonstrate children’s early attempts to grapple with the way words are combined into sentences, the subsystem of language called syntax. It is the syntax of English that allows the combination of words ‘Stewart respects Vikki’ to mean something different from ‘Vikki respects Stewart’, and explains why ‘Why did you say that?’ is a sentence of adult native-speaker English, but ‘Why you say that?’ is not. It is the combination of words, which ones are there and the order they appear in, that makes the difference. While children’s syntax develops quickly, as example (7) shows, the earliest word combinations are just two or three words, and generally do not include function words. Because of this absence of function words, early utterances sound rather like telegrams sent by someone who cannot pay for more than just the main content words: cryptic, but usually understandable. (Some researchers have actually called early utterances ‘telegraphic’.)

(6) Pragmatics

The term ‘pragmatics’ covers a rather large assortment of things. It is considerably less well-defined as an area of study than those we have looked at so far (Levinson, 1983). Broadly, it covers all aspects of the way language is used to convey messages. Among other things, it includes how speakers use utterances to make requests, promises, and threats; how utterances differ in the degree to which they are polite; how the structure of utterances allows speakers to background some information while foregrounding other information. In fact, it covers all the ways in which the grammar serves the needs of speakers as social human beings.

While we can only guess at children’s intentions in the absence of more adequate contextual information, it is likely that the child in example (14), Figure 1 is using language to ask for information; (15) seems to be making an announcement; (9) seems to be a polite request for an object. Being able to construct utterances to serve these purposes is a crucial part of being able to communicate.

Descriptive rules

In examining each of the subcomponents of grammar, and in looking at pragmatics, linguists have tried to describe how the adult system works. They have tried to define the rules that speakers of the language seem to be using when they construct utterances. These are not rules in the prescriptive sense of what speakers ought to do (that is left to English teachers), but rules in the descriptive sense of regularities or generalizations apparent from what speakers say and intuitively think is right or wrong. For example, ‘Who did you see yesterday?’ breaks none of the descriptive grammar rules of English, despite a prescriptive preference for ‘whom’ over ‘who’ in such cases. On the other hand, ‘Who you yesterday did see?’ would not be accepted by a native speaker of English as a sentence of the language; and the descriptive rules of the grammar should correctly predict this.

The non-linguistic repertoire

In addition to the linguistic subcomponents, there are also non-linguistic devices for communication. Most obviously there are gestures, facial expressions and eye movements. The child in example (2) communicates his interest in sharing his toy with his mother mostly by looking at her. At least that is how she interprets it. Examples (4) and (9) in Figure 1 include gestures (reaching and pointing respectively). At the prelinguistic stage children obviously only have non-linguistic communicative devices available, but they develop quite a sophisticated gestural system that continues to serve them well even when language has emerged.

Communicative competence

This book will be using the term ‘communicative competence’ to refer to the total communication system, verbal and non-verbal. The term ‘competence’ was first used as a technical term in linguistics by Noam Chomsky in 1965. He used it to mean the unconscious knowledge that speakers (at any stage of language development or language mastery) have of the grammatical features of the language(s) they s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1. Background concepts
• Chapter 2. Foundations of early communication
• Chapter 3. Prelinguistic communicative competence and the early lexicon
• Chapter 4. Communicating with language
• Chapter 5. Explaining the development of communicative competence
• Chapter 6. Studying child language
• Bibliography
• Index