Helen Doron is an accomplished experienced and knowledgeable teacher of English as a Second Language. In this piece here she provides parents with the details that will allow them to recognize just how important it is to talk a lot to their babies and very young children.
Reading skills ride on prior language development. The child with poor vocabulary, little conversation and a low level of variation in everyday life will naturally find reading both harder and less meaningful.
Doron’s paper provides the information that explains why reading stories to your children is helpful. In my view reading stories to your children is very good, but actually telling them stories is even better. Because we have lost the art of story telling in everyday life, I have suggested to many parents that they should read a story themselves, hide the book, tell the child the story, with all the bells and whistles they can muster, and then “find” the book, and read it over again, a day or two later. This gives the child a correct view of reading as a way of coding speech. In practice this approach leads to conversations about the story of a kind recommended by Grover (Russ) Whitehurst in his interesting essay on ‘dialogic reading’. In this he has formalized categories for typing different kinds of conversational gambits in a way useful to help parents understand why what they may do quite naturally is very useful. (See Whiting’s paper in readings provided to expand on the topic of Why Stories, Music, Writing?) GS
Helen Doron
: Early English
Annual Conference 2000 and S.E.A.L.
conference 2001
Becoming Better Teachers By
Understanding Neurolinguistics and Brain Functioning
A child's brain begins as a chaotic pool of unconnected neurons
waiting to be stimulated, directed and wired in some
logical pattern. This complex wiring creates an excessive number of
connections, causing the brain to rapidly overdevelop between the ages of two
and 10. Although trillions and trillions of neurons are connected during this
burst of discovery, more than half of the excessive connections will eventually
be eliminated. The trick, according to Dr. Chugani, is to keep desired
connections alive and permanent to allow for efficient processing of a variety
of functions.
During the first decade of life, the cerebral cortex undergoes a
dramatic curve in energy consumption. Metabolic rates in the
brain rapidly increase beginning at birth and begin to reach adult values
around age two. At age three, a child’s metabolic brain energy far exceeds
adult levels, and by age four, a "plateau" is reached which lasts
until about age nine. This plateau is the result of hyperconnectivity, where
cortical neurons have formed excessive connections, which are later either
preserved or selectively eliminated depending upon exposures and stimuli.
Around age 10, plasticity of the brain begins a gradual decline until 16 or 18,
at which point, the levels of glucose utilization have reached adult values.
Because the regions of the brain develop systematically, there are
critical windows of opportunity for learning. Different regions
become more malleable during particular phases. "Our brains are
particularly open to certain stimulations at certain times," said Dr.
Chugani. "Once that time is up, you can never recapture that unique
ability."
So if your little girl
wants to play a musical instrument, she shouldn’t wait until age 20 when the
cortex is already developed. She should begin at age five when her cortex is
being wired specifically for such skills. The connections then become part of
the brain’s formation. Dr. Chugani explains it this way. If a child has done something
many times before, it becomes easier, not just physically but biologically, too.
The pathway in the brain becomes very clearly drawn or wired over time. So if a
child learns a second language or plays a musical instrument very early, the
connections for that task are very clear and unobstructed. If the child
has never encountered a situation before, the brain has to try several
different pathways, and may be re-routed several times before making the
appropriate connection.
Dr. Chugani also stresses the importance of repeated and
reinforced learning. Research suggests that crash courses in a
second language are much less effective than continuous learning over four or
five years. It doesn’t do much good to enroll a child in a French class for one
semester, because the brain benefits from repeated exposures, not intense
isolated hits. This same reasoning explains how children become wired
for positive or negative behaviors.
They learn what is reinforced throughout their childhood.
Why do all members of some
families seem to continually explode or overreact to simple situations? A child’s
automatic response mechanisms are learned through collected past experiences
over a lasting period, so if you are raised in a hostile environment with
parents who often yell or exhibit violent behaviors, you will probably become
"hard-wired" for hostility. The brain doesn’t screen out negative
behaviors. This is just one reason Dr. Chugani is opposed to television
violence. "It becomes a passively learned behavior," he said.
"You learn what you see--and again the brain doesn’t differentiate between
good and bad." All exposures are registered and stored until they become
reinforced or contradicted by others.
Levels of Language
Prosody intonation and rhythm
Phonetics pure sounds
Phonology sounds arranged into units of meaning
Morphology word grammar
Syntax sentence structure
Semantics meaning
0 - 10 months
The path leading to language begins even before birth,
when a developing fetus is bathed in the muffled sound of its mother's voice in
the womb. Newborn babies prefer their mothers' voices over those of their
fathers or other women, and researchers recently have found that when very
young babies hear a recording of their mothers' native language, they will suck
more vigorously on a pacifier than when they hear a recording of another
tongue.
At first, infants respond only to the prosody--the
cadence, rhythm, and pitch--of their mothers' speech, not the words. But soon
enough they home in on the actual sounds that are typical of their parents'
language. Every language uses a different assortment of sounds, called
phonemes, which combine to make syllables. (In English, for example, the
consonant sound "b" and the vowel sound "a" are both
phonemes, which combine for the syllable ba,
as in banana.) To an adult, simply
perceiving, much less pronouncing, the phonemes of a foreign language can seem
impossible. In English, the p of pat
is "aspirated," or produced with a puff of air; the p of spot or tap is unaspirated. In English, the two p's are considered the
same; therefore it is hard for English speakers to recognize that in many other
languages the two p's are two different phonemes. Japanese speakers have
trouble distinguishing between the "l" and "r" sounds of
English, since in Japanese they don't count as separate sounds.
Polyglot tots. Infants can perceive the
entire range of phonemes, according to Janet Werker and Richard Tees,
psychologists at the
Kuhl, Williams, Lacerda,
Stevens and Lindblum in 1992 (Science) found that by 6 months of age, babies recognized the phonemes of their mother
tongue as distinct from those of other languages.
By the time babies are 10 months to a year old, however, they have
begun to focus on the distinctions among phonemes of
their native language and to ignore the differences among foreign sounds.
Children don't lose the ability to distinguish the sounds of a foreign
language; they simply don't pay attention to them. This allows them to learn
more quickly the syllables and words of their native tongue.
An infant's next step is
learning to fish out individual words
from the nonstop stream of sound that makes up ordinary speech. Finding the
boundaries between words is a daunting task, because people don't pause . . .
between . . . words . . . when . . . they speak. Yet children begin to note
word boundaries by the time they are 8 months old, even though they have no
concept of what most words mean. Last year, Jusczyk and his colleagues reported
results of an experiment in which they let 8-month-old babies listen at home to
recorded stories filled with unusual words, like hornbill and python. Two
weeks later, the researchers tested the babies with two lists of words, one
composed of words they had already heard in the stories, the other of new
unusual words that weren't in the stories. The infants listened, on average, to
the familiar list for a second longer than to the list of novel words.
The cadence of language is a baby's first clue to word boundaries.
In most English words, the first syllable is accented. This is especially
noticeable in words known in poetry as trochees--two-syllable words stressed on
the first syllable--which parents repeat to young children (BA-by, DOG-gie,
MOM-my). At 6 months, American babies pay equal amounts of attention to words
with different stress patterns, like gi-RAFFE or TI-ger. By 9 months, however,
they have heard enough of the typical first-syllable-stress pattern of English
to prefer listening to trochees, a predilection that will show up later, when
they start uttering their first words and mispronouncing giraffe as raff and banana as nana. At 30 months, children can easily repeat the phrase
"TOM-my KISS-ed the MON-key," because it preserves the typical
English pattern, but they will leave out the the when asked to repeat "Tommy patted the monkey."
Researchers are now testing whether French babies prefer words with a
second-syllable stress--words like be-RET
or ma-MAN.
Decoding patterns.
Most adults could not imagine making speedy progress toward memorizing words in
a foreign language just by listening to somebody talk on the telephone. That is
basically what 8-month-old babies can do, according to a provocative study
published in 1996 by the
The researchers created a
miniature artificial language, which consisted of a handful of three-syllable
nonsense words constructed from 11 different syllables. The babies heard a
computer-generated voice repeating these words in random order in a monotone
for two minutes. What they heard went something like "bidakupadotigolabubidaku."
Bidaku, in this case, is a word. With
no cadence or pauses, the only way the babies could learn individual words was
by remembering how often certain syllables were uttered together. When the
researchers tested the babies a few minutes later, they found that the infants
recognized pairs of syllables that had occurred together consistently on the
recording, such as bida. They did not
recognize a pair like kupa, which was
a rarer combination that crossed the boundaries of two words. In the past,
psychologists never imagined that young infants had the mental capacity to make
these sorts of inferences. "We were pretty surprised we could get this
result with babies, and with only brief exposure," says
Innate Language Capacity of Newborns
Learning words is one thing; learning the abstract rules of
grammar is another. When Noam Chomsky first voiced his idea that
language is hard-wired in the brain, he didn't have the benefit of the current
revolution in cognitive science, which has begun to pry
open the human mind with sophisticated psychological experiments and new
computer models. Until recently, linguists could only parse languages and
marvel at how quickly children master their abstract rules, which give every
human being who can speak (or sign) the power to express an infinite number of
ideas from a finite number of words.
Universal Grammar:There
also are a finite number of ways that languages construct sentences. As Chomsky
once put it, from a Martian's-eye view, everybody on Earth speaks a single
tongue that has thousands of mutually unintelligible dialects. For instance,
all people make sentences from noun phrases, like "The quick brown
fox," and verb phrases, like "jumped over the fence." And
virtually all of the world's 6,000 or so languages allow phrases to be moved
around in a sentence to form questions, relative clauses, and passive
constructions.
Statistical wizards.
Chomsky posited that children were born knowing these and a handful of other
basic laws of language and that they learn their parents' native tongue with
the help of a "language acquisition device," preprogrammed circuits
in the brain. Findings like Newport's are suggesting to some researchers that
perhaps children can use statistical regularities to extract not only
individual words from what they hear but also the rules for cobbling words
together into sentences.
Computational linguists
have designed computer models called artificial
neural networks that are very simplified versions of the brain and that can
"learn" some aspects of language. Artificial neural networks mimic
the way that nerve cells, or neurons, inside a brain are hooked up. The result
is a device that shares some basic properties with the brain and that can
accomplish some linguistic feats that real children perform.
But neural networks have
yet to come close to the computation power of a toddler. Ninety percent of the sentences uttered by the average 3-year-old are
grammatically correct.
10 - 13 months: 1st words
Characteristics:
one
or two syllables.
Consonant clusters (e.g. st) and diphthongs (e.g. you) are rare.
Most consonants are in
front of mouth, e.g. p, b, d, t, m, n.
Most common vowels: are
those in "stop" and "eet".
Reduplication common e.g. baba for "bottle"
Meanings of first words
(Nelson, 1973)
51% general nominals e.g. ball, doggie, snow
14% specific nominals e.g. mommy, pet names
13% actionwords e.g. give, byebye, up
9% modifiers e.g. red, dirty, outside, mine ….
8% personal social words e.g.
no, yes, please
4% function words e.g.
what, for ….
These are the number of
terms in each category, not necessarily the frequency of use. Selective: food,
clothing, animal, toy and vehicle names.
Change is important:
objects that move and change themselves. The rest is “part of the furniture”
e.g. not common TV, table, window, tree
but common clock, blanket, key, car
etc..
Overextension
Overextension most common between 13 – 30 months.
Words or sentences?
Children use first words in
several ways.
1. Seldom simply as a name e.g. sees ball and says ball. This
happens, but rarer.
2. More typical is child who sees his
father’s slippers and says daddy. i.e. comment on object or event in the environment.
3. Child says airplane when he sees plane in sky and byebye when it’s gone, i.e. the importance of a transition point /
change in child’s environment.
4. Location,e.g. when an object is
moved, child says down.
5. Description or commanding herself, i.e. child blows nose and
says nose.
6. Negatives: not just using word no, but more complex forms of
negation too.
Holophrastic speech = words that are
sentences.
Back to neurolinguistics: Children may be noticing grammatical
morphemes when they are as young as 10 months and have just begun making
connections between words and their definitions. Gerken recently found that
infants' brain waves change when they are listening to stories in which
grammatical morphemes are replaced with other words, suggesting they begin
picking up grammar even before they know what sentences mean.
Such linguistic leaps come
as a baby's brain is humming with activity. Within the first few months of life, a baby's neurons will forge 1,000
trillion connections, an increase of 20-fold from birth. Neurobiologists
once assumed that the wiring in a baby's brain was set at birth. After that,
the brain, like legs and noses, just grew bigger. That view has been
demolished, says Anne Fernald, a psycholinguist at
Other leaps in a child's linguistic prowess also coincide with
remarkable changes in the brain. For instance, an adult
listener can recognize eleph as elephant within about 400 milliseconds,
an ability called "fast mapping" that demands that the brain process
speech sounds with phenomenal speed. "To understand strings of words, you
have to identify individual words rapidly," says Fernald. She and her
colleagues have found that around 15 months of age, a child needs more than a
second to recognize even a familiar word, like baby. At 18 months, the child can get the picture slightly before
the word is ending. At 24 months, she knows the word in a mere 600 milliseconds,
as soon as the syllable bay has been
uttered.
Fast mapping takes off at the same moment as a dramatic
reorganization of the child's brain, in which language-related operations,
particularly grammar, shift from both sides of the brain into the left hemisphere.
Most adult brains are lopsided when it comes to language, processing grammar
almost entirely in the left temporal lobe, just over the left ear. Infants and
toddlers, however, treat language in both hemispheres, according to Debra
Mills, at the
From then on, the two
hemispheres assume different job descriptions. The right temporal lobe
continues to perform spatial tasks, such as following the trajectory of a
baseball and predicting where it will land. It also pays attention to the
emotional information contained in the cadence and pitch of speech. Both hemispheres know the meanings of many
words, but the left temporal lobe holds the key to grammar.
Sign Language
This division is maintained
even when the language is signed, not spoken. Ursula Bellugi and Edward Klima,
a wife and husband team at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in
Birth of a language
Linguists have never had
the chance to study a spoken language as it is being constructed, but they have
been given the opportunity to observe a new sign language in the making in
18 - 20 months - putting words together
Two basic observations
1. Child language is simpler than adult language in a regular
way. Typically nouns, verbs and adjectives are present whereas articles,
conjunctions, prepositions and endings are normally missing.
2. Early child language is genuinely creative – not only are
many child utterances not identical to adult utterances the child may have
heard, but they are not even simplifications. A child who watches a door being
closed and says allgone outside has
constructed a novel utterance.
Telegraphic speech:
emphasizes the first of the observations above,
e.g. I see the truck becomes I see truck.
18-month olds recognize complicated grammar
Inside a small, dark booth,
18-month-old Karly Horn sits on her mother Terry's lap. Karly's brown curls
bounce each time she turns her head to listen to a woman's recorded voice
coming from one side of the booth or the other. "At the bakery, workers
will be baking bread," says the voice. Karly turns to her left and
listens, her face intent. "On Tuesday morning, the people have going to
work," says the voice. Karly turns her head away even before the statement
is finished. The lights come on as graduate student Ruth Tincoff opens the door
to the booth. She gives the child's curls a pat and says, "Nice
work."
Karly and her mother are
taking part in an experiment at
Linguists these days are
reconsidering a lot of ideas they once considered crazy.
Recent findings like Jusczyk's are reshaping the prevailing model
of how children acquire language.The dominant theory, put
forth by Noam Chomsky, has been that children cannot possibly learn the full
rules and structure of languages strictly by imitating what they hear. Instead,
nature gives children a head start,
wiring them from birth with the ability to acquire their parents' native tongue
by fitting what they hear into a pre-existing template for the basic structure
shared by all languages. (Similarly, kittens are thought to be hard-wired
to learn how to hunt.) “Language”, writes Massachusetts Institute of Technology
linguist Steven Pinker, "is a distinct piece of
the biological makeup of our brains."
Chomsky, a prominent
linguist at MIT, hypothesized in the 1950s that children are endowed from birth
with "universal grammar," the fundamental rules that are common to
all languages, and the ability to apply these rules to the raw material of the
speech they hear--without awareness of their underlying logic.
Yet for all of grammar's
seeming illogic, toddlers' brains may be able to spot clues in the sentences they hear that help them learn grammatical rules,
just as they use statistical regularities to find word boundaries. One such
clue is the little bits of language called grammatical morphemes, which among
other things tell a listener whether a word is being used as noun or as a verb.
The, for instance,
signals that a noun will soon follow, while the suffix ion also identifies a word as a noun, as in vibration.
Psycholinguist LouAnn Gerken of the
It is striking how little difficulty the child has with any of the
general mechanisms of language: the notion of a sentence,
rules for combining various classes of words, the expression of a wide variety
of meanings, the concept of inflections, and more. All are present from a very
early age. Particular rules, meanings and inflections may, however, require
time for mastery.
The early appearance of many semantic relationships,
together with the striking differences between many child utterances and the
adult speech around the child, strongly suggests that the child is attempting
above all to express his own ideas, emotions, and actions through whatever
system she has so far constructed,
The acquisition of grammatical morphemes
of English is in a regular sequence determined mainly by grammatical complexity
and by semantic complexity.
Overregularization
Stage 1 Came,
did, broke are leant. Not surprising as irregular forms are 4 times as
common in adult speech to children as regular ones.
Stage 2 Regular
past tense morpheme - ed
is learnt and suddenly appears in all verbs, regular and irregular alike, e.g. comed, doed, breaked.
Stage 3 Child returns to correct irregular
forms together with regular forms.
This shows that the child
is essentially a pattern learner. Once a pattern is acquired, it will be
applied as broadly as possible.
Other types of error show
how the child filters rules through his own emerging grammatical system: e.g.
Going to put some sugars (count nouns v. mass
nouns)
I didn’t spilled it
Does the kitten stands up?
The search for patterns on
the part of the child can even override her desire to match the patterns of the
language around her.
Vocabulary
A recent study indicates
that the size of toddlers'
vocabularies depends in large measure on how much their mothers talk to them.
At 20 months, according to a study by Janellen Huttenlocher of the
In other words, children need input and they
need it early, says
3 years old
You may feel confident that you can outsmart your three-year old,
but when it comes to brainpower, he’s probably got you beat. The metabolic
energy consumed by a child’s brain is 225 percent that of an adult. Does that
mean your child is far more intelligent? Probably not--but it does indicate
that he’s thinking and processing information at a much greater rate. And at
this tender young age, he holds an incredible strength--his immense capacity
for learning.
Neurolinguistics today
The debate over how much of language is already vested in a child
at birth is far from settled, but new linguistic research already is
transforming traditional views of how the human brain works and how language
evolved. "This debate has completely changed the way we view the
brain," says Elissa Newport, a psycholinguist at the
Geneticists and linguists recently have begun to challenge the
common-sense assumption that intelligence and language are inextricably linked,
through research on a rare genetic disorder called Williams syndrome, which can
seriously impair cognition while leaving language nearly intact. Increasingly
sophisticated technologies such as magnetic resonance imaging are allowing
researchers to watch the brain in action, revealing that language literally sculpts and
reorganizes the connections within it as a child grows.
Hearing more than one language in infancy makes it easier
for a child to hear the distinctions between phonemes of more
than one language later on says
Linguists don't yet know
how much of grammar children are able to absorb simply by listening. And they
have only begun to parse the genes or accidents of brain wiring that might give
rise, as Pinker puts it, to the poet or the raconteur. What is certain is that language is one of the great wonders of the
natural world, and linguists are still being astonished by its complexity
and its power to shape the brain. Human beings, says Kegl, "show an
incredible enthusiasm for discourse."
Maybe what is most innate
about language is the passion to
communicate.