Berko Gleason The Development Of Language

[Arleen Smelko]

This classic text now in its tenth edition, The Development of Language continues its focus on language acquisition in an unbiased, authoritative, and comprehensive way. Written by leading experts known for their research in the areas they discuss, this book has a multidisciplinary approach, and demonstrates the relevance of typical language development to speech-language pathologists, educators, clinicians, and those in other professions. Topics include the roots of language learning in infancy, phonology, syntax/grammar, word learning, bilingualism, pragmatics, literacy, atypical language development, and more.

Nan Bernstein Ratner, EdD, CCC-SLP is a Professor of Hearing and Speech Sciences and Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Maryland at College Park. She conducts research that has been funded by both the US NIDCD and NSF, and publishes frequently in the areas of language acquisition and speech/language disorders. Dr. Bernstein Ratner is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and is an ASHA Honors recipient.

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My background is in psycholinguistics. Language acquisition remains my major research interest. In recent times, I have become interested in broader questions of psychological development and the role that language plays in that process. My recent research on child language has dealt with parental input language and with socialization, as well as with the lexicon. I have conducted research in Hungary, on language development in the Roma community. I have also worked for a number of years on aphasia, particularly on questions related to lexical retrieval.

This authoritative text is ideal for courses that take a developmental approach to language acquisition across the full life span. The text thoroughly explores syntax, morphology, semantics, phonology, and pragmatics. It examines atypical development with attention to the most common disorders affecting language acquisition, presents strong coverage of individual differences in language acquisition and learning, describes how and why they occur, and provides contemporary references and the most recent research findings. The panel of expert authors provides students with cutting-edge, up-to-date research knowledge in an interesting and highly readable format.

Language is both expressive (e.g., speaking, writing, signing) and receptive (e.g., listening, reading, watching). Spoken language, written language, and their associated components are each an interdependent system comprised of individual language domains that form a dynamic integrative whole (Berko Gleason, 2005).

The chart below describes how each language domain relates to spoken and written language. Signed languages and AAC can facilitate development of the language domains below. It is important to note that individual languages and dialects vary across the five components of language. Each dialectical speech community has its own range of social and linguistic diversity (ASHA, 2003). For example, what is pragmatically appropriate in one community may be unusual in another community.

An interaction of biological, cognitive, psychosocial, and environmental factors determines how language is learned and used. Language develops within specific historical, social, and cultural contexts. Dialects are variations of a linguistic symbol system that reflects the shared regional, social, or cultural/ethnic backgrounds of its speakers (ASHA, 2003). Examples of dialects spoken in the United States include General American English, African American English, and Southern White English (Oetting, 2020).

A language disorder is a persistent difficulty learning and using language. This could include spoken, written, and/or signed language. The disorder may involve the form of language (phonology, morphology, syntax), the content of language (semantics), and/or the function of language in communication (pragmatics) in any combination (ASHA, 1993). Some individuals with language disorders may require AAC as a means of, or supplement to, expressive communication.

The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) is the national professional, scientific, and credentialing association for 234,000 members, certificate holders, and affiliates who are audiologists; speech-language pathologists; speech, language, and hearing scientists; audiology and speech-language pathology assistants; and students.

A multilingual and multicultural focus on acquisition in languages other than English, on non-mainstream varieties of English and on children learning two or more languages simultaneously (bilingualism), as well as children with developmental communication disorders

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Combining the contributions of experts and highly-respected researchers, the eighth edition of Language Development offers a definitive exploration of language acquisition and development from infancy through adulthood.

Although babies learn how to speak at different rates, almost all little ones learn how to form words and sentences in a similar order, beginning with single syllables and graduating to more complex ideas like tense. In just a few short years, a child goes from no language at all to forming cohesive sentences following grammatical rules.

As children move through the five stages of syntactic development, their sentences grow in length. According to speech language pathologist Caroline Bowen, kids begin to learn grammatical elements in Stage II, usually between 28 and 36 months. Most toddlers acquire these elements in the same order, beginning with the present progressive -ing, then the prepositions in and on.

For example, Erika Hoff says, "I have used CHILDES to get the original Adam, Eve, and Sarah transcripts. I hand them out to the class and use them as examples of various phenomena and the students get to see the real words of famous subjects. I have also used those transcripts as the basis of take home exams with a question something like, 'what does Eve know and what about language does she not know at this point in her development?' Students have thought that was interesting and valuable."

• Extensive and selected handouts. Some courses make more extensive use of handouts, selecting across particular types of materials. For example, Lynn Santelmann reports, "I use the transcripts in two ways: First, I have created a packet of transcripts for the students to analyze, one set for child-directed speech, one for phonology, one for morphosyntax, and one for discourse/conversation. (I also have a set for narratives, but they did not come from CHILDES). Unfortunately, I haven't been able to get a good data set for word learning yet. I clean up these transcripts a bit to remove some of the analysis tiers, and I give them transcripts of different ages so they can see change over time. I give the students very specific questions or features to analyze, and then they work either in small groups or at home. We discuss the results in class. This gives them not only a chance to see some of the features that we've talked or read about first hand, but gives them a chance to see how hard it is to analyze things sometimes (e.g., is a morpheme missing because the child doesn't produce it or because the context does not provide an opportunity for the child to use it?)."

Nan Bernstein-Ratner, Ed.D., is a Board-Certified Specialist in child language and language disorders, American Speech-Language-Hearing Association Honors recipient, and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Her primary areas of funded and published research focus on interactions between fluency and language development/disorder, and the role of adult input/interaction in child communication development. With the late Oliver Bloodstein, she is coauthor of A Handbook on Stuttering; with Jean Berko Gleason, she has coauthored the texts Psycholinguistics and The Development of Language. She co-directs the FluencyBank and other TalkBank initiatives (www.fluencybank.talkbank.org) with Brian MacWhinney.

The new approach to viewing children's disordered language as a linguistic system did not evolve from our aphasia-in-children thrust, but rather from events outside our field in psychology and linguistics. The event which is usually seen as starting it off was Noam Chomsky's transformational linguistic theory which postulated an abstract level of language used by people to understand and produce sentences. Following Chomsky's idea of an abstract generative language system (Chomsky, 1957) psychologists, postulated rules for beginning language learners, rules that are different from adult users of the language.