Today our topic of discussion is- Cognitive development
Cognitive development
Children’s ability to understand language becomes more mature and complicated along with their age development. Their brains become mature and their ability to communicate, comprehend and produce spoken language develops as well.
When children acquire a first language, they draw on what they know on the basis of their conceptual knowledge that differentiates and helps to construct definitions for the objects, relationships and events they encounter (Clark, 2004).
All of these need well formed brain development. I have categorized a major portion of my findings under the theme ‘cognitive development’ because according to the analysis, language acquisition course cannot occur alone as a vacuum process, it needs reasoning, information processing, attention and memory.
Cognitive factors and social aspects are closely related to the entire process too. Children are often seen in their everyday communication process imitating or memorizing language chunk for contextual communication like- how to receive a phone call or what to say when someone is leaving the house (etc.).
These are all accumulated process of cognition of language development. The child imitates (a part of social cognition) what others say and do, tries to explain or use language logically, overgeneralizes when he is unable to capture the form- meaning mapping scenario, uses his perceptions, expresses feeling-emotions,
involves in pretend/symbolic play or shows, special abilities to recognize numbers, shapes or colours; and all of these processes are enabling the child to acquire the first language and interpret it for successive communication.
Researchers supported that, cognitive pre-requisites for language development is very important. In 1980’s cognitive linguists helped to initiate a flood of work connecting language and cognition (Campbell, 1979).
Representation of conceptual structures in language is a central concern in cognitive linguistics as they put emphasis on issues like- how aspects of general cognition (such as how the meaning of grammatical construction are created) are important to describe linguistic structures. It all started by Jean Piaget (1954)
when he tried to emphasize the commonalities between language and cognition. Meaning acquisition processes like imitation, perceptual organization or reasoning establishes that cognitive development is not inseparable with language acquisition.
This research is also concerned to find the relationship between cognitive development and surrounding environment of the speaker which is the most influential factor in a child’s first language growth. Psychologist Vygotsky (1978) mentioned that child’s language reality needs to be adjusted with cognitive organization.
He believed that after successful language acquisition children need to depend more on environmental circumstances to develop cognitively. We need to know that developmental aspects related to cognition are also important to child’s physiological growth and it goes parallel to language acquisition, depending more on the environment in which the linguistic operations take place.
That is why starting from the very first cognitive theory by Piaget to the recent developmental stances on language acquisition (including the usage based approach), priority has always been given to the role of cognition in language development. Issues like language constructions or schematizations are results of cognitive maturation influencing language acquisition.
The presence of this crosses our perception more through the expressive and receptive use of the children’s language during the entire period of first language acquisition.
Until now, the research questions have been explained randomly through the process of data analysis and most of the findings are also discussed relating to the reviewed literature and theoretical perspectives.
Once again I would attend to the research questions individually and extensively in this chapter. Before that I need to shed light on few more findings of this
research that I think vital in enhancing children’s meaning making process. Some of them are universal to all children and some are culture specific as to the Bengali children.
Courses of semantic acquisition are more or less identical to all languages and to every child; for example- early utterances, pretend play, imitation, perceptual organization, form- meaning mapping, asking questions, development of conversational skills etc.
Apart from these, the following features need to be highlighted and explained because they are culture specific, thus unusual too. Moreover these features of meaning acquisition demanded little more intense observations than the other features. These features are as follow-
(a) Original word imposed meaning
(b) Own word generation
(c) Use of onomatopoeic and reduplicated words
(d) Semantic negotiation
(e) Blame shifting
(a) Original word imposed meaning: I have seen that most of my participant children
use some already established and meaningful words with different meanings. Like, child
Anna used /piz/(please) very frequently and it seemed like she knows what it actually means. But when she was asked, she always had different meanings for the word depending on her choice of use-
/piz/= to give (when she is asking for milk),
/piz/= asking to come (when she means ‘please come here”), like this she uses-
/ciken/= chocolate (not to mean ‘chicken’, as chocolate)
/bikale /= right now (when she wants something right at the moment) etc.
Like the above words, she used ‘life’, ‘burp”, “fresh’, ‘gas’ and many other words
with meanings that were her own or I can say that the way she wanted to express them. (b) Own word generation: Besides using an already established word in different senses, children use many self made words too, like-/buku/- /buk/ or ‘chest’/mimi/= ‘breast milk’, /badu/= ‘bad’ and many more words of this kind.
Do they make the words out of nowhere? The answer is ‘no’. Children make up these words, but they are logically explainable. Such as- /buku/ resembles the Bengali word ‘/buk/’ for ‘chest’ and the word ‘/badu/’ resembles the English word ‘/bad/”bad” respectively.
Again, */mimi/’ means ‘chocolate’ in Bengali and the child loved both breast milk and chocolate, so he used the same term to represent both. But the idea and procedure to make new words out of the existing ones are quite amazing. Both cognition and surrounding learning influenced children’s personal use of words for communication.
Children at that age could not map the meaning with the actual form, which is why they have different versions of the same words in use. Along with age development, they will overcome the incompetent situation and know the actual use of every single word.
(c) Use of onomatopoeic and reduplicated words: Other than the above language uses, children apply reduplicated and onomatopoeic words in their everyday language (after 3 years usually). Such as- /ɔnek onek/, /goje ghofe/, /fiffif/, /dhaf kore/, /kalkal/, /thus kore/etc
. These words are frequently used in children’s everyday utterances. Again, reasons behind using these words lay down in taking input from their surrounding environment. They hear the
elders using such words and sometimes copy perfectly and sometimes with changes. But the influence of linguistic environment is playing a major role here.
Two of the language features used by almost all the participating children are very unique to me. I have seen them using language sometimes for taking personal benefit from the target situation specifically.
Before presenting they manipulate with the language or impose kind of self made (seems fake for that moment also) features on the language form which help them to make their utterances meet their expectations. I have named these features as ‘semantic negotiation’ or ‘language used for emotional manipulation’ and ‘blame shifting’.
(d) Semantic negotiation: Use of unnecessary intonations, gestures, facial expressions or emotional expressions with the utterances is the signs of manipulative language use. Children even give what we can identify as threats (emotional blackmailing perhaps) to the elders to make them agree with what they want or say.
For example- /tumi jodi amake na dao ami porbona/ or /age dao nahole ami k’abo na/= (if you do not give me I will not study or give it to me first or I will not eat). Besides, children praise mother (or say good things about a father) for her dress up or cooked food to cover up their mistake or any slip-up; /mamoni ami tomake balobafi/= (mother I love you) is the common expression that child Anna produced when she felt left alone or acted naughty.
Examples of manipulative language use are given with elaborate explanations in the findings chapter. I have also mentioned that developmental psychologists described both positive and negative aspects of such language use by children.
If I keep these aside, I will mark this strategy of meaning making very much innovative for children who are only 3.5 years or above. They should accredit for finding ways of expressing meaning in such novel ways.
e) Blame shifting: Children are also seen to be using words that actually shift blame or put one’s blame of misdeed on someone else. This is a normal phase of language development found in children in all languages as ‘ego defense mechanism’ (Freud, 2018).
Interestingly, I observed that the participating Bengali children shift their blames both on animate and inanimate entities. M:/amar ai pod ke dhoreche?/= (who touched my I pod?)
M:/dog mone hoy!/= (the dog perhaps) etc.
The question might arise- how do the children learn to blame others or use language in a manipulative way! According to my observation, children use their memory and reasoning to use previously heard language or observed situations to convey meaning in this way.
It does not require direct one to one data input or teaching from the adult’s part; children acquire all of the as quickly as possible to create contextual meaning from their linguistic environment.
The first research question is the most important one which is designed to explore how the Bengali speaking children acquire meaning for communication depending mostly on the input they get from their surrounding environment (including linguistic environment).
Both in the findings and discussion sections I have presented and analyzed many data collected during the observation sessions proving that starting from the pre-linguistic stage children depend mostly on information they receive from the people around them for communication.
Gradually they progress in acquiring meaning in the form of word combination and syntactic level, and during this whole period ‘cognitive skills’ or ‘cognition” co-constructed the link between children and their cultural contexts.
involvement in a given cultural context and distinctive definitions and behaviors that help to explore diverse developmental outcomes (Allen, 2015).
All data has been collected in the children’s natural settings. Whenever the child had
to establish any argument or present evidences in his favour, I have seen them using previously gathered knowledge and adjusting them according to the present context also. Even perceptions were also expressed on the basis of existing knowledge that the child received from parents or someone else.
For example, the child Fuko once asked her mother after she received a phone call-
C:/baba fon kore chilo? amake, dile na kæno?/= (Did father call? Why didn’t you let
me talk?)
M: /na, baba chilona./= (No, it wasn’t him.)
C:/amar to mone holo babai chilo./= (I think it was him.)
M:/kibabe buj”le tumi!/= (How do you know!)
C:/ami dekhechi e lek’a ut eche. e diye babar nam asaḍ hoy./= (I have seen the
alphabet ‘A’ on the screen. My father’s name ‘Asad’ starts with A.)
The child here used memory and reasoning from the previous knowledge to convey contextual meaning. Usually by 18 months toddlers start to observe and depend on the adults’ for information.
They start checking the speaker actively to associate an appropriate object with the label. Emotional and linguistic information is being obtained and shared at this period in even in the context of early parent- infant relationship.
By two years I have seen the children successfully engage in accomplishing activities joining with their parents, such as-sharing previous experiences or telling stories.
The role of the linguistic environment in learning a language was discussed also by the earliest theories of language acquisition. B.F. Skinner (1957) as we remember was the first theorist to suggest a fully fledged language acquisition theory.
He intended to primarily relate human linguistic activity (expressions and responses to the others’ utterances) with behavioral inclination. According to him, mastery of language and language learning depend solely on one’s verbal behaviors controlled by environmental elements including others’ utterances.
Children are rewarded or punished for their linguistic productions which gradually converge to appropriate performance for the widest language community. On the other hand, Noam Chomsky argued that language use and production are stimulus dependent and not determined by the history of reinforcement.
Language mastery involves a wealth of semantic, pragmatic, and syntactic knowledge. What we say or respond to others is the result of mutual understanding and interaction between our histories, our belief in our current situation, our desire and our knowledge of how our language works (Chomsky, 1959).
Children acquire the language only because they hear it spoken around them, and they also do so naturally, easily and without over-instruction also. Chomsky outlined the importance of cognitive and mentalistic conception of the language acquisition process when he claims that children learn a language mostly on their own.
Both of these earlier theories of language acquisition may vary in their theoretical development, but they believed in language acquisition as a result of the innate ability of the child to “think”, the skill that makes human unique and separate him from animals.
Both of the theorists focused on the role of environment, influences and reinforcements of the surrounding people in a child’s life that enhance his language acquisition process with ease and effortlessness.
Modern theories (after 20th century) also take language acquisition as a complex process which includes- associating words with concepts and knowledge of putting words together for making sentences to express our thoughts for meaningful communication.
The human brains have something special that helps children to master a natural language, knowing all the intricate laws that govern linguistic communication and comprehension of their language (Cowie, 2008).
My second research question deals with one of the major processes of meaning making, which is ‘categorization’. Categorization is the process of organizing experiences by treating occurrences discriminably that are alike (Gelman & Meyer, 2011).
Child categorization starts in early infancy and spans all of development. It changes when the child’s knowledge and cognitive skills develop. Children categorize information as an effective means of storage and retrieval; as a result, they do not have to track down every single item they come across. Moreover, it helps children to infer knowledge beyond past experiences and make predictions in future.
Young children’s foundation for adaptive action and problem solving begins through early categorization. Children start to differentiate and understand ideas and objects through categorization. How children come to be in command of the different categorizing process have been topics of vigorous debate since Chomsky.
During the research and data analysis process I have seen that children acquire their first language in several steps, and to accomplish each stage they have their own way or processing the language.
Usually children go through some basic type (common to all children during first language acquisition period) of categorization, like – perceptual categorization, conceptual categorization, semantic and syntactic categorization and social
categorization. All of these mainly enhance child language categorization process. Perceptual
categorization is an automatic part of perceptual processing computing perceptual similarity to one object or person to another; it creates perceptual schema of objects outlook.
Conceptual categorization re-describes perceptual information in conceptual forms, particularly on the paths that objects take. This process creates the notion of kinds, such as vehicles, animals, plants, furniture etc.
On the other hand, social categorization is the method of classifying individuals into groups on the basis of similar characteristics, whether gender, height, hair colour, occupation or any other traits. Human infants display complex categorization abilities (Bornstein & Arterberry, 2010), like-
(a) Visual preference: differentiating animate and in animate things.
(b) Habituation: capability of recognizing shapes or lines as they are practiced from
childhood.
(c) Object examining: identifying objects on the basis of external characteristics like, round/flat, heavy/light etc.
(d) Sequential touching: being able to identify body parts (of animals also) and tell if a person is fat or thin by touching over.
(e) Inductive generalization: knowing the function of things, like key starts a car, drinks cannot be chewed; a switch turns on a fan etc.
Even in the early word combination stage children do not produce the two-word utterances combining words randomly. Rather, they are systematic and logical in the way they combine words to express meaning, R. Brown (1973) noted that children produce utterances by relating one semantic category to another. The four semantic categories are-
presenting word list. Undoubtedly, lexical learning is one of the essential parts of a child’s first language development but not the only one.
Unlike grammar, vocabulary is acquired throughout life, human continue hearing and learning new words and their meanings all through their life. So issues relate to lexical acquisition can be addressed from the first language acquisition angle too.
A child’s acquisition of words is known as ‘lexical development’ and acquisition of meaning associated with those words is the main focus of lexical semantics, one of the major areas of semantics. Starting from the early stage of word acquisition (18 months onwards), the numbers of words the child has learned will increase at each point.
After adding a new word to their -vocabulary they do not get the full range of meanings immediately. It is a gradual process that goes through (a) acquiring grammatical/ function words, (b) overgeneralizations and finally (c) getting it right.
Only word learning is not sufficient in language acquisition, making correct referential links between the words and their meanings are equally essential. A child has to map between form (words) and meaning at a time in his life as both of these are moving targets of language communication.
History proves that many semanticians have paid more attention to the meaning representation at the lexical level in their studies; Jackson’s textbook- “Word and Their Meaning’ (2014) presented this approach.
Cruise’s ‘Meaning in Language’ (2004) focused on lexical issues relating to semantic acquisition. In this present study, we have seen that children categorize, make schemas and map the words and use them differently to convey meanings. It is actually the core component of semantic acquisition.
So we can simply say that lexical learning and semantics are very much interrelated and they work together for successful language acquisition and communication also. Starting from the very beginning of
the acquisition process, lexical learning and semantic acquisition relies on each other and together play a crucial role in a child’s overall language development process.
The following chapter will talk about the conclusion, limitations, and future directions of this research.
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