Today our topic of discussion is – Research findings
Research findings
I have seen that children’s language development follows some predictable sequences. The reviewed literatures agree on this issue too. All the children started with vocal cry and after passing few similar and related pre-linguistic stages (cooing, coughing etc.)
they reach the ‘babbling’ stage. Babbling started from between 6 to 9 months of age. Their babbling consisted of repeating the same syllable like- ‘[bababa]’ or ‘[gagaga]’ or
[dadada]’. After a couple of months (around at 12 months), these babblings took some common forms and followed same sequences too. They consisted of a consonant like sound followed by a vowel sound, such as- ‘[baba]’ or ‘[mama]’ or ‘[dada]’.
Almost all the parents think of these as the child’s first words. During the interview session when the parents were asked about their child’s first words, all of them mentioned these ‘canonical’ or repeated form of babblings.
They are not mistaken as, children’s early babbling takes longer and frequent forms with added feature of intonation. They show preferences in using certain sounds more. Moreover, children rise and lower their babbling intonations in a manner that it seems like they are actually calling their parents or asking for something.
Children keep using these babbling sounds along with the attempt to utter more sounds similar to adult words, even after they turn 1.5 years or even 2 years (varies among children). Gradually, with adult interference and motivation children combine many more sounds to form contextually meaningful words.
Research shows that, both babbling and speech has vocalizations and it is the direct precursor to speech (Lee et al., 2018). But all the babbling sounds do not represent the language around them; they narrow down in the use of babbling sounds in words.
Researchers assume that parents need to encourage or reinforce their children to produce the right sounds related to the target language for successive completion of the meaningful word acquisition. According to Boysson et al.
babbled sequences become consistent with ambient language, using identical sound patterns, contours of rhythm and intonation (cited in Vihman, 1996). Few more studies have suggested that canonical babbling precedes the development of even a limited vocabulary of spoken word and appears as a result of significant advances in the development of the speech capability (Oller, 2000).
Gradually gestures and other linguistic features assist babblings to take the form of meaningful early words or ‘proto words’. For example, the child uses his hand in the form of a call, along with the sound [baba] / (father in Bengali) to ask for something or to go to his lap or uses the sound [tata] / (bye) with ‘hand waving’ when someone leaves.
These certain features of pre-linguistic or early word stage of my study are also similar to the longitudinal study of Carter, who observed eight types of pre-linguistic schemas used in his child’s early vocalization stage too (cited in Clark, 2003).
It is worth mentioning that ‘holophrases’ or single words used to express complete, meaningful thoughts are also production of early vocalizations and canonical babblings. Rowe and Levine note that some holophrases are utterances expressing the meaning of more than one word, but are perceived by the children as one word (Rowe & Levine, 2016).
For example- ‘[edike afo]’ (come here), ‘[ota dao]’ (mother give it to me), ‘[oi je gari]’ (there is the car)- all of these expressions are seen to be used by a Bengali child only through the single word [mama], but other linguistic features accompany these productions to make it significantly meaningful.
Observations of these early language productions or perhaps precursors to first meaningful vocalizations are very much essential in studying children’s semantic acquisition process and they came to me quite naturally while observing the children for data collection.
Moreover, the theory suggests that, structure and meaning come through use; and after first cries, cooing or vegetative sound stage, ‘babblings’ followed by ‘holophrases’ are children’s basic language production to express meaning.
And they are common and natural for all children without having any major difficulties. The next stage of communication is the ‘word combination’ stage where children split the experiential scene into several symbolizableunits. According to Tomasello, pre-requisite for this word combination stage are successive single word utterances.
After this single unit utterance stage, the next important stage towards meaning acquisition is the multi-unit utterance or word combination stage. By the end of the previous stage, children started acquiring individual words (both naming and others).
According to Aitchison, children’s ‘mental lexicon’ is continually expanding with hundreds of words and these words are continually accessible. Children must learn the meaning of these words for advancement to the next stage of meaning formation, which is the word combination stage, also known as the early sentence or proto-sentence stage (Aitchison, 2003).
According to the usage based theory, children start with single unit utterances with intonation contour to express communicative motive, but soon begin to construct multi-unit utterances (Tomasello, 2003).
For example, /koi? (where?)- the child looks for his mother and expresses it only through the use of this single word. Until he becomes capable of combining the next proper word to join next to it, he uses ‘intonation’ to make the word sound like a question. Soon he constructs multi-word utterances to complete his communicative motive, like- /mamma koi?/ (where is mother?)
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