The human communication process is enormously complex, involving the operation o
ID: 3491724 • Letter: T
Question
The human communication process is enormously complex, involving the operation of almost all cognitive systems we have discussed in this class. Write an essay detailing how each of the four components of language interact with and rely upon cognitive processing systems in order to facilitate effective production and comprehension of language. What disorders can cause this process to work less well than it should?
The four components: semantic, syntax, medium, and pragmatics
I need to write 2-5 paragaphs, please help me outline my answer
Explanation / Answer
Question:
Explain the four components of language interact with and rely upon cognitive processing systems in order to facilitate effective production and comprehension of language.
Answer:
Semantic development
The average child masters about fifty words by the age of eighteen months. These might include words such as, milk, water, juice and apple (noun-like words). Afterwards they acquire 12 to 16 words a day. By the age of six, they master about 13 to 14 thousand words.
The most frequent words include adjective-like expressions for displeasure and rejection such as 'no'. They also include social interaction words, such as "please" and "bye".
There are three stages for learning the meaning of new words:
In other words, when the child hears the word "sheep" he overgeneralizes it to other animals that look like sheep by the external appearance, such as white, wooly and four-legged animal.
Contextual clues are a major factor in the child's vocabulary development.
The child uses contextual clues to draw inferences about the category and meaning of new words. By doing so, the child distinguishes between names and ordinary nouns.
For example, when an object is presented to the child with the determiner "a" (a cat, a dog, a bottle) he perceives it as an ordinary noun.
However, when the child hears a noun without the determiner, he perceives it as a name, for instance "this is Mary".
Children usually make correct meaning associations with the words that the adults say. However, sometimes they make semantic errors.
There are a few types of semantic errors:
Overextension: When a child says or hears a word, they might associate what they see or hear as more generalized concept than the real meaning of the word. For example, if they say "cat", they might overextend it to other animals with same features.
Underextension: It involves the use of lexical items in an overly restrictive fashion. In other words, the child focuses on core members of a certain category. For example: 'cat' may only refer to the family cat and no other cat, or 'dog' may refer to certain kinds of dogs that the child is exposed to.
Verb meaning: when a pre-school child hears the verb 'fill', he understands it as the action 'pour' rather than the result, which is 'make full'.
Dimensional terms: the first dimensional adjectives acquired are big and small because they belong to the size category. The size category is the most general one. Later children acquire the single dimension adjectives, such as, tall-short, long-short, high-low. Eventually they acquire the adjectives that describe the secondary dimension, such as thick-thin, wide-narrow and deep-shallow.
From birth to one year, comprehension (the language we understand) develops before production (the language we use). There is about a 5-month lag in between the two. Babies have an innate preference to listen to their mother's voice. Babies can recognize familiar words and use preverbal gestures.
Within the first 12–18 months semantic roles are expressed in one word speech including agent, object, location, possession, nonexistence and denial. Words are understood outside of routine games but the child still needs contextual support for lexical comprehension.
18–24 months Prevalent relations are expressed such as agent-action, agent-object, action-location. Also, there is a vocabulary spurt between 18–24 months, which includes fast mapping. Fast mapping is the babies' ability to learn a lot of new things quickly. The majority of the babies' new vocabulary consists of object words (nouns) and action words (verbs).
30–36 months The child is able to use and understand why question and basic spatial terms such as in, on or under.
36–42 months There is an understanding of basic color words and kinship terms. Also, the child has an understanding of the semantic relationship between adjacent and conjoined sentences, including casual and contrastive.
42–48 months When and how questions are comprehended as well as basic shape words such as circle, square and triangle.
48–60 months Knowledge of letter names and sounds emerges, as well as numbers.
By 3–5 years, children usually have difficulty using words correctly. Children experience many problems such as underextensions, taking a general word and applying it specifically (for example, 'cartoons' specifically for 'Mickey Mouse') and overextensions, taking a specific word and applying it too generally (example, 'ant' for any insect). However, children coin words to fill in for words not yet learned (for example, someone is a cooker rather than a chef because a child may not know what a chef is). Children can also understand metaphors.[citation needed]
From 6–10 years, children can understand meanings of words based on their definitions. They also are able to appreciate the multiple meanings of words and use words precisely through metaphors and puns. Fast mapping continues.[citation needed] Within these years, children are now able to acquire new information from written texts and can explain relationships between multiple meaning words. Common idioms are also understood.
Syntactic development
The development of syntactic structures follows a particular pattern and reveals much on the nature of language acquisition, which has several stages. According to O'Grady and Cho (2011), the first stage, occurring between the ages of 12–18 months, is called "one-word stage." In this stage, children cannot form syntactic sentences and therefore use one-word utterances called "holophrases" that express an entire sentence. In addition, children's comprehension is more advanced than their production abilities. For example, a child who wants candy may say "candy" instead of expressing a full sentence.
The following stage is the "two-word stage" in which children begin to produce "mini-sentences" that are composed of two words, such as "doggy bark" and "Ken water" (O'Grady & Cho, 2011, p. 346). At this stage, it is unclear whether children have an understanding of underlying rules of the language such as syntactic categories, since their "mini-sentences" often lack distinction between the categories. However, children do exhibit sensitivity to sentence structures and they frequently use appropriate word order.
After several months of speech that is restricted to short utterances, children enter the "telegraphic stage" and begin to produce longer and more complex grammatical structures (O'Grady & Cho, 2011, p. 347). This stage is characterized by production of complex structures as children begin to form phrases consisting of a subject and a complement in addition to use of modifiers and composition of full sentences. Children use mostly content words and their sentences lack function words. For example, a child may say "fill cup water," instead of saying, "Fill my cup with water." Subsequently, language acquisition continues to develop rapidly and children begin to acquire complex grammar that shows understanding of intricate linguistic features, such as the ability to switch the position of words in sentences.
Throughout the process of syntactic development, children acquire and develop question structures. According to O'Grady and Cho (2011), at the early stages of language acquisition, children ask yes-no questions by rising intonation alone as they develop awareness to auxiliary verbs only at a later stage. When auxiliary verbs make their appearance, it takes children a few months before they are able to use inversion in yes-no questions. The development of WH- questions occurs between the ages of two and four, when children acquire auxiliary verbs that then leads to the ability to use inversion in questions. However, some children find inversion easier in yes-no questions than in WH- questions, since the position of the WH- word and the auxiliary verb both must changed (e.g., "You are going where?" instead of "Where are you going?").
Morphological development[edit]
Morphological structures development occurs over a period of several years. Before language is acquired, children lack any use of morphological structures.
The morphological structures that children acquire during their childhood, and even up to the early school years, are: determiners (a, the), -ing inflection, plural –s, auxiliary be, possessive –s, third person singular –s, past tense –ed).
When children start using them they tend to overgeneralize the rules and project them upon all the words in the language, including irregulars. For example: if a child knows the –ed (past tense) there is a possibility that they'll say "I eated"( Man-mans cat-cats). These errors result from overgeneralization of rules.
This overgeneralization is very noticeable, in fact, children do that in less than 25 percent of the time at any point before reducing that percentage. Then they improve their mastery, which can be tested in various ways, such as the "wug test" (Berko, 1958).
Children often figure out quickly frequent irregular verbs, such as go and buy rather than less common ones, such as win. This suggests that children must hear the word several hundred times before they are able to use it correctly.
This development of bound morphemes is similar in order among children, for example: -ing is acquired before the article the. The interesting part though is that parents tend to use a different order while speaking to their kids, for example, parents use the article 'the' more frequently than -ing. Meaning, other factors determine the order of acquisition, such as:
As it comes to word formation processes such as derivation and compounding, the earliest derivational suffixes to show up in children's speech are those they hear adults use most frequently. (-er as the *'doer' of the action such as walker.) When it comes to compounds, children first make up names for agents and instruments that they don't know by a pattern (N-N), though some of them do not follow the pattern (*cutter grass for grass cutter). Then, they might have the right structure but the words are inappropriate since English already has words with the intended meaning such as car-smoke = exhaust. This process points to a preference for building words from other words, thus place less demand on memory than learning an entirely new word for each concept.
Grammatical development
Grammar describes the way sentences of a language are constructed, which includes both syntax and morphology.
Syntactic development and morphological development
Syntactic development involves the ways that various morphemes are ordered or combined in sentences.[33]Morphemes, which are basic units of meaning in language, get added as children learn to produce simple sentences and become more precise speakers. Morphemes can be whole words (like "happy") or parts of words that change meaning of words ("un"happy). Brown proposed a stage model that describes the various types of morphological structures that are developed in English and the age range within which they are normally acquired.
Stage I: From 15–30 months, children start using telegraphic speech, which are two word combinations, for example 'wet diaper'. Brown (1973) observed that 75% of children's two-word utterances could be summarized in the existence of 11 semantic relations:
Stage II: At around 28–36 months, children begin to engage in the production of simple sentences, usually 3 word sentences. These simple sentences follow syntactic rules and are refined gradually as development continues. The morphological developments seen in this age range include use of present progressive (-ing endings), the prepositions "in" and "on", and regular plurals (-s endings).
Stage III: Around 36–42 months, children continue to add morphemes and gradually produce complex grammatical structures. The morphemes that are added at this age include irregular past tense, possessive ('s), and use of the verb 'to be' (It is, I am, etc.).
Stage IV:Around 40–46 months children continue to add to their morphological knowledge. This range is associated with use of articles (a or the), regular past tense (-ed endings), and regular third person speech (He likes it).
Stage V: Around 42-52+ months children refine the complex grammatical structures and increase their use of morphemes to convey more complex ideas. Children in this stage use irregular third-person speech, the verb 'to be' as an auxiliary verb (She was not laughing), and in its contraction forms (It's, She's, etc.).
Pragmatics development
From birth to one year, babies can engage in joint attention (sharing the attention of something with someone else). Babies also can engage in turn taking activities.
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