The language of the child - its development and support in the family

Dr. Bernd Reimann

The contribution looks at the development of child language from the perspective of communicative interaction. With reference to the dialogical use of language, it is worked out how the primary caregivers take up, modify, correct and expand children’s utterances in a way that stimulates learning. Observational learning and implicit language support are described as fundamental processes.

introduction

The development of language is one of the most fascinating phenomena in the early development of the child. In the first 3 to 4 years, the child learns to successfully use the language of its living environment as a means of communication and thinking. One of the most important framework conditions is the conversation with the familiar caregivers in the family.

The child learns its mother tongue because it grows into a social network of relationships in which spoken communication is required. There are permanent requirements to use language in everyday life, to understand the purposes of objects and the meaning of actions that are conveyed linguistically and are typical in its culture. Language acquisition is thus also a determining element of socialization (see also the article socialization research and socialization theory).

The child relies on an accommodating conversation behavior of its partners so that it can open up the meaningfulness of the language at all and consequently also build up knowledge about the system of the language (e.g. grammatical rules). BRUNER (1987) regards language acquisition as a by-product of the transmission of a culture. Language is only a means to achieve goals, to play with the adult, or to stay connected to people on whom the child is dependent. As a result, the child acquires its language because it finds conditions in which its use is required. It learns the spoken language by trying to realize its needs, wishes and goals in specific situations of everyday interaction, not because it learns that spoken communication is in itself in demand.

The development of communication skills in general and spoken language in particular takes place in familiar contexts. As part of everyday and special processes, the child learns the rules of use of the language. It is used by the primary caregivers in everyday situations right from the start and is thus “highlighted” as a necessary means for meeting the most diverse needs. .

It can be assumed that a child will learn its mother tongue if the following minimum conditions are met:

The perception and cognitive activity must function from birth, i.e. H. there must be no serious damage to the senses and / or a strong intellectual disability.
The child must also be able to perceive and use the language of his or her environment in meaning-conveying as well as person- and object-related actions.

Mothers have an extraordinarily well-developed inventory of behaviors that can significantly promote children’s communication and language development. They intuitively adjust to their child’s progress and at the same time prepare them for the next development phase.
With regard to the promotion of language learning in the early years of language development, results of recent studies on language dialogue leadership repeatedly emphasize the role of mothers in the following respects:

You mediate Knowledge about language and language use within the areas of need and action relevant to the development of the child.
The way the language is used has a kind of model character for the child.
Mothers not only adapt their language to the child’s perception and processing ability in the so-called pre-language period in the form of a "baby language", but also subsequently design language offers depending on the level of development of the child’s language system, although there are individual differences.

Learning to speak is learning through observation

The most important factors of child’s learning through observation can include characteristics of the person who is related to the satisfaction of the elementary life needs, e.g. for security and contact that has the most important function. MARTIN (1989) names the following characteristics that characterize maternal behavior as responsive:

interpersonal sensitivity (the ability to recognize characteristics and changes in interpersonal relationships),
Empathy (experiencing someone’s emotional reality other than their own),
Predictability (interpersonal cohesion that makes the relationship stable and secure),
Non-intrusive (no interference if the situation does not require it) and
a general emotional availability (participation).

BANDURA (1976 and 1986) lists the following features of observation learning, which are particularly important for language acquisition:

The observer must be attentive to the characteristics of the model reaction to be recognized, whereby attention-determining variables (the range of communication tailored to the needs of the child with linguistic attention) influence what exactly is observed.
These modeled events must be saved. The observers exercise a highly active function by transforming the modeling stimuli into easily reproducible schemes and practically testing them through repetition.
Reinforcement and motivational influences influence the effectiveness of observation learning.

WHITEHURST (1989) cited as an important variable of observation learning in linguistic interaction the ability of the adult to use signs of child’s attention to events to offer labels for these events.

Parents and child as action partners

The mother sees her child as a partner who contributes “action contributions” to the mutual interaction. She attributes to the child the ability to react correctly within the interaction framework that she has defined (e.g. with smiles, eye contact and body movements). It thus supports the development towards the so-called “secondary intersubjectivity” (TREVARTHEN, 1980), which leads to a new quality of interaction at around 9 months. From this time on, the mother is seen as an action partner whose actions and language can be influenced by certain “methods”.

Support and complement parents

BRUNER (1985) thinks that the child spontaneously does so much in everyday interaction

can as it is already capable. However, what it still cannot do is added by the mother or kept ready with a so-called “scaffolding technique”. If, for example, the child cannot yet respond to a question about the name of an object with a name, it accepts what the child is doing (produce some sound structure), but then delivers the correct sound structure as a model. If the child points out something “noticeable” (usually around 1 year only with “there!”), The mother names what the child sees.

Thus, the competent interaction partners show support services to the child that allow the child to participate in the development, i.e. in a social practice that (still) exceeds its level of development. These aids include the routine, control of interactions and the sensible addition to the child’s contributions. However, these complementary activities also play a major role in non-linguistic activities. The mother observes the behavior when handling objects. If certain objects cannot (yet) be used properly, they will demonstrate how to use them successfully. At the same time, it creates the best conditions for learning functions by observing the use of objects.

In the pre-language development phase (up to 1 year), the parents adapt their language to that of the child

This adaptation takes place in two forms: First, the language addressed to the child itself is changed, i.e. it is coordinated with the perceptual skills that have already been developed in order to achieve maximum attention for motherly speech. At another time, object-exploring activities such as searching, focusing, grasping and viewing are synchronized with speech. The child receives a simultaneously conveyed image on the auditory level of an optically present object, process or event.

Mothers talk to their infants and others with higher pitch, greater pitch variation, longer pauses, shorter expressions and more repetitions. These characteristics are also essential characteristics of early baby speech. CRUTTENDEN (1994) ascribes an auxiliary function in the language learning process to this motherly language, since it creates a so-called solidarity of community and in this context helps to focus the child’s attention on emphasized components of the language and to recognize sections in the flow of speech.

NELSON et al. (1989) assume, based on their results, that baby language makes a fundamental contribution to learning sentence structure. It could be determined that infants turn more often in the direction from which the language with the typical pauses in sentences was perceived and also turned towards it for longer. Has the language been structured atypically, i.e. if there were pauses within sentences where there are no other sentences, attention was much less. The same effect, but less pronounced, was observed with a language addressed to the child if it was similar to the adult language. The authors conclude that baby language helps to structure the language into perceptual units that correspond to the structure of sentences. This sensitivity to sentence units can be fundamental to the language acquisition be considered. The mother tongue divides the language into rhythmic units, making it easier to learn the language. With this changed “approach”, the mother makes herself acoustically and linguistically attractive, so to speak, as a primary communication partner through which all needs-related interests are realized. Since she also only uses certain language units in action contexts that the child can understand, she creates an optimal learning framework. This is all the more important since, according to JUSCZYK (1997), the first year of life is a particularly “fruitful period” for learning the sound structures of the mother tongue.

In the main phase of language acquisition (1 – 3 ½ years) parents consider the child’s communication skills

When parents react to their children’s conversation offers, they are initially interested in maintaining communication and in satisfying the child’s need for communicative attention. At the same time, there is a latent transfer of knowledge about the language system, the use of language and a transfer of world knowledge. SNOW (1989) et al. use the term fine-tuning in this context. It involves “adjusting” the level of complexity of the child’s language depending on the level of the child’s productive and understanding. PENNER (1987) found in children aged 1; 9 to 2; 2 years that parents acknowledge and extend non-standard linguistic statements more often than in statements that conform to the standard. MOERK (1991) describes various forms of corrective feedback that refer to nouns, verbs and prepositions. He emphasizes that these do not have an immediate, but rather effects in the form of a cumulative effect on the child’s language forms.

The range of languages is based on the current state of development. In the early word acquisition phase e.g. Basic terms offered earlier than subordinate terms and type designations. The offer of specific (new) linguistic forms starts when the child’s attention development indicates that his or her perception is ready for new structures, but the child cannot yet produce them. This receptivity to specific forms of communicative attention and language offers is controlled cognitively and signaled in communication. Based on these signals, the adult knows intuitively when there is sensitivity to certain types of offers. So he knows that he talks past his one-year-old child when he walks on a passing car instead of "There, a car!" With "There, a Ford!" Or on a dog sitting in front of a shop instead of " Da, a dog! ”Would refer to“ Da, a Beagle! ”. In the same way, an offer of explanatory causal sentences in communicative situations, in which objects are viewed and named, would not be up-to-date for the 12-16 month-old child. It begins when the child has cognitively separated the actor from the action or the process from the process owner and thus has the prerequisites to record actions and processes in their temporal, spatial and causal dependency.

What would you have to take a closer look at if you want to capture the language-promoting influence of dialogic interaction in more detail? It is the so-called dialogical follow-up reactions of the adult, his responses to childhood communication initiatives. This is exactly where there are differences in the connection statements in different parents.

Examples of this are listed in Table 1 below.

Table 1: Examples of parental reactions