Language theory revision

*Language is symbolic, operational and logical thought! * Language training can speed up cognitive development *There are 3 modes: Enactive, Iconic and Symbolic. Enactive – baby represents world through actions Iconic- knowledge represented through visual or auditory images. An object can be recognised and used to becomes independent and in turn a permanent thing and is remembered (this is object permanence.) Symbolic- language starts to influence thought. It is not as dominated by appearance of things as they begin to think beyond images and use symbols such as words or numbers. Information can now be categorised and summarised and can be more readily manipulated.

Pre-operational (2-7 years, pre-school) Mental operations are internalised forms of actions that are mastered during infancy: ordering combining separating Pre-operational child can reason about simple problems but system lacks critical linkages and is not internally consistent child only able to focus on one salient feature of task at a time. child characterised by egocentrism - can look on world only from own position. Concrete-operational (age 7-11) Child becomes able to perform operations that are directly related to objects Egocentrism reduces - greater ability with language leads to greater socialisation More objective view of world and causes of physical events and their relationships

At around the age of two plus, children start joining more than two words. More combinations of words are uttered and pronouns are used. Here the length of sentences may be three, four, five or more words. Children give a short form of the message, leaving out some of the words and that is why such utterances are called “telegraphic speech”. Telegraphic speech contains abbreviated sentences with only words essential to convey meaning. Here are examples. “Where mama.” “Dog eat bone.” At this stage articles, prepositions and helping (auxiliary) verbs like to, the, can, is are missing. Also missing are the –ing and –ed forms even when they are required for the continuous and past tenses. Words in children’s sentences are not randomly put together but, from a very early stage, reveal their grasp of the principles of sentence formation. The child does not deliberately leave out the functional words as an adult sending a telegram but this is done in accordance with the stages of development.

The Holophrastic Stage After one year, children have learnt that sounds are related to meanings; they begin to go through the one-word which is considered for them as one-utterance. The words in this stage serve three major functions. First, they are linked with a child’ own action or desire for action. Second, they are used to convey emotions. Third, they serve a naming function. b - The Two-Word Utterances: Babies begin to produce two- word utterances which can show different combination of word order. In this stage, the words lack morphological and syntactic markers but we can notice that there is a word order.