Describe how the developmental themes from the text (active-passive; continuity-discontinuity; holistic; and nature-nurture) are especially relevant to the development of language and communication skills

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Despite the fact that nativists believe in an inborn language acquisition device, which helps the child process and eventually produce speech, the active child theme is central to this chapter. Before their first birthday, infants have already learned that humans take turns when speaking to one another, which usually causes them to wait until a companion is done talking to them before babbling or cooing in reply. Their reply then signals their companion to continue the "conversation" by responding to the infant's vocalization. As development proceeds, toddlers ask many questions, usually about objects' names, purposes, or actions. This active request for information leads to the large store of words the toddler will use during the naming explosion. Later, children also use processing constraints to decipher the meanings of words that are not explicitly defined for them. Children alter their speech or mannerisms in order to accommodate the situation, such as being more polite around adults or strangers. Children ask for clarification if they do not understand requests or commands and are more likely to be aware of a listener's comprehension and slow down or repeat phrases if their listener is lost. Lastly, in middle childhood and early adolescence, children pay more attention to the ambiguous words and phrases they hear and try to draw multiple meanings from them. Each of these examples suggests that children are truly active participants in their own language development.

The issue of nature and nurture influences in development was discussed extensively in this chapter, but perhaps the most obvious example of this theme comes from the various theoretical perspectives on language acquisition. Learning theorists tend to be proponents of the nurture perspective, believing that children learn language by conversing with others, being spoken to in child-directed speech, and imitating what they hear. Nativists, on the other hand, are proponents of the nature perspective, believing instead that infants have a special language acquisition device that triggers their speech comprehension, and that infants require nothing more than hearing adults converse in order to acquire a language. The interactionist viewpoint combines these two perspectives by integrating the ideas of a species-specific nervous system that directs the child's language abilities and the assertion that companions' intervention is crucial to an infant's acquisition of language.

Our third theme concerns qualitative and quantitative changes in development. In language development, we see distinct qualitative changes across ages as infants' and children's language changes in form or kind. The most obvious examples of these qualitative changes are the stages of prelinguistic, holophrase, and telegraphic language abilities. But there are also many quantitative changes in language development. The acquisition of new words, new grammatical structures, and new syntactical rules across development are excellent examples of quantitative changes. It seems language development may be one of the best examples in developmental psychology of the interplay between qualitative and quantitative changes that occur with age.

Finally, we can see the holistic nature of language development in the way children's interactions with their peers improve as they learn how to communicate. When children learn how to modify their speech in certain circumstances, they better prepare themselves for efficiently conveying their needs and desires, thus making it more likely that they will receive what they have asked for. As children learn how to detect hidden meanings in others' words, and how to convey hidden meanings of their own and clarify their own ambiguous phrases, their social interactions with others improve. We also see examples of the holistic nature of language development in the research that suggests that infants and children must have meaningful social interactions involving language in order to acquire language. We saw that culture and birth order are also clear influences on language acquisition. And finally, the interactionist perspective showed us that language acquisition cannot be distinguished from cognitive development.