Hockenbury Discovering Psychology 5th txtbk

Development During Infancy and Childhood383Responds and attends to speaking voiceVocalizes to social stimulationDiscriminates between friendly and angry talkingUnderstands gestures and responds to “bye-bye”Responds to simple commandsUnderstands a prohibitionFigure 9.4 Milestones in LanguageComprehension and Production Approximateaverage age ranges for the firstappearance of different stages of languagedevelopment are shown here. Notice thatlanguage comprehension occurs muchearlier than language production.Source: Based on Bornstein & Lamb (1992).Understands a simple questionUnderstands two prepositions: “in,” “under”CooingBabblingTwo syllables with repetition of first: “ma-ma,” “da-da”Says first wordSays five words or moreUses two words in combinationUses first pronoun, phrase, sentenceBirth1 3 6 9 12 15 18 21 24Average age in months at first appearanceLanguage comprehensionLanguage productionthey babble, including sounds that do not occur in the language of their parents andother caregivers. At around 9 months of age, babies begin to babble more in the soundsspecific to their language. Babbling, then, seems to be a biologically programmed stageof language development (Gentilucci & Dalla Volta, 2007; Petitto & others, 2004).The One-Word Stage of Language DevelopmentLong before babies become accomplished talkers, they understand much of whatis said to them. Before they are a year old, most infants can understand simplecommands, such as “Bring Daddy the block,” even though they cannot say thewords bring, Daddy, or block. This reflects the fact that an infant’s comprehensionvocabulary (the words she understands) is much larger than her productionvocabulary (the words she can say). Generally, infants acquire comprehension ofwords more than twice as fast as they learn to speak new words.Somewhere around their first birthday, infants produce their first real words. Firstwords usually refer to concrete objects or people that are important to the child,such as mama, daddy, or ba-ba (bottle). First words are also often made up of thesyllables that were used in babbling.During the one-word stage, babies use a single word and vocal intonation to standfor an entire sentence. With the proper intonation and context, baba can mean“I want my bottle!” “There’s my bottle!” or “Where’s my bottle?”The Two-Word Stage of Language DevelopmentAround their second birthday, infants begin putting words together. During the twowordstage, infants combine two words to construct a simple “sentence,” such as“Mama go,” “Where kitty?” and “No potty!” During this stage, the words used areprimarily content words—nouns, verbs, and sometimes adjectives or adverbs. Articles(a, an, the) and prepositions (in, under, on) are omitted. Two-word sentences reflectthe first understandings of grammar. Although these utterances include only themost essential words, they basically follow a grammatically correct sequence.comprehension vocabularyThe words that are understood by an infantor child.production vocabularyThe words that an infant or child understandsand can speak.