Developing Speech and Language Skills - Noel's ESL eBook Library

Phoneme Factorylanguage is either Dutch or English. Infants up to six months old will be equallyinterested in listening to lists of words spoken in Dutch or English. However, at aboutnine months infants listen significantly longer to lists of words in their native language.These and a great many other experiments show that infants gradually learn todistinguish sounds and to isolate words from the stream of speech sounds they hearwhen people are talking. Understanding what those words mean develops a bit later.The ability to recognise words starts at about seven months, and the ability to store thesound pattern for frequently heard words is developing from about this age. At about10–12 months the child can demonstrate understanding of words in context such astheir name, ‘no’ and ‘bye’. At the same time they become more like mature listeners, inthat they no longer discriminate sounds that are not heard in their native language.Their speech perception skills have been finely tuned so that they focus on relevantbits of information about their own native language or languages, and ignoreinformation that is less important. For more information on the development of speechperception see Jusczyk and Luce (2002).The second year: learning to understand and discriminate wordsThe next stage of acquisition is the learning to recognise words. Earlier in life babieswere learning about the sounds of the language, and all sorts of other things about howthe language is put together, such as the rhythm, stress patterns and the likelihood ofhearing various combinations of sounds. Now they need to put together a sound patternof a word and a meaning.Although babies can discriminate sounds that are phonemes in the language, toddlersappear to use a different strategy when they first learn words. They appear to attend towhole words and syllables, but do not necessarily pay attention to subtle differences inwords that are minimal pairs, for example, unless these words are already very familiarto them. For example, Fennell and Werker (2003) found that children aged 14 monthsdid not distinguish new words (in this case the nonsense words ‘dih’ and ‘bih’) evenafter they had heard them over 100 times, but did distinguish the words ‘ball’ and ‘doll’which were minimal pairs in their Canadian accent, and were words that they hadheard frequently since infancy. This strategy of attending to whole words is alsorecognised in how children produce words at the early stages of development.The third year and olderIt is relatively easy to create a developmental sequence for the acquisition of speechsounds and patterns, because we have the spoken words and utterances of youngchildren that can be written down and analysed. Finding out about how toddlers andyoung children perceive speech and how they develop the ability to distinguishbetween words is much more difficult. This is only now becoming researched in asystematic and reliable way, because of the difficulties of designing tasks that are at the34