Language and social development in late childhood

LANGUAGE AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT IN LATE CHILDHOOD :

Introduction :

From birth on, children are programmed to develop speech and language. The first five years are most critical, but language development continues throughout early childhood and into adolescence. Language and communication skills are critical to a child’s development. Good communication makes them better able to engage in socialization as well as learn from formal classroom instruction and the environment around them.

LATE CHILDHOOD :

* 6-12 years. Late childhood extends from the age of six years to the time the individual becomes sexually mature. 

* At both its beginning and end, late childhood is marked by conditions that profoundly affect a child’s personal, language and social adjustment. Because of change in the stage, children need to make more adjustment to the new demands and expectations, most children are in state of disequilibrium; they’re emotionally disturbed and as a result they are difficult to deal and live with.

* It's period of excellence and pseudo-maturity. 

 * Names used by Parents- Troublesome age, sloppy age, Quarrelsome age. 

* Names used by Educators- Elementary school age, critical period 

* Names used by Psychologist- Gang-age, age of conformity, Playage     

LANGUAGE :

* Language is a system of conventional spoken, manual (signed), or written symbols by means of which human beings, as members of a social group and participants in its culture, express themselves.

* Language is human ability to communicate. 

    

LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT :

Language development is an important part of child development. It supports your child's ability to communicate. It also supports your child's ability to: express and understand feelings. 

* Language development lays the foundation for the reading and writing skills in children as they enter and progress through school.

Vocabulary :

*By age 6, they have approximately 2,600 words of expressive vocabulary and 20,000–24,000 words of receptive vocabulary.

*By the age 8, 10,000 words. 

*And some of the lists and tables that explain vocabulary development report that most 10-year-olds know at least 20,000 words (Merritt, 2016).   

* The vocabulary promotes, more reading. 

*SOURCE: U.S. Department of education. Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics, National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 1992,

1994, 1998, 2000, 2002, 2003, 2005, 2007, 2009 and 2011 Reading Assessments. 

Grammar and Flexibility :

* School-aged children are also able to learn new rules of grammar with more flexibility. While preschoolers are likely to be reluctant to give up saying “I goed there,” school-aged children will learn this rather quickly along with other rules of grammar.

* Nativists such as Chomsky point to the evidence that children will say things they have never heard, such as “The cats eated the mouses” rather than “The cats ate the mice.”, but it gets better in elementary school. 

* Other than Syntax (the grammar of the language), Language includes phonology (the sounds that make up the language), semantics (the meanings of words), and pragmatics (how we use language in social situations to communicate).When children develop the ability to communicate with language, they are developing all four of these areas (Gleason, 2005). 

Bilingualism :

* Ability to speak two different languages.  

* Learning a second language at a young age makes it more likely that the child will speak it without a detectable accent (Asher & Garcia, 1969)

* Children ability to pronounce second language with correct accent decrease with age (sharp drop after 10-12 year). 

* There are a variety of individual factors, such as motivation, imitative ability, and working memory capacity, which may play a role along with

the age of acquisition of the second language (Birdsong, 2006).  

New understanding & Slang :

* The child is also able to think of objects in less literal ways. For example, of asked for the first word that comes to mind when one hears the word “pizza”, the preschooler is likely to say “eat” or some word that describes what is done with a pizza. However, the school-aged child is more likely to place pizza in the appropriate category and say “food” or “carbohydrate.”

* Slang sometimes catches on with thewider society and becomes part of how everyone talks (Ely, 2005)  

This sophistication of vocabulary is also evidenced in the fact that school-aged children are able to tell jokes and delight in doing do. 

They often change the meaning of a word to its opposite: That’s sick comes to mean it’s really good (Karmiloff & Karmiloff-Smith, 2001).  Other eg:-

SUP- (What's up?) 

NMU (not much, what about you?)

G2G (gotta go). 

YEET, Orz etc

A CASE STUDY :

One famous case is that of a girl called Genie. Throughout her childhood, she spent most of her time strapped to a chair in a back bedroom of her family home where she had little social contact or interaction with others. In 1970, the girl’s situation came to the attention of welfare authorities in Los Angeles,

and at age 13 Genie was removed from her home. At that point her whole development was severely retarded, and she had little functional language. As horrific as these circumstances were, Genie provided a unique opportunity for scientists to examine the idea that there is a

critical period for language development. At 13 years of age, Genie was already past the age when children normally develop language.Developmentalists used a variety of methods to promote her language development and carefully documented her progress (Rymer, 1993). Although Genie learned words, she could never develop the use of grammar (Curtiss, 1977).This conclusion has been reported over and over again as evidence for a critical period for language learning. However, Peter Jones (1995)

reexamined data from Curtiss’s earlier study of Genie and came to a different conclusion. Look at several things that Genie was able to say in 1974 and 1975:

“I want think about Mama riding bus.” “Teacher said Genie have temper tantrum outside.”

“I do not have a toy green basket.”

These sentences may not be perfect, but they show quite complex levels of grammatical construction.Jones (1995) concluded that Genie

was able to develop language, and in particular grammar, even at her advanced age.