SS5752 Life Span Development Group Project Infant stage - what experiences influences early language development?

Report

Prepared By: Chan Sai Kin, Toby (tskchan@mtr.com.hk)

Introduction
Page 1

Children come to understand and communicate with people since their birth. In the language development, there are two different language styles, namely receptive language and expressive languages, to be developed. Piaget labeled infancy stage in the period from birth to 30 months (Piaget, 1926). In infancy stage, children recognize sounds and learn individual words earlier than they can speak them (Santrock, 2009, p.167). Parents try different methods to help their children acquiring languages. The purpose of this document

is to report the symbolic gesturing experience that can influence early language development in infant stage. The experience can help parents to facilitate their childs language

development in infancy stage.

Page 2

Background Santrock indicates infants general progress of language and speech development as follows (Santrock, 2009, p.167):

the first three to four months can make gurgling sounds to represent pleasant with

caregiver; six months of age can produce babbles which are repetitive syllables such as ba,

ba, ba or da, da, da; the end of first year can start to use gestures for communications;

thirteen months of age can understand 50 words and master to say a few words;

age two can speak about 200 words and express meaning with two words with the

usages of gesture.

Before infants can speak their first words, they listens the sound around them. Through interaction with parents or caregivers, infants learn early language skills through mirror their sounds. Infants use their bodies, crying and other vocal voice as primary means to communicate their needs. Structured sign language like American Sign Language was created and evolved over time for communications with deaf or hearing impair children. Garcia (2004) discovered that the hearing babies could begin to sign by eight or nine months
Page 3

old if they were taught at six months of age. In the last decade, more researchers found that baby sign language could be used for normal infants and had opened a new world of communications between infants without hearing impairment and their parents. It allowed parents to gain insight into infants mind (Simpson, 2008). Goodwyn et all (2000)

conducted a study in year 2000 to evaluate the effect on verbal language development of hearing infant to use simple symbolic gestures. Their research indicated that signing babies could command better English language, with larger vocabularies and longer sentences than their non-signing peers. In the next section, the methods of the study will be described and discussed.

Page 4

Method Goodwyn et al (2000) conducted a longitudinal study to examine the impact of symbolic gesturing on infant development in verbal language development. The study compared three groups of 11-month-old infants from a predominantly middle-class area of Northern California.

The first experimental group (32 infants) was named as Sign Training group (ST). Parents in this group were encouraged to communicate with their infants on daily basis with symbolic gestures by modeling simple gestures in pair with the verbal word, e.g. bird - flap one or both arms out to the side like a birds wings. The target gestures included simple movement for five objects (i.e. fish, flower, bird, airplane and frog) and three non-object concepts (i.e. where is it, more and all gone). To ensure the communications

conducted in daily routine, parents used toys representing the five object concepts and a large color picture book with lots of examples of many objects in daily routine activities such as mealtime, bath time, bed time, etc..

The second experimental group (39 infants) was named as Non-intervention Control group (NC). Parent in this group were not involved any training nor were they aware of the special interest in language at all. To control for training effects to interpret any verbal language advantage of the ST group infants over the NC group, a third experimental group

Page 5

(32 infants) was created and named as Verbal Training group (VT). Parents in this group were encouraged to label as many things as possible during daily interactions. Similar as the ST group, this group will be provided with target words included kitty, doggy, ball, shoe, boat, bye-bye, more, and all gone. Each family was also given toys and a color picture book.

Parents were interviewed by phone at 2-week interval and were asked to describe the progress of infants language. Infants from all three groups were tested in the laboratory at 11, 15, 19, 24, 30 and 36 months. A variety of standardized measures of both receptive and expressive languages were adopted in the study. Vocalization was used as a baseline

measure at 11 months to estimate the percentage of time the infant spent vocalizing. MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) was used to measure expressive vocabulary (Fenson, et al., 1993). Parents completed a questionnaire to indicate the words their children produced consistently. Sequenced Inventory of Communicative Development (SICD) was used to assess both receptive and expressive language skills (Hedrick, Prather, & Tobin, 1984). Receptive language abilities were based on the behavioral response to a variety of verbal commands while expressive language abilities were the childs responses to questions and commands. Receptive- and Expressive-One-Word-Picture-Vocabulary Tests (ROWPVT & EOWPVT) was to test receptive and expressive language (Gardner, 1985). For receptive language assessment, children were asked to match a picture with the meaning
Page 6

of a word, e.g. show me a book. For expressive language assessment, children were asked to label a picture shown to them. Mean Length of Utterance (MLU) and Long Utterance were to count on a corpus of 50 utterances and number of morphemes in the longest utterance. Phonemic Discrimination Task was to test infants abilities to distinguish the discrimination in phonemes. A summary of a variety of standardized measures of both receptive and expressive is shown in below:

Measures Vocalization CDI

At periods 11 months 11, 15, 19, 24 and 30

months SICD 15 and 19 months ROWPVT & EOWPVT 24, 30 and 36 months MLU and Long Utterance 24 months Phonemic Discrimination Task 30 months Table 1 A summary of a variety of standardized measures

Page 7

Results This section will describe the results obtained in the study of Goodwyn et al (2000). It will be presented in five categories: Acquisition of Symbolic Gestures Verbal Language Comparisons: Assessing Training Effect

Verbal Language Comparisons: Does Symbolic Gesturing Facilities Verbal Language Development

Verbal Language Comparisons: Syntactic Development at 24 months Verbal Language Comparisons: Receptive and Expressive Combined

Acquisition of Symbolic Gestures In the ST group, infants acquired 20.38 numbers of symbolic gestures in average. The result was much higher than the highest 5 mean number of symbolic gestures in Goodwyns (1988) earlier studies of spontaneous development (i.e. no special effort to encourage the use of symbolic gestures). The results showed that ST parents could encourage the usage symbolic gestures successfully. ST parents reported that their children could express

observations about their daily life in details.

Verbal Language Comparisons: Assessing Training Effects The comparison would check if parents involved in a language intervention program

Page 8

would facilitate development. In comparison of the overall language scores in Verbal Training (VT) group to those in Non-intervention Control (NC) group, results clearly indicated that training effects were not a concern. VT group did not significantly outperform the NC group on any measure.

Verbal Language Comparisons: Does Symbolic Gesturing Facilitate Verbal Language Development The results could be presented in receptive language and expressive language abilities separately.

Composite receptive language scores was calculated by averaging the z-scores for

SICD/RCA at 15 and 19 mos; ROWPVT at 24, 30 and 36 mos, and Phonemic Discrimination Task at 30 mos. The mean score in ST group was 0.21 while in NC group was -0.10. In comparing the results at individual ages, it yielded a difference at age 15 months and a significant difference at both 19 and 24 months. Difference continued to favor ST group over NC group at 30 and 36 months though differences were not significant. The results proved that symbolic gesturing encourages

development of language comprehension skills, especially in the second year.

Composite expressive language scores were calculated by averaging the z-scores for
SICD/ECA at 15 and 19 months; EOWPVT at 24, 30 and 36 months, CDI at 15, 19, 24 and 30 months, and MLU and Longest Utterance measures at 24 months. The ST group
Page 9

score mean was 0.17 while NC group score mean was -0.17. In comparing the results at individual ages, it yielded a significant difference for ST group over NC group at 15 and 24 months. Group differences at other three ages (19, 30 and 36 months) also favored the ST group. The results strongly supported a positive effect of symbolic gesturing experience on learning to talk.

Verbal Language Comparisons: Syntactic Development at 24 months Syntactic development involves the ways words are combined to form acceptable phrases and sentences. Results found out that children in ST group were significantly ahead of children in NC group in MLU and Longest Utterance. As a result determined, experience of symbolic gesturing facilitated the effect on early syntactical development.

Verbal Language Comparisons: Receptive and Expressive Combined To indicate a summary of the effects of symbolic gesturing on language development in the first 3 years, an overall language ability score at individual ages was calculated by encompassing both receptive and expressive language measures. The results favored ST group at all ages, significantly differences at 15, 19 and 24 months and slightly significance at 30 months and at 36 months. The gesturing training children were outperformed than control group children. In the variety of measurement, the results at every level of analysis were consistent to prove an advantage in verbal language development for those children who were trained to use symbolic gestures in their early communicative in overall.
Page 10

Page 11

Conclusion In last section, Goodwyn et al (2000) found the symbolic gesturing facilities the early stages of verbal language development. This section will explain why the symbolic

gesturing helps for early language development and conclude the report at the end.

Increases in infant-directed speech Infants use symbolic gestures to label an object or to make a request to parents or their caregivers. Adults understand the meaning of their infants easily and respond positively with verbal appreciation such as very good to their request. Infants are able to convey their messages and enjoyed the experience being accurately understood. This interaction

encourages their feelings of competence. Then, the more things an infant can and does talk about, the more vocal language the infants will hear in return. Parents encouraging symbolic gesturing by modeling infants gestures could reinforce their infants to express their messages more. Girolametto et al (2003) had similar findings in their exploratory study of in-service training on language facilities strategies of child care providers in day care centers. Caregivers increase their talkativeness, be more child-centered and encouraged the childrens active participation. Caregivers respond and react to whenever the infants utter. They keep the eye contact whenever talk to infants with soft voice. They are patient to listen and motivate infants to speak out. They talk to infants slowly and used simple words. Children then mirror their caregivers by increasing their overall talkativeness to adults and

Page 12

also to peers. They use more multiword combinations to represent their messages. Children who talk more their experience can have more occasions to practice language forms and received feedback on their attempts (Bohannon & Bonvillian, 1997). They also gain opportunities to practice language and learnt the necessary linguistic through increasing interaction with peers.

Topic selection Infants tend to pay more attention to things in which they are interested. They use symbolic gestures automatically to express their meaning and their parents will figure out what the infants want to talk about and shift the response to match their focus. For example, you bring your infant to a zoo on holiday. She uses gestures to point an elephant as her favorite animal that she likes most. You can adjust your focus by simulating sound or repeating the elephant gesture to match with her choice. Gestures can change thought indirectly by showing childrens spoken thoughts to listeners who can adjust their input accordingly. The change of thought will directly impact on the childs learning as well and allows them to express knowledge using their own bodies (Goldin-Meadow, 2009).

The power of scaffolding The term scaffolding refers to parental behavior that supports childrens effort, allowing them to be more skillful than they would be. According to Vygotsky (1978), there is a psychological distance between children individual performance in solving problems and
Page 13

their potential for higher level of performance when guided by more capable peers or adults. Caregivers provide a positive, reciprocal framework in which they and their children interact (Santrock, 2009, p197-198). Infants using gestures are motivated to talk. At a more subtle level, infants learn a symbolic gesture for dog in one entity that can be used in other entity (e.g. showing a dog is outside their house) for the purposes of communication. As a result of day after day mini-lessons, any mis-concept of objects can be corrected or concepts are honed to develop their language acquisition and expression.

In summary, we can see that early language development is not limited to talking or using words. Symbolic gestures provide insight into an infants thoughts. When gesture is used in these early stages, it is used as an assist into the linguistic system, substituting for words that the child has not yet acquired. The results showed the composite effect of the symbolic gesturing experience on verbal language was positive across the first three years of age. The symbolic gestures made communication easier and interaction with parent or caregivers more positive. Request gestures (e.g. MORE) helped children get their needs, animal gestures (e.g. MONKEY, ELEPHANT) helped them become active partners during book-reading, descriptive gestures (e.g. HOT, AFRAID) helped them share about their feelings and all of the gestures helped clarify the childrens initial verbal labels (e.g. the plural of mouse is MICE not MOUSES). It facilitated and enriched interactions between parents and child.

Page 14

As gestures reflect thought, it can be used by researchers, parents, teachers and clinicians as a window into the childs mind. It can be used in the home, the classroom and the clinic to improve the language learning and development.

Page 15

References Acredolo, L. P. & Goodwyn, S. W. (1988). Symbolic gesturing in normal infants. Child Development, 59, 450-466. Bohannon, J.,& Bonvillian, J. (1997). Theoretical approaches to language acquisition. In J. Berko Gleason (Ed.), The development of language (4th ed., pp.259-316). Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon. Fenson, L. , Dale, P.S., Reznick, J.S., Thal, D., Bates, E. Hartung, J.P., Pethick, S.T. & Reilly, J.S. (1993). The MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories (CDI). San Diego, CA: Singular Publishing Group, Inc. Gardner, M.F. (1985). Receptive and Expressive One-Word Picture Vocabulary Test. Novato, CA: Academic Therapy Publications. Garcia, J. (2004). Sign with your baby: How to communicate with infants before they can speak. Seattle, WA: Northlight Communications, Inc.. Girolametto, L., Weitzman, E. & Greenberg, J. (2003). Training day care staff to facilitate childrens language, American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, Vol. 12, 299-311. Goldin-Meadow, S. (2009), How gesture promotes learning throughout childhood, Child Development Perspectives, 2009, 3, 106-111. Goodwyn, S. W., Acredolo, L. P., & Brown, C. A. (2000). Impact of symbolic gesturing on early language development, Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 24, 81-103. Hedrick, D. L., Prather, E.M., & Tobin, A.R. (1984). Sequenced inventory of communication development, revised edition, Seattle: Univerity of Washington Press.
Page 16

Piaget, J (1926). The language and thought of the child. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Santrock, J. W. (2009). Life-Span Development (12th Ed.). Boston, MA: McGraw Hill. Vygotsky, L.S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

<End>

Page 17