COMMUNICATIVE AND LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT A. Introduction B. The Nature Of Communicative Competence Communicative competence is different from linguistic competence.

Llinguistic competence is the ability to produce and understand well form meaningful sentences, and communicative competence is the ability to use those sentences appropriately in social interaction (Hymes, 1972). Sometimes the term communicative competence is used to include linguistic competence (Foley & Van Valin, 1984). And the knowledge that constitutes communicative competence consists of several overlapping domains of knowledge as follows. 1. Pragmatic Competence Analysis of communication can be used as a guide to what must be accounted for in describing the childrens communicative development. The most explicit accounts of what constitutes communication come from academic discipline of philosophy, specifically philosophy of language. a. Speech Acts According to Austin (1962) , speaking is not just uttering sentences that describe events but doing things with words. Each sentence a speaker utters is a speech act, and the kinds of acts performed are promising, requesting, referring, describing, arguing, demanding, and others (Searle, 1969). A speech act has three components: (1) its intended function (illocutionary force), (2) its linguistic form (locution) and (3) its effect on the listener (perlocution). For example, Denis appears at his neighbor front door and says, My mother wants to borrow a cup of ice cream, the intended function or illocutionary force is to request ice cream, and the form or locution is that of declarative sentence. The effect or perlocution is unknown. Dividing the speech act into some components is important in studying the childrens communicative development.

Intentionality In studying the development of communicative competence, we are asking whether the child is communicating. . the focus on what is inside th mind of communicator

makes intentionality a crucial part of the definition of communication. . it is insufficient that a behavior be interpretable for it to be communicative. For example, if someone sneezes, the possible inference is because he or she has a cold. However sneezing is reflex and not necessarily a communicative act. But if one pretended to sneeze in order to signal that he was feeling ill, that would be communicative. Furthermore, the intention that is really behind communication is not just the intention to accomplish something. As for example , the intention of Dannis was not only to get ice cream, but also to create a belief in the listeners mind (Grice, 1957;1959). If his neighbor had responded to Dennis that she did not have any ice cream, we would judge the communication is successful, eventhough the goal of getting ice cream was not achieved. b. Form-function mappings and the Role of Context Although Dennis sentence was a declarative statement about his mothers need state, his purpose in uttering that sentence was to make a request. Speakers may use a variety of different forms for the same function. For example, the request that someone open a window can be made with any of the following utterances: Open the window Would you open the window? Id love some fresh air It sure it stuffy in here The different forms of request for a window to be opened would not be equally appropriate in all settings. We ca ask when and how children acquire a repertoire of different forms to express the same function and when and how they learn to use the form that is appropriate. 2. Discourse Competence Language in communication includes stretches of speech that are much longer than a single sentence. If it includes two or more people talking, it is called conversation. But if one speaker talks at length as in lecture, it is called monologue. Grice (1957;1975), there are two basic rules of conversation. The first rule is to take turn (Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson, 1974). The second rule is to be cooperative which

includes four more specific maxims (quantity, quality, relation, and manner). One who breaks the rules is considered as poor conversationalist. Te beginning of narrative development can be found in the spontaneous description of past events children produce in conversation, starting before the age of 3 years. 3. Sociolinguistic Competence a. Register Language is used differently in different setting (place, participant0 and the style of language use associatet with particular setting are called registers (Chaika, 1989) b. Dialect and Cultural Variation in Language use Dialects are variations within a language that are a function of who the speaker is. Dialectical variation can appear in pronunciation, lexical, syntactic, and stylistic aspects of language. The norms for how language is used in interactions vary widely from culture to culture. For example, conversation between mothers and children are different in Japan than in USA (Clancy, 1986). Therefore, children need to learn the language style of one particular group which is called language socialization. We can ask when group specific style emerges in children, how a culture transmits its particular style of language use to its children.

C. Communicative Foundations Of Language Development 1. Prelinguistic Communicative Development Young infants have effects on their listeners, but there is no evidence that they have intentional control over those effects (Bates, Camaioni, & Volterra, 1975). Bates and colleagues (1975) described the course of the development of intentional communication based on the study of three little girls, starting when the children were 2 months, 6 months, and 12 months old and following each for approximately 6 months until the development course overlapped. They describes three phases in the development of communication: perlocutionary, illocutionary, and locutionary phases. a. Having effects

In perlocutionary phase (birth to 10 months old), children have effect on their listeners; but the signals are not produced with the intention of communicating to a listener. For example, the child who wants an object that is out of reach may try to get it and may make a fuss in the process. The mother may observe the child, infer the childs desire and get the object for the child, but there was no effort to communicate with the mother. (Bates and his colleagues, 1975) b. Having intentions In illocutionary phase (10-12 months old), children become aware that their behavior can be used to communicate with others. Children at 10 months understand that other people can be helpful in satisfying ones goal and that it is possible to elicit this help by communicating with them. For example, a child who wants something will not just reach and fuss but will actively try to elicit anothers aid in obtaining that object. . (Bates and his colleagues, 1975) c. Using conventional signals The third phase is is locutionary (12 months old or more) , which begins when childrens communicative behavior includes using language to refer. This phase does not suddenly begin with the childs first words. Rather, there are degrees within the locutionary stage. Bates and his colleagues (1975) described one child using the sound MM with a pointing gesture to indicate a request. Slightly more advanced, but still not referential, is using a word such as bam when knocking over constructions made out of blocks. The relevant distinction is part of the activity of knocking down blocks, not a symbol that stands for and can be used to refer to the activity of knocking down blocks. Gradually, children use language referentially. 2. The Emergence of Communicative Intent in Infancy Around age 10 months the ability to relate to one person about an object emerge. Sugarman-Bell 1978) described this development as the coordination between action and vocalizations. Trevarthen and Hubley (1978) describe that infants at around 10 months, may share themselves with others which is called primary intersubjectivity. After this point, they share their experiences with others called secondary

intersubjectivity. The maturational change occurs in infants at around 9 to 10 months of age, and that change permits the emergence of intentionality. a. The development of joint attention skills Joint attention is the state in which the child and an adult together attend to some third entity. Infants understand that other people also can attend to things and can have intentions to communicate. Infants understand that in episodes of joint attention they are making contact with another mind, and that basic social desire to meet other minds along with the capacity to do so are the developmental precusors and the foundation of communicative and linguistic development. b. The role of joint attention skills in language development The joint attention skills measured in these studies include both pointing (to direct the attention of another) and following anothers eye gaze. Another sort of evidence is the coocurance of severe impairment in joint attention skills and impirment in language in individuals with autism. In this view, infants have an understanding of others mind and that this social/cognitive accomplishment underlies language acquisition. But critics have argued that infants and very young childrens seemingly communicative behavior do not reflect such sophisticated understanding of other minds (Moore & Corkum, 1994;Shatz &Waltson OReilly, 1990), but are learned instrumental behaviors. They produce social and communicative behaviors because they like the outcome, not because they want to meet another mind. Camaioni and Perruccini (2003) distinguished two kinds of pointing behavior in 11 month olds (eg: pointing at something he wants and pointing at something just to get another person to look at what he is looking at) They found that children who were high in the use declarative pointing at 11 months were later more advanced in language tan children who were low in the use of declarative ponting. 3. The Role of Prelinguistic Interaction in Language Development Researchers have suggested that through interactions adults draw infants into communicative exchanges that become the basis for the later emergence o true intentional communication (Camaioni, 1993; Locke, 1993). Snow has described this phenomenon as mothers pulling intentionally out of the pre intentional child (Baby

talk, 1984). Bell and Ainsworth (1972) studied the responsiveness of 26 mothers to their infants crying over the first year of the infants lives. They found that infants who had the most responsive mothers when they were 6 to 12moths old cried less than at the age of 12 months than did the infants with less responsive mothers. Furthermore, they were more communicative in terms of both their vocalization and their nonvocal behavior. Tamis-Le Monda, Borntein, Kahana-Kalman, Baumwell, & Cyphers, 1998) found that children whose mothers are responsive to their vocalization at 13 months produce their first word earlier and reach a 50 word vocabulary earlier. Other researchers also found that children whose mothers follow the childs focus of attention in their talk when they are 13 months old have bigger vocabularies at 22 months (Akhtar and his colleagues, 1991). The individual differences in joint attention skills and maternal responsivity to language development appear to decline after the age of 18 months (Morales, et al, 2000) perhaps because by that age , all normally developing children can follow the speakers lead (Hoff & Naigles, 2002). 4. The Role of Communication in Language Development a. Communication as the motivation for acquiring language structure Bloom (1993) proposed that children acquire language in order to expect what they are thinking. Snow (1999) proposed that the desire to share experience is the foundation for language development. Without a partner, isolated children do not invent language (Shatz, 1994b). Finally, when children fail to be understood, the failure prompts them to find new and better ways of communicating (Golinkoff, 1983; Mannle & Tomasello, 1987). b. Language function as the basis of language structure According to this sort of account, words are social conventions that children learn by understanding the communicative intentions of the speaker who utters a novel word (carpenter, et al, 1998). Grammatical subjects tend to be message topics (Bates & MacWhinney, 1982). Learning grammar is simply the outcome of learning to communicate (Foley, et al, 1984). c. Language function as the gateway to language structure

Language is initially acquired as a system to perform communicative functions that later serve as bootstraps to a formal system. Snow (1999) has termed this pragmatic bootstrapping. She argues that children first understand that it is possible to influence anothers action by ones own behavior, which leads to the production of speech acts. As speech acts comes to be expressed with increasingly conventional forms borrowed from adults system, the child moves toward a language system that is no longer a set of expression for different pragmatic intent. Snow (1999) cites evidence that the frequency with which 1 year olds participate in communicative exchanges predicts their later grammatical development. Some researchers have argued that might exploit the correlation between language function and language form to crack linguistic code (bates & MacWhinney, 1982; Budwig, 1991). d. Communicative pressure as the source of communicative development The need to communicate fuels the acquisition of language form. A more limited effect of communicative pressure that has been proposed holds that communicative need does not affect linguistic development per se but does influence communicative development. For example, Tomasello (1987) Barton and Tomasello (1994) proposed that interaction with fathers and siblings promotes skills that are communicative rather than purely linguistic. e. The independence of language function and language structure D. Pragmatic Development 1. First Communicative Intentions expressed in Language 2. Expansion of the Communicative Function of Language

E. Discourse Development 1. The nature of Young Childrens Discourse a. Piegets Description of the Egocentric Child b. Private Speech c. Solitary Monologues d. Vygotskys Theory of the function of private Speech 2. The development of Conversational Skill

a. Responding to Speech b. Differential responding to Different Utterance Types c. Initiating Topics d. Repairing Misconception e. Sustaining Dialogue and Contingent responding f. The Role of AdultYoung Childrens Peer Conversation 3. The Development of Narrative Skill a. The Conversational origin of Narratives b. Adults Scaffolding of Childrens Narratives c. Developmental Changes in Childrens narratives F. Sociolinguistic Development 1. Learning to produce Situationally Appropriate Language a. The Egocentric Child b. Children use of request Forms c. Politeness d. Chldrens Child-Directed Speech 2. Learning Culture Specific or group Specific language Styles Cultural Differences in narrative Style and Development Gender Differences in language use G. Explaining the development of Communicative Competence 1. Influences on Pragmatic Development 2. Influences on the Development of Discourse Skill

3. Influences on Sociolinguistic Development