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So far, I have been discussing the cognitive and physical milestones in this chapter as if they occurred in a vacuum. But, as I highlighted at the beginning of this chapter, that uniquely human skill, language, is vital to every childhood advance. Vygotsky (1978) actually put language—or speaking—front and center in everything we learn.

According to Vygotsky, learning takes place when the words a child hears from parents and other scaffolders migrate inward to become talk directed at the self. For instance, using the earlier example of Chutes and Ladders, after listening to her mother say “Count them” a number of times, Tiffany learned the game by repeating “Count them” to herself. Thinking, according to Vygotsky, is inner speech.

Support for this idea comes from listening to young children monitor their actions. A 3-year-old might say, “Don’t touch!” as she moves near the stove; or she could remind herself to be “a good girl” at preschool that day (Manfra & Winsler, 2006). We may feel the same way as adults. If something is really important—and if no one is listening—have you ever given yourself instructions “Be sure to do X, Y, and Z” out loud?

How does language itself unfold? Actually, during early childhood language does more than unfold. It explodes.

By our second birthday, we are just beginning to put together words (see Chapter 3). By kindergarten, we basically have adult language nailed down. When we look at the challenges involved in mastering language, this achievement becomes more remarkable. To speak like adults, children must articulate word sounds. They must string units of meaning together in sentences. They must produce sentences that are grammatically correct. They must understand the meanings of words.

The word sounds of language are called phonemes. When children begin to speak in late infancy, they can only form single phonemes—for instance, they call their bottle ba. They repeat sounds that seem similar, such as calling their bottle baba, when they cannot form the next syllable of the word. By age 3, while children have made tremendous strides in producing phonemes, they still—as you saw in the introductory chapter vignette—have trouble pronouncing multisyllabic words (like psghetti). Then, early in elementary school, these articulation problems disappear—but not completely. Have you ever had a problem pronouncing a difficult word that you were able to read on a page?

The meaning units of language are called morphemes (for example, the word boys has two units of meaning: boy and the plural suffix s). As children get older, their average number of morphemes per sentence—called their mean length of utterance (MLU)— expands. A 2-year-old’s sentence, “Me juice” (2 MLUs), becomes, “Me want juice” (3 MLUs), and then, at age 4, “Please give me the juice” (5 MLUS). Also around age 3 or 4, children are fascinated by producing long, jumbled-together sentences strung together by and (“Give me juice and crackers and milk and cookies and . . .”).

This brings up the steps to mastering grammar, or syntax. What’s interesting here are the classic mistakes that young children make. As parents are aware, one of the first words that children utter is no. First, children typically add this word to the beginning of a sentence (“No eat cheese” or “No go inside”). Next, they move the negative term inside the sentence, next to the main verb (“I no sing” or “He no do it”). A question starts out as a declarative sentence with a rising intonation: “I have a drink, Daddy?” Then it, too, is replaced by the correct word order: “Can I have a drink, Daddy?” Children typically produce grammatically correct sentences by the time they enter school.

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The most amazing changes occur in semantics—understanding word meanings. Here, children go from three- or four-word vocabularies at age 1 to knowing about 10,000 words by age 6! (See Slobin, 1972; Smith, 1926.) While we have the other core abilities under our belts by the end of early childhood, our vocabularies continue to grow from age 2 to 102.

One mistake young children make while learning language is called overregularization. Around age 3 or 4, they often misapply general rules for plurals or past tense forms even when exceptions occur. A preschooler will say runned, goed, teached, sawed, mouses, feets, and cup of sugars rather than using the correct irregular form (Berko, 1958).

Another error lies in children’s semantic mistakes. Also around age 3, children often use overextensions—meaning they extend a verbal label too broadly. In Piaget’s terminology, they assimilate the word horsey to all four-legged creatures, such as dogs, cats, and lions in the zoo. Or they use underextensions—making name categories too narrow. A 3-year-old may tell you that only her own pet is a dog and insist that all the other neighborhood dogs must be called something else. As children get older, through continual assimilation and accommodation, they sort these glitches out.

Table 5.6 summarizes these challenges. Now you might want to have a conversation with a 3- or 4-year-old child. Can you pick out examples of overregularization, overextensions or underextensions, problems with syntax (grammar), or difficulties pronouncing phonemes (word sounds)? Can you figure out the child’s MLU?

Question 5.14

Vygotsky would say it’s normal—the way children learn to think through their actions and control their behavior.

Question 5.15

1. When offered a piece of cheese, Joshua said, “I no eat cheese.”

2. Seeing a dog run away, Joshua said, “The doggie runned away.”

3. Taken to a petting zoo, Joshua pointed excitedly at a goat and said, “Horsey!”

(b) = overregularization; (c) = overextension

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