12.2 Language

As you will remember, many aspects of language advance during early childhood. By age 6, children have mastered the basic vocabulary and grammar of their first language. Many also speak a second language fluently. Those linguistic abilities form a strong knowledge base, enabling some school-age children to learn up to 20 new words a day and to apply complex grammar rules. Here are some specifics.

Vocabulary

By age 6, children know the names of thousands of objects, and they use many parts of speech—adjectives and adverbs as well as nouns and verbs. As Piaget stressed, they soon become more flexible and logical; they can understand prefixes, suffixes, compound words, phrases, and metaphors. For example, 2-year-olds know egg, but 10-year-olds also know egg salad, egg-drop soup, egghead, last one in is a rotten egg. They know that each of these expressions is distinct from the uncooked eggs in the refrigerator.

Metaphors, jokes, and puns are finally comprehended. Some jokes (“What is black and white and read all over?” “Why did the chicken cross the road?”) are funny only during middle childhood. Younger children don’t understand why they provoke laughter, and teenagers find them lame and stale, but the new cognitive flexibility of 6- to- 11-year-olds allows them to enjoy puns, unexpected answers to normal questions, and metaphors.

Indeed, a lack of metaphorical understanding, even if a child has a large vocabulary, signifies cognitive problems (Thomas et al., 2010). Humor, or lack of it, is a diagnostic tool.

Many adults do not realize how difficult it is for young children or adults who are learning a new language to grasp figures of speech. The humorist James Thurber remembered

Metaphors are context specific, building on the knowledge base. An American who lives in China notes phrases that U.S. children learn but that children in cultures without baseball do not, including “dropped the ball,” “on the ball,” “play ball,” “throw a curve,” “strike out” (Davis, 1999). If a teacher says “keep your eyes on the ball,” some immigrant children might not pay attention because they are looking for that ball.

Because school-age children can create metaphors, asking them to do so reveals emotions that they do not express in other ways. For instance, in a study of how children felt about their asthma, one 11-year-old said that his asthma

That boy was terrified of his disease, which he considered evil and dangerous—and beyond his parents’ help. Other children in the same study responded differently. One girl thought asthma would attack her only if she was not good and that her “guardian angel” would keep it away as long as she behaved herself. Adults who want to know how a child feels about something might ask for a metaphor.

One aspect of language that advances markedly in middle childhood is pragmatics, already defined in Chapter 9. Pragmatics is evident when we are comparing how children talk formally with teachers (never calling them a rotten egg) and informally with friends (who can be rotten eggs or worse). As children master pragmatics, they become more adept at making friends. Shy 6-year-olds cope far better with the social pressures of school if they use pragmatics well (Coplan & Weeks, 2009).

Typical Yet Unusual It’s not unusual that these children are texting in French—they live in Bordeaux, and children everywhere text their friends. The oddity is that a girl and a boy are lying head to head, which rarely occurs in middle childhood. The explanation? They are siblings. Like dogs and cats that grow up together, familiarity overtakes hostility.

BSIP/PHOTO RESEARCHERS, INC.

Mastery of pragmatics allows children to change styles of speech, or “linguistic codes,” depending on their audience. Each code includes many aspects of language—tone, pronunciation, gestures, sentence length, idioms, vocabulary, and grammar. Sometimes the switch is between formal code (used in academic contexts) and informal code (used with friends); sometimes it is between standard (or proper) speech and dialect or vernacular (used on the street). Code used in texting—numbers (411), abbreviations (LOL), emoticons (:-D), and spelling (r u ok?)—shows exemplary pragmatics.

Some children may not realize that such expressions are wrong in formal language. All children need instruction to become fluent in the formal code because the logic of grammar (whether who or whom is correct or how to spell you) is almost impossible to deduce. The peer group teaches the informal code, and each local community transmits dialect, metaphors, and pronunciation. Educators must teach the formal code without making children feel that their code’s grammar or pronunciation is shameful.

Code changes are obvious when children speak one language at home and another at school. Every nation includes many such children; most of the world’s 6,000 languages are not school languages. For instance, English is the language of instruction in Australia, but 17 percent of the children speak one of 246 other languages at home (Centre for Community Child Health, 2009).

In the United States, almost 1 school-age child in 4 speaks a language other than English at home; most of them also speak English well (see Figure 12.3). In addition, many children speak a dialect of English at home that differs from the pronunciation and grammar taught at school. All these alternate codes have distinct patterns of timing, grammar, and emphasis, as well as vocabulary.

Hurray for Teachers More children in the United States are now bilingual and more of them speak English well, from about 40 percent in 1980 to 82 percent in 2011. Source: Federal Interagency Forum.

Source: Federal Interagency Forum.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, October (1992, 1995 and 1999) and November (1979 and 1989) and Current Population Surveys and 2000–1011 American Community Survey.

Some children of every ethnicity are called ELLs, or English Language Learners, based on their proficiency in English. Among U.S. children with Latin American heritage, those who speak English well are much better at reading than those who do not, but even they are less adept at reading than the average European American child (Garcia & Miller, 2008). Culture may be the reason, as their learning style may not be the same as their teachers’ teaching style, even though they speak English.

The information-processing perspective shows that each aspect of language learning follows a distinct developmental path. Between ages 5 and 8, for children who speak Spanish at home and English in school, the length of each sentence in English (average number of words) dips during summer vacation but fluency improves steadily (words per minute). Their knowledge of Spanish follows another trajectory. It does not improve much at all during kindergarten and first grade (presumably because the child was focused on learning English), and then it advances markedly at the end of second grade (Rojas & Iglesias, 2013). These are averages; specifics depend on the particular experiences of the child at home and school.

Differences in Language Learning

Learning to speak, read, and write the school language is pivotal for primary school education. Some differences may be innate: A child with a language disability has trouble with both the school and home languages. It is a mistake to assume that a child who does not speak English well is learning disabled (difference is not deficit), but it is also is a mistake to assume that such a child’s only problem is lack of English knowledge (deficits do occur among all children, no matter what their culture).

Nonetheless, most of the language gap between one child and another is the result of the social context, not brain abnormality. Two crucial factors are the family’s SES and everyone’s expectations for the child’s learning.

Decades of research throughout the world have found a strong correlation between academic achievement and socioeconomic status. Language is a major reason. Not only do children from low-SES families usually have smaller vocabularies than those from higher-SES families, but their grammar is also simpler (fewer compound sentences, dependent clauses, and conditional verbs) and their sentences are shorter (Hart & Risley, 1995; E. Hoff, 2006).

With regard to language learning, the information-processing perspective focuses on specifics that might affect the brain and thus the ability to learn. Possibilities abound—inadequate prenatal care, exposure to lead, no breakfast, overcrowded households, few books at home, teenage parents, authoritarian child rearing, inexperienced teachers…the list could go on and on. All of these conditions correlate with low SES and less learning, but none has been proven to be the major cause (not merely a correlate) of low achievement during primary school.

In addition, a child’s early exposure to words has been proven to affect language learning. Unlike most parents who have attended college, many less-educated parents do not provide varied and extensive language exposure to their infants and young children. Daily book reading to 2-year-olds, for instance, occurs for 24 percent of the children of mothers with less than a high school education as opposed to 70 percent of the children of mothers with at least a BA (National Center for Education Statistics, 2009) (see Figure 12.4). Even independent of income and social class, research has shown that children who grow up in homes with many books accumulate, on average, three years more schooling than children who grow up in homes with no books (Evans et al., 2010).

Red Fish, Blue Fish As you can see, most mothers sing to their little children, but the college-educated mothers are much more likely to know that book reading is important. Simply knowing how to turn a page or hearing new word combinations (hop on pop?) correlates with reading ability later on.

Source: National Center for Education Statistics, 2009.

Book reading is not the only way to increase language exposure in children—some families do not read to their children but engage them in conversation about the interesting sights around them—but in the United States book reading often indicates how much verbal input a child receives. Another way to increase language exposure is to sing to a child, not just a few simple songs, but dozens of songs.

Ideally, parents read to, sing to, and converse with each child daily, as well as provide extensive vocabulary about various activities, such as walking down the street: “The sidewalk is narrow [or wide, or cracked, or cement] here. See the wilted rose. Is it red or magenta or maroon? That truck has six huge tires. Why does it have so many?.”

As already noted, slow language development correlates with low income, but language exposure is the likely reason. Indeed, children from high-SES families who rarely hear language also do poorly in school.

Studies that track how much language young children hear from adults find vast differences from one home to another—some children hear ten times as many words as others do. Some high-SES parents rarely talk to their children, whereas the opposite is also sometimes true (Greenwood et al., 2011; Hart & Risley, 1995). Remember that dendrites grow to reflect children’s experiences. Children in nontalking families fall behind, first in reading and then in other school subjects. Eventually their brains signal linguistic weaknesses (Hackman & Farah, 2009).

A second cause of low achievement in middle childhood in many nations of the world is teachers’ and parents’ expectations (Melhuish et al., 2008; Phillipson & Phillipson, 2007; Rosenthal, 1991; Rubie-Davies, 2007). Expectations are related to another factor: whether or not a child is taught advanced words and concepts, especially the vocabulary words that are the foundation for later learning, such as negotiate, evolve, respiration, allegation, deficit (Snow et al., 2007).

Recent research has repeatedly found that expectations do not necessarily follow along income lines. For low-SES Latinos especially, family expectations for learning can be high, and children try to meet those expectations (Fuller & Garcia Coll, 2010).

International achievement test scores (discussed in the last section of this chapter) indicate that the income gap and the consequent variations in school resources and student achievement are much greater in some nations than in others. One of the largest gaps is in the United States, where the fourth-grade math scores for the public schools with the largest number of low-income children is 91 points below the average for the public schools with the fewest poor children (Provasnik et al., 2012). For comparison, 91 points is more than the difference between the U.S. average (541) and that of Thailand (458) or Armenia (451).

The worst part of adults’ low expectations is that they are transmitted to the child. Schoolchildren who internalize their parents’ or teachers’ expectation that they will not learn much probably won’t learn much. A child’s expectations and motivation (discussed earlier) go hand in hand.

Expectations are crucial at every stage of life. A study of learning among college students found that, after controlling for family background and high school grades, the colleges where professors expected students to study, and who therefore gave longer reading and writing assignments, advanced student learning (Arum & Roksa, 2011). A person’s expectations influence more than just academics: Adults who expect to live a long life take better care of their health. [Lifespan Link: The impact of health habits on longevity is discussed in Chapter 20.]