Language development is vital for humans to be able to communicate with their social environment. However, it is inconceivable without the simultaneous development of the ability to speak and the establishment of nonverbal relationships with objects, people and actions. Parents and other caregivers can support the child in its language development in the long term. Disturbances in language development can lead to massive problems and place a great deal of psychological strain on the child.
What is language development?
Speech development is vital for humans to be able to communicate with their social environment. Speech development and language development run parallel to each other. The word language development refers to the ability to learn and use language in a meaningful way. It refers either to the mother tongue or to two languages if the child grows up with more than one language. Child language development parallels the development of the speech instruments lips, tongue, larynx and palate. Parents and other caregivers pick up on their child’s attempts to speak by repeating incorrect syllables, words and incorrectly pronounced words and placing them in the correct context. As language develops, the child learns the rules of the sound system, more and more words, grammatical rules and coherent expressions. At a later stage of language development, it can describe certain events, objects and people. In children who are raised bilingually, the development of the second language is similar to that of the first. Sometimes one language facilitates the faster learning of the other. Language development proceeds in the same order for all children, although there are individual differences in the speed of language acquisition. The phases of language development vary in terms of their length and expression. The decisive factors are not only individual factors, but also the extent to which and the way in which parents promote their child’s language development.
Function and task
The goal of speech and language development is the acquisition of linguistic (communicative) competence. It includes all nonverbal and verbal skills used to communicate one’s thoughts, feelings, and intentions to others. The development of speech and language skills is necessary in order not to depend on other people to replace one’s own inadequate communication. The first attempts at language development are already evident in the infant. He cries in various ways when he wants to be caressed or fed. Later, a somewhat more developed attempt by the child to communicate with other people consists, for example, of pointing to the desired object with the finger. The prerequisites for normal language development are a normally developed voice, good hearing and the ability to move the mouth in the same way as the infant has previously practiced when taking food. By naming objects in the form of nouns, the child acquires these objects. Demands expressed verbally as syllables are initially still ambiguous. For example, “there” can mean “put it there” or “give it to me.” With the help of nonverbal communication, which the child optimizes parallel to language development, he learns to link verbal expressions, actions and objects in a meaningful way. Content relationships emerge. The cognitive horizon of experience is expanded. Even before saying the first word, the child understands various words because he or she has had initial experiences in everyday life with what the words denote. For this reason, play and social behavior are absolutely necessary complements to the child’s language development. It takes place in phases associated with a certain age of the child: Crying from birth, babbling and cooing from the 2nd month of life, and echoing sounds (parroting vowels) and forming syllable series (“dada”) from the 4th month of life. From the 6th month of life, the child’s mouth movements become more specific, as he or she already has a better command of sucking, swallowing and chewing. From the 8th month, the toddler already understands some words and tries to behave according to them.
Diseases and ailments
Children whose language development is encouraged by parents and other caregivers are less likely to become speech-impaired than children whose language education is neglected.The need to communicate early on with the help of language, for example because there is no sibling who could “take over” something communicatively, can also lead to accelerated language development. In the case of language development disorders, a distinction is made between language development delay and the actual language development disorder (SES, USES). Language development delay means that the child’s language development is more than 6 months late in the age-standard language development. A language development disorder, on the other hand, is manifested in the defective course of language development. There are receptive speech development disorders – they concern the own speech perception – and expressive speech development disorders. They refer to the linguistic utterances. Disturbed language development is manifested, for example, in the use of incorrect sounds (phonetic-phonological SES), incorrect words (lexical-semantic SES) and incorrect grammar (morpho-syntactic SES). In pragmatic-communicative language development disorder, stuttering, stammering and other language disorders occur. Usually several areas are affected at the same time: Instead of -j, for example, -l is said (incorrect phonation) and the article is forgotten (incorrect grammar). If parents detect a speech development disorder in their child, they should contact a pediatrician. He or she will first examine the young patient for physical causes of the language development disorder. Then an assessment of the child’s cognitive development and overall development is made. The earlier the child receives speech therapy, the greater the therapeutic success.
