Development of Language Skills

To what extent early speech expresses intelligent thought was one of Piaget's concerns (Piaget, 1965), and that issue has become almost a commonplace constant of language theory. Bohannon and Warren-Leubecker (1989) summarize five theoretical approaches to explaining language development: behavioral, linguistic, cognitive, information-processing, and social-interactionist. The first three are distinctive and well established, while the latter two owe something to the more established modalities. Cognitive and behaviorist theories impinge greatly on information-processing and social-interactionist theories. The linguistic approach relies on the idea that human beings possess a kind of internal grammar that drives the process of language development (Chomsky, 1969). Cognitive language-development theory says that the context in which language is learned is decisive. "[C]hildren do not grammatically mark relationships [i.e., meanings] in their spontaneous productive speech until they know the concept

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rsation or adopt a consciously observant attitude toward the emotional content of conversation (Roth & Leslie, 1991). Similarly, those who have language-acquisition difficulties per se in early childhood may have difficulty processing complex language uses, such as metaphor, as they get older (Nippold & Fey, 1984). Symptoms of autism have been studied and treated in a variety of settings. The complete absence of language acquisition in autism is referred to as mutism, though this is not necessarily permanent. In this regard, Windsor, Doyle, and Siegel (1994) describe the limited language-development progress made over a period of sixteen years for an autistic girl with access to a clinical/professional setting. Between ages 10 and 26, the girl changed from being completely mute to having the ability to utter or write between one and two small units of coherent speech. Autistic children who have acquired language may process it in an ultraliteral, limited way. Asked what happens when he gets cut, the autistic child will not answer that he gets a bandage but that he bleeds (Sigman & Capps, 1997). Taylor Flusberg (1985) cites the limited cognitive flexibility of both autistics and normal children with equivalent verbal skills, in ma
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Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)

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