5. Stages of Development

About this Lecture

Lecture

In this lecture, we look at the way a child’s development from the second trimester of pregnancy to five years old, focusing in particular on: (i) the extent to which an unborn child can hear what’s happening outside the womb – and how this can be tested; (ii) the level of understanding at birth – and how this can be tested; (iii) the level of understanding after six months; (iv) the babbling phase (6-8 months); (v) first words (8-12 months); (vi) the two-word stage (18-24) and the extent to which children are genuinely producing two-word sentences rather than echoing a two-word phrase they have heard; (vii) the growing understanding of morphology and syntax, including ‘telegraphic speech’ (2-2.5 years); (viii) the movement to 3+ word sentences and beyond (3+ years); and (ix) the state of a child’s language when they start school.

Course

In this course, Professor Ben Ambridge (University of Liverpool) explores childhood language acquisition. In the first lecture, we explore how children learn to distinguish the basic sounds (phonemes) that make up their mother tongue. In the second lecture, we think about how children learn new words. In the third lecture, we explore how children learn the rules of morphology and how we can test for that understanding. Next, we think about how children learn the rules of syntax. In the fifth and final lecture, we review a general timeline of child language acquisition from the middle of the second trimester to five years old.

Lecturer

Professor Ben Ambridge is Professor of Psychological Sciences at the University of Liverpool. His research focuses on children's first language acquisition, mostly using judgment and production methodologies. He is particularly interested in children's errors involving question formation (e.g., *What he doesn't like?) and verb argument structure overgeneralisation errors (e.g., *The joked giggled him; *I falled over). One of Professor Ambridge’s recent publications is ‘Syntactic representations contain semantic information: Evidence from Balinese passives’ (2022), and he is also the author of the popular science book Psy-Q, Are You Smarter than a Chimpanzee? (2014).