Language is a tool of communication, which plays an important role in generalizing and regulating children's psychological development. In intelligence tests, speech ability is often regarded as an important indicator of children's intelligence development. As children grow up, their speech ability develops rapidly. Early childhood is a period when children's speech is constantly enriched, a critical period when they master oral speech skillfully, and a period when they gradually transition from external speech to internal speech and initially master written speech.
First, the development of pronunciation.
With the maturity of pronunciation organs, the development of speech and auditory system and brain function, children's pronunciation ability is rapidly strengthened, and the pronunciation mechanism is stable and perfect, and they can basically master all the pronunciations in their own homes (note: pronunciation organs include respiratory organs, larynx and vocal cords, oral cavity, nasal cavity and pharyngeal cavity). According to the research of Chinese psychologists, the phonetic development of children aged 3-6 in China has the following characteristics.
1. The correct rate of children's pronunciation is directly proportional to their age.
2.3-4 years old is a leap period of phonetic development.
Pronunciation level is gradually improved throughout childhood, but the progress is most obvious at the age of 4. Children over 4 years old can generally master the pronunciation of their own national language. Since then, pronunciation tends to be stable and dialect, that is, it begins to be limited to the pronunciation of the nation or region. Therefore, about 4 years old is the key period to cultivate correct pronunciation. During this period, children can learn almost any pronunciation of all national languages in the world. After the age of 4, due to the gradual tendency of dialect pronunciation, for example, it is difficult for southern children to distinguish nasal vowels such as "en" from "eng", "in" and "ing" when learning Mandarin. This is similar to the situation that adults often have a local accent when learning a foreign language or other dialects. Therefore, we must pay attention to the correct pronunciation of preschool children, especially children aged 3-4.
3. Children's pronunciation of vowels is easy to master, and the correct rate is higher than that of initials.
Most children over 3 years old have no difficulty in pronouncing initials, and some children over 3 years old have difficulty in pronouncing French consonants.
Most three-year-old children can pronounce their biological mothers, and some children's mistakes in pronouncing initials mainly focus on consonants such as zh, ch, sh, Z, C and S.
Researchers believe that 3-year-old children make more mistakes when pronouncing consonants, mainly because consonants are subtly distinguished by actions such as lips, teeth and tongue. However, 3-year-old children are not mature enough to control the pronunciation organs and are not good at mastering the pronunciation parts and methods, so the distinction between consonants is often not obvious.
The correct rate of children's pronunciation is related to their social environment.
Although the maturity of the pronunciation organs determines the level of children's pronunciation, the social environment also seriously affects the accuracy of children's pronunciation. According to the research in our country, many phonemes are pronounced correctly when children follow adults' instant pronunciation, but when they recite the materials they have learned alone, many sounds that can be pronounced correctly become incorrect. This shows that when the pronunciation organs are basically mature, the pronunciation habits of the local language have serious obstacles to the correct pronunciation of children, and other factors in the environment (educational conditions, family environment) will also affect the correct pronunciation of children.
6. Language awareness is gradually emerging.
In early childhood, mainly around 4 years old, the awareness of pronunciation developed obviously, and gradually began to treat pronunciation consciously and consciously. This shows that they are very interested in other people's pronunciation, they love to correct and evaluate other people's pronunciation, they pay attention to their own pronunciation, and actively try to practice their own pronunciation. He was very happy when he learned that. He will get angry if others accuse him of mispronunciation. He often deliberately avoids or distorts difficult pronunciation, and even defends himself. All these show that they have the auditory representation of correct pronunciation, have actually mastered the pronunciation standards, and consciously and actively learn pronunciation.
Second, the development of vocabulary.
All languages are composed of words in a certain way. Therefore, the development of vocabulary is an important symbol of language development. We will talk about the development of children's vocabulary from the following aspects.
(A) the increase in vocabulary
Early childhood is the period when people's vocabulary increases the fastest in their lives. Studies have shown that the vocabulary of 7-year-old children can be increased to about 4 times that of 3-year-old children. (See Developmental Psychology edited by Lin Chongde)
(B) the expansion of the scope of parts of speech
The scope of children's parts of speech is expanding with age, which is reflected in the following two aspects:
1. The types of words mastered are constantly expanding.
Grammatically speaking, words can be divided into content words and function words. Content words refer to words with more specific meanings, including nouns, verbs, adjectives, pronouns and adverbs. Function words refer to words with abstract meanings, which generally cannot be used as sentence components alone, including prepositions, conjunctions, auxiliary words, interjections and so on. Research data at home and abroad show that children master the types of words from less to more, reflecting a certain order, and its laws are as follows:
Children generally master notional words first, and then function words.
Nouns are first mastered in notional words, followed by verbs, adjectives and other notional words.
Function words account for a small proportion in children's vocabulary.
Nouns occupy a major position in children's vocabulary, with the largest proportion. However, it should be noted that the absolute amount of nouns increases during the period of 3-6 years old, but the proportion in the total vocabulary tends to decrease.
In addition, according to the research of Chinese scholar Shi, the growth rate of notional words at the age of 3-4 is faster than that at the age of 4-5; Function words grow rapidly at the age of 4-5, so it can be seen that the age of 4-5 is the active period of rich vocabulary, and the age of 5 is the turning point of children's language ability towards coherence and conciseness, and it is also the key period to improve the quality of speech.
2. The content of vocabulary is broken and expanded.
At the same time, children's mastery of the same kind of words is also expanding. With the growth of age, children have expanded from mastering vocabulary directly related to daily life to vocabulary slightly distant from daily life, from mastering specific vocabulary to mastering abstract and generalized vocabulary.
① Nouns: According to the research on the language development of children aged 3-6 in two provinces and cities in China, it is found that the nouns that children of all ages use and master most are words closely related to daily life, such as "daily necessities", "daily living environment", "people" and "animals". However, with the growth of age, some words that are far away from daily life gradually begin to increase, such as "politics, military", "society, personality", and the proportion of abstract nouns also begins to increase.
② Verbs: There are three kinds of verbs commonly used by children: those that reflect the actions and behaviors of characters (80%); Reflect the psychological activities and moral behaviors of the characters;
Reflect activities and behaviors such as tendency and initiative (the latter two categories are less)
③ Adjectives: Adjectives are the third part of speech in children's vocabulary. According to Wu Jin and others' research, children's use of adjectives increases with age, showing the following expanding trend:
From the description of the characteristics of objects (2 years old) to the words of physical feelings such as hunger, satiety and pain (2.5 years old) → action (3 years old) → description of human form (3.5 years old) → description of personality, expression, emotion and event scenes (4.5 years old).
From single feature to complex feature
From Simple Form of Adjective to Complex Form
From dialect to Mandarin, from spoken language and vocabulary to written language.
The study of history counts the number of adjectives used by children and obtains 30 adjectives that children use the most. Namely: small, good, fast, many, big, red, bad, tall, early, new, white, long, hot, clean, dirty, fragrant, black, yellow, true, light, rotten, bright, sweet, flowery, old, round, green, fat and full. (in order of frequency) These words show the characteristics of children's mastery and use of description:
Appearance characteristics category (30%) and color category (20%) are the most frequently used by children.
Children's most commonly used adjectives are closely related to life.
3. The growth of positive vocabulary.
Positive vocabulary refers to the vocabulary that children can correctly understand and use. Eliminated words refer to words that you don't understand, or words that can't be used correctly. Children have mastered many positive words, but there are also many negative words, so misuse of words often occurs. For example, the word "rough" is called "fat", and the word "PLA" is mixed with "army", so the enemy is called "enemy PLA" and so on. Therefore, we should pay attention to children's positive vocabulary in education and promote the transformation from negative vocabulary to positive vocabulary. We should not only be satisfied with how many words children can say, but more importantly, we should see whether children can understand and use these words correctly.
Although children's vocabulary has developed in the above aspects, on the whole, compared with the later development, the vocabulary of this period is still poor, the universality is still relatively low, and mistakes often appear in understanding and use.
Third, the development of grammatical structure.
Grammar is the rule of combining words into sentences. According to the research of some psychologists in China, the process of children mastering grammatical structure generally reflects the following trends and characteristics.
(A) the function of the sentence from confusion to gradual differentiation.
In the process of children mastering language, sentence functions gradually differentiate. This differentiation is manifested in three aspects:
1. Differentiation of expression content. In early childhood, the three functions of expressing feelings (such as "happy" and "unhappy"), conation (expressing will by combining language and action) and referent (calling out the name of the object) are closely combined without distinction. The same sentence can have different meanings and express different contents in different occasions and contexts. For example, children say the word "cake" may refer to the function of things, expressing "this is a cake" and "I see a cake"; It may also be a conation function. Expressing "I want to eat cake, give me cake" may also be an emotional function, expressing "I'm glad to see cake" and so on. The non-differentiation of this kind of functional expression content is often manifested in children's talking and doing, especially when the language is difficult to express their own meaning, they use actions to "annotate" and "explain", which is more common before the age of 3, and gradually divides later.
2. Differentiation of parts of speech. Children's early words are not divided into parts of speech, which shows that nouns and verbs are mixed. For example, "beep" can mean "car" as a noun and "driving" as a verb. In fact, use noun phrases as a word. For example, younger children often call little gray "little white gray". Only in later childhood can they gradually distinguish nouns from verbs, modifiers from headwords.
3. Differentiation of structural levels. At first, babies used words and sentences without subject and predicate, and sentences with different structural levels began to appear in early childhood.
Researchers believe that the reason why children's sentence functions are confused and undifferentiated is related to their low cognitive level. In early childhood, children's cognition of the objective world is chaotic and undifferentiated, and they can't analyze the characteristics and details of things in detail, so they can't master the corresponding words to describe the characteristics and details of things, resulting in grammatical errors. With the increase of age and the improvement of cognitive level, the content, part of speech and structure of sentences gradually differentiate.
(B) from simple sentences to complex sentences
(C) from declarative sentences to various sentences.
(D) From non-modified sentences to modified sentences
Fourthly, the development of oral expression ability.
The development of children's oral expression ability has the following three typical characteristics:
(A) the gradual transition from dialogue speech to monologue speech
Spoken English can be divided into dialogue and monologue. Dialogue is an interactive dialogue between two people (or more people). A monologue is a story that a person tells to the listener alone. Before the age of 3, children's speech was basically in the form of dialogue, often just answering questions raised by adults, and sometimes it was successful.
Some questions and demands put forward by people. In early childhood, with the development of independence, children often leave adults for various activities, thus gaining some experience, understanding and impressions. In this way, monologue language developed. Of course, the development level of children's monologues is still very low, especially in early childhood. At the age of 3~4, although children have been able to talk about their own lives on their own initiative, due to lack of vocabulary, their expressions are not smooth, and there are often some redundant spoken words. 4~5 years old can tell stories or all kinds of things independently. Under good educational conditions: children aged 5-6 can speak boldly, naturally, vividly and emotionally.
(B) the transition from situational language to coherent speech
Situational speech can make the listener understand the speaker's thoughts only by combining with specific situations, and often needs the assistance and supplement of gestures, facial expressions and even body movements. Lian inertial speech is characterized by complete, coherent and logical sentences, so that listeners can understand the meaning only from the language itself, without having to be familiar with the specific situation in advance. Children's language before the age of 3 is mainly situational language. The language of children aged 3-4 is situational, and they use many incoherent short sentences, supplemented by some gestures and facial expressions. Children aged 4-5 often speak intermittently; You can't explain the relationship between things, phenomena and behaviors, you can only talk about some fragments. Only 6-7-year-old children speak coherently and begin to develop from narrative external connection to narrative internal connection.
In short, in the whole early childhood, with the growth of age, the proportion of children's situational speech and coherent speech gradually decreased, while the proportion of children's coherent speech gradually increased.
(C), the occurrence and development of internal language
Internal language refers to silent language, which is a special language form, characterized by hidden pronunciation and concise sentences. Internal language and thinking are inextricably linked; It mainly performs the functions of consciousness analysis, synthesis and self-regulation, which is directly related to the generation of human consciousness. The internal language is issued on the basis of the development of the external language to a certain stage. The internal language began to appear when the child was about 4 years old, showing the voice of soliloquy. This is a transitional form between vocal external speech and silent internal speech, which has both the characteristics of external speech: speaking loudly and the characteristics of internal speech: talking to oneself. There are two forms of talking to yourself: game language, complete, detailed, emotional and expressive. Example: When playing games, children often talk while doing actions, and supplement and enrich actions with words. Question language often appears when encountering problems or difficulties, which is short and fragmentary and expresses confusion, doubt and surprise. Children often show their own thinking process and problem-solving methods in monologues. Children aged 4-5 have the richest question language. Children aged 6-7 have been able to think silently in internal language. Therefore, there are relatively few question languages, but when encountering difficult tasks, question languages become active again.