13. EMOTIONAL SPEECH AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE STRUCTURE OF ITS UNDERSTANDING AND GENE

Lecture



Expressiveness and emotional speech is its important component. Often the child’s speech contains many exclamations, abrupt interruptions, multiple constructions, the accelerated rate of speech — in a word, all the turns of speech expressing emotionality. Such turns are not a sign of a well-thought-out stylistic device or a means; they are indicators of the emotionality of a child’s speech, who by means of these means tries to convey a picture filled with emotions to the listener. He is not constrained by the framework of behavior, indicating the need to restrain his emotions in society. In his speech, there are no clearly defined rules for constructing a sentence, nor is there a motivation to restrain one’s emotionality. And instead of the orderliness and semantic construction of the sentence, an emotional construction comes: the emotional component of the word brings it to the forefront, pushing the other away, thus a structure is built that does not meet any rules, but is nonetheless informational and emotionally filled. Later, as the child grows up, he looks at the people around him, and begins to copy their manner of speech, notices differences, including reducing his excessive emotionality, making his speech more regulated, in view of which the brightness and expressiveness of speech decreases, it becomes smoother. As a result, the opposite situation arises: after the excessive expressiveness of speech subsides - if you do not pay attention to the parents, the child’s speech can become extremely unimpressive.

One of the means of expression, often found in communication, is intonation . Listening to the intonations of the parents - the emotional child begins to copy them, and in his speech a pleading, angry and many other intonations appear. Often, excessive emotionality of speech is manifested in its acceleration. Wanting to tell as much as possible, some children begin to speak very quickly, which leads to the effect of "blurring" speech.

The field of study of the emotionality of children's speech has interested many linguists in the last decade of the 20th century. This linguistic category has great prospects in interpreting many unexplained facts and phenomena in the speech of children. This interest is due to several reasons. First, emotional means are a way of expressing verbal expression of feelings in children; secondly, there are no universal schemes and criteria that would allow to study the emotional behavior of children.

In psychology, there are and are actively developing two areas in the study of emotions and their manifestations in children:

1) emotional childish thinking;

2) the ratio of emotions and thinking as the basis for the formation of children's language and intelligence. In the process of personal development, life experience finds its intellectual and linguistic expression both consciously and unconsciously.

With the advent of a new branch of science, ontolinguistics , the thesis on the relationship between emotions and thinking can explain the processes of formation and development of emotional competence, the linguistic picture of the world and the linguistic personality of a child.

The manifestation of certain forms of behavior depends on the mental development of the child and confirms the thesis that thinking and emotions are in a balancing relationship. Thus, the child's behavior in a particular situation depends on the motivation due to emotions or rational knowledge. L. S. Rubinstein wrote that mental processes are not only cognitive in nature, but also affective, emotional-volitional.

Investigating the structure, function of emotional processes in a child, A.V. Zaporozhets and Ya. Z. Neverovich came to the conclusion that emotional processes at all genetic stages retain a central character. They also found that in children under 6 years of age there is a delayed emotional correction, that is, the child constantly needs to encourage the results of his own actions.

Taking into account all the above, as well as the results of the study of L. S. Vygotsky about the crisis of 7 years, when children develop self-esteem and logic of feelings, we can conclude that the age limit for children of 6-7 years old is marked by the activation of cognitive processes. It is at this age that the cognitive processes of children's consciousness begin to control not only the child’s mastery of the surrounding world, but also his emotional sphere. At the same time, the child’s emotional thinking, to a greater extent than rational, influences the formation of his personal linguistic picture of the world and plays a decisive role in the choice of speech means for its designation.

The development of speech function in ontogeny is currently understood as the development of language ability. Language ability is considered as a complex generalized psychological system correlating with the language system. As N. I. Chuprikova points out, a lot of evidence has now been accumulated, showing

the formation and development of language ability in children. These facts, gathered together, show that all components of linguistic ability develop from the primary common source nucleus - the germ. From the facts it follows that the linguistic ability does not add up to the sum of independently developing components, but that, on the contrary, the components are only gradually distinguished from the primary fused integral and roughly global primitive formations.

There are a lot of facts about the development of various components and aspects of language ability, and all of them vividly demonstrate the universality of the law of development from general to specific. According to modern research, the child masters many speech functions at the verbal stage of development, when not words or sounds of language are used as communicative means, but so-called proto - signs - body movements, facial expressions, gestures, sounds not related to verbal speech. Researchers have identified up to 7 communicative functions observed in children even before they begin to master verbal speech. These are: instrumental - to meet material needs; regulatory - to control the actions of adults close to the child; interactions - to achieve and strengthen contact with them; personal - to express their own individuality and a number of others. One of the researchers, M. Halliday , believes that these functions are universals of human culture, and he considers mastering them in the pre-verbal period as a necessary prerequisite for mastering speech. Thus, as N. I. Chuprikova points out, an essentially important result of the studies of the pre-verbal period of speech consists in substantiating the proposition that a certain primary, still very rough and primitive, but a system of the most common communicative functions and pragmatic skills, within which the child’s sound speech will continue to develop, and as the development progresses, it will become more and more rich, delicate, differentiations.

At first, the child is sensitive to regular melodic forms, perceives utterances as a single sound whole, relying on non-subtle acoustic signs. And when mastering active speech, first roughly approximated articulation complexes are produced, corresponding to large elements of speech (phrases, words), and then, based on this, their individual components (syllables, sounds) are refined.

There is a lot of evidence that a child does not differentiate the intonation and phonemic components of speech for quite a long time. Replacing the vocabulary of the adult’s demands addressed to him while maintaining their rhythmic-melodic intonation structure to a certain age does not cause changes in the child’s responses to these requirements, and a change in intonation with an unchanged content of utterances, on the contrary, leads to a complete absence of the responses developed per word. Only in the age of 10–11 months does the selection of the intonation and phonemic content occur in the initially single, consistent sound.

There is a lot of evidence that the development of the phonemic structure of a language goes on as a multi-tier hierarchical differentiation, splitting some of the original phonemes, of which there are only 2, then 3, 4, etc. The process of a child’s mastering the phonemic structure of the language is very complex and depends on many factors. The order in which individual phonemes appear in his speech is influenced by such circumstances as the frequency of their occurrence in the language and the ease of their perception and pronunciation. But still, with all these external circumstances in this process, the features of the internally logical path of development based on the principle of differentiation clearly appear.

The development of the active speech of a child, performing a signal-signaling function, begins with one-word statements, from the stage of individual words-sentences. From the content side, the first words and sentences refer to the whole situation, and from the form side in them the subject and predicate, nomination and predication, elements of semantics, grammar and syntax are merged in inseparable unity. There is neither a dismemberment of the situation, nor a dismemberment of the speech form. All this is combined into a single indissoluble whole. At the same time, most researchers agree that single-word sentences contain the rudiments of everything that a child has to develop when they master an adult language, that a single-word sentence is an initial construction in many respects. The deployment of single-word statements into two-word and wordy sentences is natural, largely universal for different languages, and goes along several internally related directions. One of them is the sequence of the appearance of words of different grammatical categories. According to many data, the word-situation is first of all divided into words-objects, then words-actions, words-signs, words-relations appear. This grammatical division of speech indicates the cognitive dismemberment of integral situations in which such components as objects and agents of actions, their properties, the actions themselves, the results of actions, and relations are singled out.

Another direction of the division of one-word statements, which is inseparably connected with the appearance of words of different grammatical categories in speech, is the isolation from the flow of speech and the use of specific language means (ending, word order, official words) to express grammatical and syntactic connections between words. From the content side, the isolation and differentiation of various spatial, temporal and other relations between the phenomena of reality are behind this. The sequence of the appearance in the child's speech of different grammatical categories and grammatical means fully corresponds to the law of development from the whole to the parts, from the general to the particular. In the fundamental classical work on the development of children's speech, A. N. Gvozdev concluded that at first more general grammatical categories are assimilated, that diverse grammatical forms arise from primarily broader, less differentiated forms that gradually specialize more and more. In modern psycholinguistics, this position is called D. Slobin by superregularization . Its essence is that the rules intended for wider classes of linguistic phenomena are formed earlier than the rules related to subclasses, that is, the general rules are learned earlier than the private ones.

As N. I. Chuprikova states, the meaning of the child’s words goes a long way before they coincide with the normative meanings of the adult language, and many aspects of this path can be understood from the point of view of the principle of differentiation . In the process of ontogenetic development of values, several directions of differentiation are inextricably intertwined, which, however, you can still try to isolate to some extent and theoretically separate from each other.

The first direction of differentiation is the gradual release of words as independent signals of specific meanings from an inclusive context. As is known, at about the 8th month of life, children give a number of adequate reactions to the words of adults addressed to them. In response to the question: “Where is mom?” And “Where is dad?” The child turns to the side of the person they are asked about; In response to the requests “Show the nose” or “Show the ears” the child makes the required movement. In response to the appeal “Make a joke,” he begins to clap his hands animatedly. As many observations show, at this stage of development, the word is only a component of the holistic complex stimulus, composed along with the word by many elements of the situation in which it is used. In other words, what can be called a meaning is not the meaning of a word as such, but the meaning of a complex signal consisting of several stimuli, including a word. Only gradually, the value of the more and more goes to the word, and the role of the relevant accompanying elements of the complex is leveled.

The second direction of differentiation in the development of the meanings of words is their gradual “objectification”, the liberation of meanings from the child’s own activity associated with them. This direction is the main content of the theory of early conceptual development and language acquisition, according to one of the researchers, K. Nelson .

The other two directions of differentiation of the meaning of words are connected with the establishment of their clearer content. This, in particular, is the overcoming of the syncretism of the meanings of the first words of the child, which manifests itself in two somewhat different forms. One form of syncretism of the meanings of words consists in the fact that the word expression does not refer to any one particular subject, but to several different subjects, if they enter into some kind of integral situation for them. For example, a child calls “cat” both a cat and fluffy toys that a cat reminds him of. Overcoming this view

syncretism is provided by the assimilation of different words belonging to different elements of situationally holistic images of perception. The second type of syncretism of the meanings of the child’s first words derives from a combination of relevant and irrelevant, from the adult point of view, attributes of objects called certain words.

The second direction in the development of word meanings consists in narrowing the initially excessively broad, generalized zone of their subject meanings. Here the principle of development from the general to the particular, from the whole to the parts is clearly expressed. One of the clearest examples of this way of differentiating the meanings of words is the development of a color naming system. According to the conclusions of N. I. Chuprikova, the names of flowers in the active speech of a child appear relatively late, not earlier than 2, and more often not earlier than 2.5 years. At the same time, children who spontaneously do not use color names yet answer the question about color, although sometimes incorrectly, but the name is colors. They may use the same term for many colors or simply reply with the word “color”, but they do not use any other adjectives relating, for example, to the form or size of objects. When a child already knows several color names, he uses them for a long time (from 2.5 to 4 years) randomly, and only about 4–7 years old they start to be used correctly. In this case, first, the correct names are established with respect to the primary colors, and then - to intermediate colors. NI Chuprikova points to such data that at first the child stops confusing the names of the colors of the warm and cold parts of the spectrum, although the names within them can be mixed. Thus, it can be seen that the general semantic field of color names is highlighted in the verbal plan much earlier than its differentiation into separate components.

Another example of the development of values ​​according to the same type of their gradual narrowing is the development of values ​​in the associated pairs of antomimes. Children often mix up the meanings of the prepositions “above” and “under”, the verbs “na-dai”, “lost-found”, adverbs “tomorrow-yesterday”, etc. Considering such cases of mixing up the meanings of a word, T.N. Ushakova considers their reason is that both opposing words have a common global (situational) meaning. From here it becomes clear the way of forming the exact meanings of words in such associated pairs.

According to the theory of E. Clark , the meanings of many words of a small child differ from the meanings of the words of an adult in that they include a smaller number of features of objects, and these are the most common signs related to broad semantic bundles. New additional features, more and more specific and characterizing narrower classes of objects, are included in the values ​​later, and where there was only one word at first, several appear.

According to the conclusions of N. I. Chuprikova, the assimilation of the meanings of words largely depends on which words the child hears most often, which of the called subjects most attract his attention and become objects of research activity and practical activity. But with all the influence of these external factors, which lay their imprint on the course of the development of word meanings, it is still clearly visible the effect of the general universal law of the development of systems: from the general to the particular, from the whole to the parts.

After the child has accumulated a certain vocabulary of words and has mastered some general grammatical rules, the division of words into smaller significant elements — morphemes — occurs. . В словах выделяются корни, приставки, суффиксы и окончания, способные в качестве самостоятельных единиц вступать в разнообразные новые комбинации. Свидетельством этого служат детские неологизмы, отмечаемые всеми исследователями. Употребление детьми слов, не встречающихся в речи взрослых и представляющих собой свободное комбинирование корней и аффиксов, говорит о происшедшем членении слов на более дробные звукозначения, являющиеся их элементами. Хотя с возрастом детское словотворчество затухает, признается, что морфемы, как минимальные зву-козначения, хранятся в долговременной памяти наряду со словами, и что морфемная решетка играет существенную роль в понимании речи и может использоваться в некоторых случаях также для синтеза слова при ее порождении. (По материалам Н. И. Чуприковой.)


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Developmental Psychology and Developmental Psychology

Terms: Developmental Psychology and Developmental Psychology