Hulit, L. & Howard, M. Born to Talk, An Introduction to Speech and Language Development (6th Edition). Allyn and Bacon: Needham Heights, MA. (2006)
Course Requirement #1A 1500 MINIMUM (MORE IS OK) WORD TERM PAPER
A term paper of no less than 1500 words will be written on a Topic to be selected by the students from a list of Language Development Hypotheses. This list is provided below. The Term Paper is to include a discussion, based on a minimum of three articles, books or chapters in a book (excluding the class Textbook), which describe, discuss, support and/or refute the hypothesis selected from the list. A minimum of three citations with references in APA format will be included at the end of the paper.
At the end of the paper will be included a short Appendix which will answer three questions:
1. What were the databases used to find each article. (For example in the Communicative Disorders Multisearch example shown below we searched ten Data Bases but found most of our articles in PubMed.)
2. What was the search strategy which was used, i.e., the search words used in each database to find the articles. (In the example below, we used the terms Television and (Language Development). We put the last two terms in brackets so that the computer would link Television to both terms and not just Language.)
3. Was each article cited an example of Primary or Secondary research? As defined by the Library at UC Berkley,
Information Competency Exercise: LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT HYPOTHESES LIST for Student Research
1. The effects of watching television for young children are detrimental to language development.
2. The number of siblings and their position in the family in terms of birth effects language development.
3. Increased opportunities to experience (play with) many objects as a young child is beneficial to concept (and hence) language development.
4. Letting the infant cry at night so that she/she will learn to sleep all night long is detrimental to language development if not the psychological development of the baby.
5. Exposing the child in the first five years of life to classical music like Bach and Beethoven is beneficial for cognitive and/or language development.
6. The more you talk to a child in the first five years, the better cognitive and/or language development will be.
7. Children who are read to (or who read) have better imagery and/or language development than children who watch Television.
8. A plentiful diet of sugar based cereals, soft drinks, pastries, cookies, and/or fast foods, is developmentally detrimental to a childs ability to sustain attention.
9. Reading to a child every day (even an infant) is beneficial for language development.
10. A baby, who immediately after birth is allowed to remain with the mother rather than being immediately put in a nursery, will demonstrate more vocalization in later months.
11. Babies who are not touched will perish at worst or have diminished brain development at best.
12. Children who watch Television spend less time reading or drawing than children who dont.
13. Children with stay-at-home moms (or dads) have better language development than those having parents who both work away from the home.
14. Sustained middle ear infections among children from birth to 5 years will have a detrimental effect on language development.
15. Learning to read and play music facilitates attention (focused, sustained, selective, alternating and dual).
16. For the normal baby, being exposed to two, three or more languages is simultaneously is a good policy for language development.
17. A persons first language can not be acquired after puberty.
18. Parrots, porpoises, and/or primates do not acquire language
19. Children have better eidetic imagery than adults
20. Syntax is only found in human communication.