telegraphic speech

telegraphic speech

The Importance of Telegraphic Speech in Language Development

1. Introduction

At this stage, it is worth considering the fact that if children are to learn language and progress through these stages, then they must be provided with the necessary input that will allow them to do so. IMPORTANT SOURCE INPUT FROM CHATPACKETS WE HAVE PERMISSION FOR THIS!!! It was proposed that telegraphic speech can be attributed to a child’s imitation of adult language.

We cannot give a clear-cut definition, so instead use the term to describe short, missing out “grammatical morphemes” and clear to understand. An example of a child’s telegraphic speech would be the child saying “Daddy walk” rather than the adult form, “Daddy is going for a walk”. It is common for children to leave out function words, auxiliary verbs, as well as any inflections and simply use content words. For many years now, telegraphic speech has been seen as an important stage in language development and one that is vital to understanding how children learn language.

Telegraphic speech is typically the term used to describe the two-word stage of language development in children. Psycholinguists often suggest that this stage is a universal phenomenon, and that children from all language backgrounds go through a stage where their language mirrors that of a telegram. This classic view has been challenged in recent years and research on telegraphic speech has shown that it is not as clear-cut as originally thought, with different children showing different patterns of short and to-the-point language. There are many different views and interpretations of what telegraphic speech is and at exactly what stage children exhibit this form of language.

2. Definition and Characteristics of Telegraphic Speech

Telegraphic speech is a term used to refer to the tendency for speech to be bereft of function morphemes and not entirely faithful in following the grammatical norms of the language. It is a term that is used only in the description of language acquisition. Its salient characteristics are: 1. Postvocabulary. This term is used to describe the early two-word utterances produced by children. An example of telegraphic speech would be “want juice.” 2. Omission of inflections. In telegraphic speech, the function morphemes will be omitted. A function morpheme is a bound morpheme such as a preposition, an article, a conjunction, or a pronoun. A free morpheme can stand alone as a single word. In telegraphic speech, these morphemes will be omitted from the speech. This would be shown in the sentence “mummy take teddy” where the past tense inflection is omitted from the verb and also the article preceding the word teddy. 3. Use of uninflected words. Often the simplest form of noun or verb is used with no inflection. “Big car there.” 4. Short and simple utterances. What this means is that the children will use small utterances to express themselves. E.g. “No. I. not.” 5. Enumeration. Quite often, the child will repeat the same word to convey the meaning of different things. For example, “dog dog” pointing to a dog and a picture of a dog.

3. Benefits of Telegraphic Speech in Language Development

This section will discuss the benefits of telegraphic speech in the development of language for a child with ASD. It will discuss how a child can use telegraphic speech to request something he wants, to control other people to obey commands, and to refuse requests he does not want to do. It will explain how he can use telegraphic speech to ask for information and to comment. It will give examples of how using telegraphic speech can be beneficial to a child. Using telegraphic speech, one child requested that his brother stop calling him a baby. He used to say “You not call me a baby!” He said to his grandmother “Do you have books here?” He asked someone to move out of his way. He requested that he play a video game. He asked his mom if he could ask a question and then asked for information about George Washington. Desires, requests, refusals, and comments can constitute the majority of communicative exchanges. Sue (00) has found that children spend slightly over 80% of their communicative interactions in these four speech functions, so children with ASD using telegraphic speech to gain desired information and special education training can be using language most of the time. Sue has recently shown that a procedure called pivotal response training (PRT) can increase speech intelligibility and lengthen utterances of children with ASD. PRT teaches parents to manipulate multiple steps of a target skill by prompting and reinforcing steps of the skill approximations, generalizing skill, and using the skill in different settings. Schedulers can use telegraphic speech to teach children with ASD to ask them questions and to request information. High student registration in these speech functions and practice in PRT may increase telegraphic speech use by students with ASD in their communicative interactions and lengthen the number of steps students take to complete skills. So telegraphic speech may promote using language to complete complex tasks. These findings indicate that techniques used to teach language to a student with ASD can increase the child’s usage and length of telegraphic speech. It seems that the farther the child develops, the more descriptive his telegraphic speech and the more closely it resembles normal speech. So telegraphic speech is likely to occur in early stages of learning skills and is part of a progression toward normal language. This suggests that if a child continues to learn and practice new skills, the child would learn to use language to complete tasks and his descriptive normal speech would replace the telegraphic speech used at early stages of the skill. This is something that parents and teachers can be confident in knowing. It is quite possible for children with ASD to overcome their difficulties in using language to complete tasks by practicing those tasks and utilizing their language models.

4. Challenges and Limitations of Telegraphic Speech

The fact that telegraphic speech does not consist of mere one-word clues does not, however, make it simple. An absence of supporting grammatical inflections and function words leads to a great deal of semantic ambiguity in telegraphic speech. Function words swap with other open-class terms making it a complex task figuring out the function of the word in the sentence, while maintaining minimal representation. In comparison to more primitive forms of communication, telegraphic speech is heavy on homophones, whose meanings can only be understood from context. According to Lieven et al., in situations where a sentence has too many meanings, children are likely to abandon the particular word for an alternative which is less ambiguous. Given that the point of telegraphic speech is to simplify language, this somewhat contradicts mechanism behind telegraphic speech. Indirectly related to the problem of homophones is the lost emphasis on context required to understand meaning. Slobin argues that telegraphic speech provides minimal access to mental spaces, explaining that due to a lack of need for re-telling and clarification, children tend not to ask for meanings of what they do not comprehend. This is problematic as many mental spaces for homophones have unconventional meanings at surface level, meaning children will understand the wrong meaning of a word and recur it. Lieven et al. supports this with the finding that in experimentally directing parents to use less clear references to desired objects, children tended to abandon pronouns in favour of the proper noun.

5. Conclusion

We need to change the way we think about telegraphic speech. It may be cute when a child says something like “Daddy sock”, but it is a leap ahead in their language development. It represents the child’s improvement in how to convey a message to another person, it is simply another way of saying “I saw Daddy’s sock.” The concept of telegraphic speech occurs much earlier than previously thought. The evidence of it beginning as early as children start to combine words is very compelling. Unfortunately in the past it has been considered simply a lack of knowledge in more words to convey the message, and had been thought to reflect language disorder in children. As discussed, research has shown that children with typical and disordered language do not differ significantly in the production of telegraphic utterances. With this in mind it demonstrates that it is not simply a less developed form of grammatical sentences; rather it is a step towards gaining knowledge in how to use the function morphemes to form grammatical sentences.