Theories of Speech Development: from Ancient Time to the Present

Abstract

Speech is the main mean of mediating higher mental functions. Several theories explain how a child learns to communicate. Currently, the research approach in the study of the formation of human speech has changed. The focus of the study has shifted to the study of local phenomena and the relationship between theoretical approaches. The purpose of research is to analyse the theories of speech development. In order to do this, we need to move in time and talk about the period from the middle to the end of the 20th century. Results of research. There was a strife between global approaches that tried to explain the formation of human speech through the capture of real information by some innate structures designed to build speech that exist in the human nervous system even before he learned to speak. Another major approach dealt with the tries to find those opportunities that a child has during development that would explain the occurrence of speech. Now, the focus of the study of speech has shifted from attempts to explain the existence of speech in general to the study of more local events in the course of speech development. Moreover, global theories exist at the background level. There are a number of researchers, who still adhere to Chomsky's ideas about the development of speech. Many researchers who are in a broader social-cognitive, social-functional paradigm. Some researchers who do not talk about the specificity of speech development. They just explain this process by innate general cognitive mechanisms. The struggle occurs between those who generally explain the development of speech by cognitive processes and those who understands the development of communication as the development of speech, the development of social interactions between people and the emergence of speech as one of the means for social interaction. We can see quite interesting clashes between these factions. For example, one of the reasons is the phenomenon of mutual exclusivity, regarding interesting data on how the acquiring of a new word occurs for the first time, upon its first presentation. When this phenomenon was discovered it turned out that a number of authors immediately decided that this was a vivid manifestation of the fact that the child has a perception of the communicative system as a whole. The child relies on the same representation of the communicative system of another person. It automatically draws conclusions about the existence of such a communicative system. Such a learning situation is specific for a language. On the other hand, authors who appeal to the processes of attention and memory always try to explain the data obtained by representatives of the socio-functional approach through the inevitably appearing emphasis that another person makes on the object. Therefore, this struggle continues to this day, and the whole interest is in what formulation, to which model it will ultimately lead us.