The three major components of language

Language can appear to be a complex beast to tackle for any Speech Pathologist or Teacher. Clear assessment and intervention is needed. Without this, it can feel like climbing an endless mountain. Thankfully, we can rely on Bloom and Lahey’s (1978) taxonomy of language which has truly stood the test of time. Let’s see how they break language down into its components.

Bloom and Lahey suggest that language can be broken down into 3 distinct components:

• Form: syntax, morphology, and phonology

• Content: semantics or word knowledge

• Use: pragmatics or the ability to use language in context for social purposes

Let’s take a closer look at each component.

Form

I like to think of form as the rules that tell us the right way to put sentences together with proper grammar. This is also a very simple definition of syntax. Some rules of grammar include:

• past tense (walked to school)

• third-person singular -s (she walks to school)

‘Brown’s Stages’ can help us predict how a child’s expressive language develops and what types of sentence structures they should be using at a given age. Speech Pathologists widely use Brown’s Stages as a framework and guideline for assessment and intervention of syntax and morphology.

Morphology is the study of the structure and form of words. We could devote a whole blog post to this topic, but to put it simply, words are formed by adding components together. Let’s run through some quick examples below:

• walked is formed by adding walk + the past tense suffix -ed

With adequate instruction over time children get quite good at understanding that words are made up of different parts, and they can be manipulated to make other words.

Phonology is the accurate production of speech sounds to produce words. Phonological processing is also included which is the ability to discriminate speech sounds.

Content

The content of what we communicate is determined by our vocabulary i.e., the words we know and have access to. Developing semantic or flexible word knowledge is extremely important for children. This might look like knowing that the word ‘spring’ is a season of the year, a leap/jump/bound, a metal spiral coil, or a place where water comes up from the ground. This lack of flexible word knowledge has an impact on understanding jokes, figurative language, and metaphorical language as they rely on our ability to know how words relate to one another (Davies, Andres-Roqueta, & Norbury, 2016).

Use

Pragmatics is our use of language during social interactions. This includes following the rules of social interaction, making social inferences, and interacting in an appropriate manner. A child who has deficits in the ‘use’ of language may have difficulty initiating and maintaining a topic of conversation, making requests, clarifying what they have heard, turn-taking, and changing or matching their style of communication to the environment.

This can also include reasoning about other people’s thoughts (Theory of Mind), understanding nonverbal communication, and identifying how others might react to things we say.

Form, content, and use are all closely linked and are impacted by each other. For example, a child with a language impairment who is trying to respond to a classmate who says to them ‘you woke up on the wrong side of the bed’ will have difficulty understanding the meaning of this idiom (content), responding to it in a socially appropriate manner (use), and using language to formulate a response that makes sense (form).

What’s the bottom line? Language assessment and intervention doesn’t have to be a nightmare. With a clear model from Bloom and Lahey, we can identify clear areas of difficulty, develop achievable goals, and explain these concepts to parents/caregivers. Without a system like this in place, we might find that we are missing crucial components of language in our practice which is to the detriment of the children and adults we support.

References:

Bloom, L., & Lahey, M. (1978). Language development and language disorders. New York: John Wiley and Sons.

Brown, R. (1973). A first language: The early stages. London: George Allen & Unwin.

Davies, C., Andres-Roqueta, C., & Norbury, C. F. (2016). Referring expressions and structural language abilities in children with specific language impairment: A pragmatic tolerance account. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 144, 98-113.