![]() Infants begin to vocalize and repeat vocalizations within the first couple of months of life. That gurgling, musical vocalization called cooing can serve as a source of entertainment to an infant who has been laid down for a nap or seated in a carrier on a car ride. Cooing serves as practice for vocalization. Before they develop language, infants communicate using facial expressions.ĭo newborns communicate? Certainly, they do. They do not, however, communicate with the use of language. Instead, they communicate their thoughts and needs with body posture (being relaxed or still), gestures, cries, and facial expressions. A person who spends adequate time with an infant can learn which cries indicate pain and which ones indicate hunger, discomfort, or frustration. However, by the time that they are about 1 year old, they can only discriminate among those phonemes that are used in the language or languages in their environments (Jensen, 2011 Werker & Lalonde, 1988 Werker & Tees, 1984).įigure 2. Babies can discriminate among the sounds that make up a language (for example, they can tell the difference between the “s” in vision and the “ss” in fission) early on, they can differentiate between the sounds of all human languages, even those that do not occur in the languages that are used in their environments. Reflexive communication interest in othersĮach language has its own set of phonemes that are used to generate morphemes, words, and so on. Stages of Language and Communication Development Stage Babies are also attuned to the languages being used around them and show preferences for videos of faces that are moving in synchrony with the audio of spoken language versus videos that do not synchronize with the audio (Blossom & Morgan, 2006 Pickens, 1994 Spelke & Cortelyou, 1981). Newborns show a preference for their mother’s voice and appear to be able to discriminate between the language spoken by their mother and other languages. ![]() In fact, it appears that this is occurring even before we are born. Moreover, it appears that there is a critical period for language acquisition, such that this proficiency at acquiring language is maximal early in life generally, as people age, the ease with which they acquire and master new languages diminishes (Johnson & Newport, 1989 Lenneberg, 1967 Singleton, 1995).Ĭhildren begin to learn about language from a very early age (Table 1). It would seem, therefore, that we are born with a biological predisposition to acquire a language (Chomsky, 1965 Fernández & Cairns, 2011). The use of language develops in the absence of formal instruction and appears to follow a very similar pattern in children from vastly different cultures and backgrounds. Noam Chomsky (1965) criticized this behaviorist approach, asserting instead that the mechanisms underlying language acquisition are biologically determined. Skinner (1957) proposed that language is learned through reinforcement. ![]() However, young children master language very quickly with relative ease. Given the remarkable complexity of a language, one might expect that mastering a language would be an especially arduous task indeed, for those of us trying to learn a second language as adults, this might seem to be true. Babies pick up on language skills really early on and can differentiate between sounds long before they can speak themselves.
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