023 Understand Child and Young Person development

It is believed that babies develop language when they are in the utero and it continues throughout their lifetime. By twelve weeks old, babies may register the sounds they can hear and at the same time make basic visual, auditory and tactile mind maps (Karen Kearns, 2013, P.105). This allows the infant to turn towards any familiar sounds and noises. Babies begin to communicate with people around them quite quickly. By two months old, babies begin to make ‘cooing’ and other noises; this indicates the phonological component of language development. By six to nine months babies begin to experience with a mixture of sounds, and often you will hear a baby babbling. Babbling development is similar across many different languages and even hearing impaired babies will go through this stage. They may copy the sounds they are introduced too or beginning to recognize familiar

| At birth babies are born with reflexes – such as: * swallowing and sucking * rooting * grasping * startle reflexIn the first few months babies change considerably * gradually sleeping less * looking less curled up and startle less

1) Sitting on the floor with the baby and talking about toys, the colours and shapes feeling the texture of it with them. Rolling a ball to them and helping them to roll it back.

The journey towards language starts in the womb. This is significant because it exhibits how early the development in language begins. It is the first step towards language in humans. Between seven to nine months pregnant, women observe that when there is music or loud noises present, their baby will kick and act restless. In New York’s Columbia Presbyterian Medical

According to Communication Skills (Skills You Need, 2015) “Communication is simply the act of transferring information from one place to another, whether this be vocally (using voice), written (using printed or digital media such as books, magazines, websites or emails), visually (using logos, maps, charts or graphs) or non-verbally (using body language, gestures and the tone and pitch of voice).” Communication depends greatly on a child’s level of development and the type of communication they are able to participate in and children’s delivery of it. From making babbling sound that eventually progress to single word, to two word and eventually to multi-word stage, (About

The ability to use complex methods of communication is paramount to the development of language. Some of the ways in which it can be accomplished are by using books and stories that are appropriate to their level of development. You can use board books, pop-up book, story books, audio books, also encyclopaedias, they can also discuss their interests with other children and take part in role play such as happy families. These are all ways of developing language.

In the video titled The Four Stages of Acquiring Language, in which I observed. The first stage is “Babbling” one syllable sounds. I observed an infant at 4 months of age babbling. According to the CDC, at 4 months of age infants begin babbling, they can babble with expression and copy sounds he/she hears. Infants at this age can cry in different ways to express hunger, pain or being tired.

Although Children are pre-programmed to grow, they need all the right conditions to flourish to achieve their full potential. they must be able to attend and understand the spoken language in order to develop the skills that are needed in all academic and social areas. Lindsay, Dockrell, Law and Peacey (2010) illustrate the importance of understanding of how spoken language capability is vital for the development of literacy skills, listening and speaking as the roots of reading and writing. Until we develop children’s communication skills fully, they are unable to reach their full potential in reading and writing. This can only be achieved through a nurturing and stimulating environment, which responds to the child’s needs.

Infancy: At this stage, infants have no language and thinking. Babble is increasingly being understood as an essential precursor to speech. They explore the surrounding environment by feeling and action, and form the concept of object permanence gradually. They have sharp sense of hearing, are good at imitating. Infants could distinguish the change in tone, tone and tone. A nine-month infants can understand some nouns, such as "mom", "ball", "dog" and so on. In general, a twelve-month infant can say at least 50 words.

Language is starting to develop during the third year, where children are trying to put sentences together to get reactions from surrounding people. “Words give a child new power over himself and the world,

At the age of 18 months children begin to use two-word sentences to communicate their ideas, and by 24-30 months these children are avid language users. The process by which children acquire language is a complex process that is still not

Children develop language in stages, pre-linguistic stage or age birth to 1 year is the stage where babies communicate through crying, cooing and gesturing, babies age 2 months will pause as if to mimic “conversation”.

Then, cooing appears when the child is between six to eight weeks old, where the infant demonstrates happy vowel like sounds (Hoff, 2006). At age sixteen weeks infants begin to demonstrate laughter and vocal play (Hoff, 2006). Between six and nine month old babies begin to produce babbling sounds, then they utter their first word around age one (Hoff, 2006). When children speak their first word it is usually as an isolated unit (Goldin-Meadow, 2006), and not considered a major step in phonological development (Hoff, 2006). Children then learn that their first spoken word is composed of smaller parts, which is known as morphology, and that the word can be used as a building block for larger sentences called syntax (Goldin-Meadow, 2006). A child’s first word goes farther then communicating a message between the child and communicative partner, the word retains symbolic meaning (Goldin-Meadow, 2006). At age eighteen months phonological processes develop, in which the child’s speech characteristics begin to transform (Hoff, 2006). Subsequent to eighteen months the child’s vocabulary grows and with this growth the child is able to phonemically represent a sound with the mental representation of every word that possesses a sound (Hoff, 2006).

Between the ages of 0-6 months, a baby can hear and recognize familiar voices, sounds, and tones. A stranger’s voice may agitate a baby while its own mother’s voice will instantly calm them. If the doorbell rings every day at 1:00, when the postman delivers the mail, it may initially startle a new baby. After a few times, the baby will not even acknowledge the doorbell ringing. The baby becomes used to that tone and just ignores the interruption. Babies at this developmental stage can also communicate in their own unique way. They have particular cries and pitches in their voices that indicate a certain need. Ask most mothers and they can identify what these different cries mean. Sometimes it means they are hungry, sick, sleepy, or they just need to be held and rocked. And thus, communication begins. From 7-12 months babies have learned to babble and explore their voices, often squealing and stretching their vocal chords. They know when they are being spoken to and recognize the sound of their own name. Simple commands and the names of common objects are easily understood. Within the first year babies tend to produce their first words. During the child’s second and third years, they combine gestures with their limited vocabulary to express themselves. “Although their spoken words are limited to about 50-250 words, they have a receptive vocabulary of approximately 500-900 words” (Klarowska).

As they begin to feel comfortable, they start repeating after words they hear usually beginning with “mommy”, “daddy” and “no”. While this initial speaking usually happens around thirteen to fourteen months, a baby can begin learning their language skills before they are born. This concept is explained in the article “The Power of the Bilingual Brain”, “The human auditory system is functional from the third trimester on, and the loudest thing an in utero baby hears is its mother 's voice, speaking whatever language or languages she knows. Those sounds, with their characteristic rhythms and phonemes, are poured straight into the baby 's brain and become comfortingly familiar” (Klugger). We begin developing our languages before we are even aware we have a voice. (Echoing salience)