Factors that Promote Rapid Language Learning in Children?

Language is very important for one’s development because it can affect other areas of development and is critical to a child’s future success. For many other aspects of development, including cognitive, social and psychological language is very necessary. Language occurs before the baby is even a month old. For a developing child, the biggest thing that will contribute to our eventual language development is what we hear. Very soon, as a young infant, we demonstrate a sense of language just by simply the noise, movements, and expression that we make. Within the first year of life the baby is already babbling and speaking a hand full of words in their native language. Also they are much better at comprehending simple words spoken to them around

Nature and nurture both play a significant role in language development. Language development refers to how children understand, organise, speak and use words in order to communicate at an effective, age-appropriate level (Karen Kearns, 2013, P.105). For centuries, theorists have been debating the roles of nature versus nurture. Although, each child’s language will develop at their own pace and there will be many individual differences based on culture, ethnicity, health and ability. As well as physical, social, emotional and cognitive development in which will contribute to a child’s language development.

The communication with your child starts way before the youngster can speak. From their cry, smile, and the responses they give you to help you understand his or her needs. Language developments have different stages that children pass through to assist them in the development of speech and languages. There are a plethora of factors which can inhabitants’ a child language development. However, these are amongst the top causes for language development such as a child’s inborn ability to learn language and the language the child hears.

Baby talk film had introduced how babies learn to speak. Its conclusion was by surroundings and also by innate ability. And Acquiring the Human Language introduced many different experiments with example sentence. It concluded that Language is learned differently from other knowledge.

Three practices that support the language development of all children is that of “communicating and Sharing” (Lally, 2006, p.32) in which a caregiver is observant of the infant and follows the infant's cues in that “Babies show us from the beginning that soothing words and lullabies can calm them.” (Lally, 2006, p.32) thus forming a bond of communicating what the infant's emotions are and sharing them in their reaction to a caregiver.

Parental observation helped a great deal in compiling the information as it acted like a progress report where I could monitor how the child’s language developed over a short period of time. As this research was built on the cross-sectional design, parental observations were very useful. The need to get the subject accustomed to the observer and other problems that crop up were avoided by using the parent, a familiar person as the observer.

What different features, properties, and/or experiences in the word and with people allow infants and young children to learn and develop language? Mutual exclusivity, infant-directed speech, and a child’s socioeconomic status are all factors affecting language development in infants and young children. Children, between the ages of 3- to 4-year-olds, expect that a given entity will have only one name, that is they will not apply a new word to an object they already know which leads them to pick the novel object when given a word they do not know, this phenomenon is known as the mutual exclusivity assumption. Infant-directed speech studies have revealed that infants, between the ages of 6.5 to 7.5 months, who hear infant directed speech, find it easier to segment and discriminate words over part words than those who hear adult-directed speech. Finally, studies examining family socioeconomic status and language development have shown that the mothers in high SES groups had higher speech properties (number of word types, number of utterances, length of utterances, etc) that in the long term influenced the development of the children’s vocabulary complexity

Lastly, it is important to include Norm Chomsky every time we talk about language acquisition. Through his studies we can say that children can learn a new language because of their innate ability in their brain to be able to classify different words, specifically grammatical terms. He suggested that we have a device in our brain which he called a Language Acquisition Device that allows children to notice the differences between two languages. In my opinion if all of us have this device. All the child needs to stimulate it to be able to learn those important first words that a child is going to need as they further exposed into a language.

Children are more likely to remain engaged in conversation when they are the ones to initiate it and studies that observed mother-infant interactions saw that infants from 9 months of age to 23 months of age were more frequently the one to begin dialogues that contained multiple back and forth turns (Bloom et al., 1996). When a child initiates dialogue they have already had the time to mentally process what they are trying to say; vocalizations that emerge from this processing are longer and quicker in response time. The relevance of an object or action plays a key role and is best made clear when the child initiates the discussion about it. There is greater acquisition of knowledge when the child points to an object and a caregiver labels

Both parents and caregivers are responsible for developing an infant’s conversational skills. This is usually done through routinized activities known as joint action. Joint actions according to Owens (2012, p. 139), “provide a structure within which language can be analyzed”. These routinized activities can be anything from daily routines and game playing (Owens, 012, p. 139).

The study solidified the theory that social interaction is key to a toddler developing his language. This study proved that children with mothers who talk and text frequently, or disengage from their children, are less likely to learn the new words. This disengagement distracts the toddler and thus interrupts the important cognitive processes occurring in the brain to map the new words. This study was effective because of the intention and concern in its design. The researchers did an amazing job explaining the material and taking great pains to control as many

The setting that I choose for observation #1 is a home child care. The children vary in their ages from six weeks up to four years. There are one baby, four infants and three preschoolers. In this observation, I will describe the language development of child A and child B that are in the infant room. Afterward, I will describe the interactions strategies that the teacher uses when sharing the book.

From a baby 's first word to their first complete sentence, there 's a lot to debate with their language development. The average child has a vocabulary of up to six-thousand words by the time they turn five years old (Brighthubcom, 2016). Language development is one of the most critical roles for an educator in both early childhood and primary settings. It is this ability of language development that is particularly interesting in the nature vs nurture debate. In order for educators to provide effective communication, it is important that they have the knowledge and understanding of the four key concepts of language, such as phonological, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic development and the underlying theoretical perspectives that explain the processes of language acquisition and development.

Early language development predicts the amount of vocabulary knowledge as the child develops and is a key factor that is linked with later academic achievement (Pungello et al., 2009; Weisleder & Fernald, 2013). Also, background factors must be analyzed and assessed, in order to understand how language growth differs from one child to the next. Exposure to speech is very important and helps influence early development of language and the processing speed (Fernald, Marchman, & Wielder, 2013 as cited by Weisleder & Fernald, 2009). A study done by Kwon et al., (2013), found that play has a significant effect on the language complexity for children’s language use pertaining to the structure of play or activity setting (free play), however the gender of the parent did not influence the language growth for the child. Furthermore, children are able to identify familiar words when speech is directed towards the child and not over heard, facilitated vocabulary learning at the age of 24 months (Weislder & Fernald, 2013). For example, over hearing adult conversation is not as beneficial towards the child’s vocabulary learning.

Children acquire language since they were born. They communicate with their parents. Furthermore, children and parents interact with each other using a language that we often call the first language or mother tongue. At an early age, children are only learning one language that is the mother tongue. By age and speech development, children improve to acquire a second language from the school or the environment around them. In terms of speed of langgauge acquisition, children are factorized by both the child and the child’s learning environment. Therefore, it is important to understand how children acquire second language. This paper is provided