Essay Infant Language Development

The debate between many researchers is the argument of whether nature or nurture play a more important role in development. In this essay I will be looking into both aspects of nature and nurture focusing specifically on their influence towards language development in children. A main controversial question I will be looking into is the question of whether are we born already equipped with mechanisms which help us to learn language, or is language learned throughout a child’s environment by, for example, imitation and repetition? Studies done by some opposing researchers claim to show that nature and nurture promote language development

In mammals, language is one of the most complex method of communication that only humans can truly learn. The critical period hypothesis describes that children from ages between four months and five years old have the best ability to understand phonemes and morphemes, as well as incorporating these into their own proper speech. By being exposed to a first language stimulus, children around these ages can quickly pick up on sounds and basic grammatical rules. However, from any age beyond six years old, comprehension becomes further difficult. In addition, without being exposed to any form of conversation during a child’s critical period, they would fundamentally find themselves incapable of acquiring a first language. For a long time, psychologists found it a struggle to prove their critical period hypothesis, but because of a neglected individual, Genie Wiley, she helps validate it.

These cases firmly recommend a critical period for language acquisition (Hoff, 2005). Further aid for the possibility of a critical period of language learning is found among younger kids whose communication

The understanding of the world can be defined as the infant’s notion of other’s and the surrounding. The question is whether infants are pre-programmed with an initial concept of the world. Many experiments conducted supported the idea that a new born infant holds an understanding of the world. Cognitive development of a human being begins during the prenatal period. Consequently, infants do have a comprehension of the world. Infants are not mindless in fact they are born with the ability to identify voices, faces, interact and perform metacognition. An infant is preloaded with a system designed to socially develop completely. They are able to discern their mother tongue since they have gotten a earful during the prenatal period, similarly with their mothers’ voices. An experiment was performed to prove the validity of this. Ninety-one infants from French families were tested with English and Japanese. The infants were on pacifiers that functioned to calculate the times sucked. The French infants’ sucking rate when hearing English sentences were higher than hearing Japanese sentences. Infants can identify a familiar language by listening to the tempo the specific language. (Nazzi et al,. 1998)

I would like to learn more about language development in infants. As an educator I would like to know how to enhance the infant language development in the earlier years. I would like to become more knowledgeable in the language content area to increase infants receptive and expressive language.

However, some researchers emphasize the influences of learning on language acquisition, while others emphasize the biological influences. Children’s ability to understand language develops faster than their ability to speak it. Receptive language is the ability to understand language, and expressive language is the ability to use language to communicate. If a mother tells her fifteen-month-old child to put the toy back in the toy chest, he may follow her instructions even though he can’t repeat them himself. Language is a cognition that truly makes us human. Whereas other species do communicate with an innate ability to produce a limited number of meaningful vocalizations, or even with partially learned systems, there is no other species known to date that can express infinite ideas (sentences) with a limited set of symbols (speech sounds and words). This ability is remarkable in itself. What makes it even more remarkable is that researchers are finding evidence for mastery of this complex skill in increasingly younger children. Infants as young as 12 months are reported to have sensitivity to the grammar needed to understand causative sentences. http://www.simplypsychology.org/language.html

While humans are biologically designed to produce language, with exception of reasons of defect, there is still a time limit during which infants must be exposed to language or risk developmental delays. These delays are not just in the area of language acquisitions, but are related to other cognitive functions as well, as we saw in the example of Justin, the boy who was raised as a dog by his caregiver. Language acquisition is essential in the development of the ability to problem solve and to process and understand symbolic

The great debate in theories of child language acquisition involves the initial stage of language learning. This is also called the nature versus nurture debate, where some theorists argue that children naturally acquire linguistic skills from simple exposure to language. Others claim that it requires more deliberate teaching and education; it is not a merely natural phenomenon. In addition to the main stages of language acquisition, I hope to offer summaries of the key debates in the scholarly field and also some interesting elaborations on the main points of this essay. The stages of child language acquisition are three, but before we look in depth at the stages of language acquisition, consider the key movements in the field of study.

Language for young children allows them to communicate with others, therefore it is crucial that they develop language to communicate. Communication can be oral, visual, writing, and/or reading. Early education for children emphasizes on language for future development in language arts. There are multiple ways a child can gain language in the early stages of life. There are read-alouds, writing, playing, games activities, and other activities that can facilitate learning. Some ways to determine a child’s language development is to listen, observe, and test a child. A child needs an excellent phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, comprehension, writing skills and other factors that play an essential role to have an effective language to communicate. If a child is struggling with their language, it is crucial that it is identified early so, there can be an action plan placed to help the child. For example, the child may need speech therapy for weakness in their mouth which affects their oral language. There are different options to explore to help enhance a child 's language. This language analysis will analyze a child between the ages of 4-8. In this analysis, there will be many factors discussed to see where the child development is in language arts. First, there is a need to explore the background information on the child and then dive into different aspects of language development, for example, how is the child 's phonemic awareness? Is the child on target or struggling

Language is a means of communication that people use to interact with others in society. Generally, language comprises vocal sounds to which meanings have been assigned by cultural convention and often supplemented by various gestures. (Sharma, 30) For any 'normal' person, language is no longer viewed as a tool to acquire: language is placed as a standard and basic skill, almost being considered given at birth. Such an idea about language is reasonable when taking into account how the development of speech and language is acquired in early childhood. But as a rule, such a 'standard and basic' process of language development is only relevant to 'normal'

The acquisition of language forms a fundamental basis for a child’s development, it is an essential social skill which children need for communicating, building relationships with others, and learning (Brock and Rankin, 2008). As a general rule acquisition of language follows a systematic sequence (Boyd and Bee, 2009), however some children experience atypical language development and are developmentally delayed with certain characteristics of language (Hawa and Spanoudis, 2013). In the case of Marcus, a contributing factor towards his speech delay may have been psychosocial deprivation and a lack of interaction and infant directed speech from his Mother (Hill and Saffran, 2005). It appears there are many theories relating to the discourse about how children acquire and develop language, and there have been many notable contributions and concepts offered across the decades; however no one theory is able to offer irrefutable evidence as to how language is acquired (Otto, 2006). Historically there is some dissension amongst psychologists about the origins of language acquisition, and whether this is due to nature or nurture (Hulit and Howard, 2002); however neuroscience research supports the idea that children possess a biological predisposition to detect and process language signals (Slater, 1998). Piagetian theory offers an outline of child development in terms of language acquisition and cognitive processing (Heo et al., 2011); however Piaget’s theories neglect

The idea that human language is normally acquired during a critical period was first proposed by Lenneberg, with the Critical Period Hypothesis (CPH). Considering data regarding recovery from aphasia, Lenneberg (1967) hypothesized that language learning could only occur during a critical period, starting from age two until twelve. This happens as the lateralization of the brain, which is the specialization of the left hemisphere for language, is by then considered to be complete. Therefore, the critical period is used to explain the reason why the ‘automatic acquisition from mere exposure to a given language seems to disappear after this age [puberty]’ and ‘foreign accents cannot be overcome easily after puberty’ (Lenneberg 1967: 176).

Acquiring language is one of the most important processes in human life. Unlike animals, human beings are able to acquire a native language and they do so in a procedure that takes time. During this procedure, human beings start to learn alphabet, forming words, forming sentences and after all they learn how to communicate with other people. In his book “A Dictionary of Phonetics and Linguistics (2008), David Crystal mentions that this acquisition procedure is not only required for one’s mother tongue, but it is also used when children come to learn a foreign language or a second language. This definition that Crystal gives in his book has a relationship with the theory of “Language Acquisition Device” made by Noam Chomsky.

What is a critical period? It is a period in which a certain skill is believed to be most easily acquired, but is there one for the acquisition of language? The case study, “The Linguistic Development of Genie” (Curtiss, et al 1974) and paper “Maturational Constraints on Language Learning”(Newport, 1990) implicates that the theory of the critical period can apply for acquisition of language. The case study of Genie demonstrates an unfortunate but unique in which the hypothesized critical period for language acquisition was missed. It was hypothesized that Genie would not be able to acquire language at the age of 13 having grown past the critical period for language acquisition. The knowledge of Genie’s linguistic input is not known, it is only known that her father was intolerant of any noise made by her. This case studies Genie and how she progresses in terms of linguistic development. In the case of maturational constraints on language development, American Sign Language (ASL) users were used to study maturational constraints to explain the acquisition of language. The paper argues that the age of first exposure is vital to the development of language. The experiments test American Sign Language users with varying ages of first exposure but with equal amounts of experience, specifically 30 or more years of experience. The tests dealt with basic word order, the agreement between subject, object, and verb, use of verbal

Hakuta, Bialystok and Wiley (2003) assert that a theory of a critical period of language learning should be based on the ideas that there are periods of development when the brain is better suited to learning language, and that, outside of that period, learners will not be able to reach the same level of proficiency as learners within the critical period. While there is substantial evidence to support the first claim, the second assertion seems to be a great source of contention. In an effort to test the general concept of a critical period, Hakuta, et al. (2003) studied census data from 1990, ultimately finding that language learning appeared to decline gradually over a lifetime, as opposed to a rapid decline following a critical period. Such a gradual decrease is not identified as a 'critical period' as much as a 'sensitive' one (Newport, 2002).