Nature And Nurture : Language Development

How Babies Talk is a book written by Roberta Michnick Golinkoff and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek. The book discusses how babies acquire language throughout various stages (The first three years of life) of their infant life. The chapter I chose to elaborate on was chapter 7, which outlines language and grammar between the ages of twenty-four to thirty-six months.

Children’s language development usually begins in their first three months. They will begin by learning to use their voice and enjoying vocal play. Babies will watch faces and mouths to try and copy movements and sounds.

“Oral language is a skill that is acquired naturally by the young. The importance of its development in early childhood cannot be overemphasised. It underpins the whole scope of learning and is employed to question, to seek information and to proffer ideas. A child who has a well – grounded ability in oral language will usually be nicely poised to cope with reading and writing. Anyone who lacks this will be at a disadvantage.” (J.Fellowes & G.Oakley, 2010, pp4) It is a vital component of every human beings life as it is a means of communication and interaction with their family, friends and

All language theorists acknowledge nature and nurture both play significant roles in children’s language development. However, the theoretical debate to whether nature or nurture is the dominant tool during a child’s language

At the age of 6-11 months babies begin to babble such things such as mama. Babies at this age often try to communicate by actions or gestures and tries to repeat simple sounds that are used a lot around them.

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

Babies learn to talk by hearing language and having language directed at them in "conversation." Between 6-12 months, babies begin to fine-tune

If a deaf parent, try to teach their non-deaf child language by just putting them in front of the TV the child won’t learn language. What the child will learn is how to use American Sign Language in other for them to talk to their parents. Children are to learn language by input from someone in the house. The cooing stage is the earliest use of speech-like sounds. When babies are in this stage they can produce, vowel sounds like [i] and [u] and the consonants [k] and [g]. The babbling stage is between six and eight months when the child start to produce different vowels and consonants sounds and start saying “ma-ma” and “da-da”. Between twelve and eighteen months, children start using everyday words. For an example, when my little brother was

I agree with you that it is a mixture of the two. Language learning begins in the womb, according to parenting.com. At four and a half months old, recognize the patterns of their name and can differentiate from others. At six months old, babies know the words mommy and daddy and can relate them to their parents. And eighteen months old, they have learned the basics. Reading to infants early prepares them for the literary language used in school. There is a method in which the parent stops talking and gives the infant a chance to respond. It is called "joint attention". Babies start babbling at four to six months. At a year old, infants say their first word, understanding other words early than that. A silent baby is not good. Babies can be

There is different forms of talking to babies one could be “baby talking” which involves sounds like “goo goo” or “gaa gaa” or the second form which is called “parentese” which is when one uses exaggerated vowels and a high pitch voice while real saying real words. Even when the baby is still in the womb they are able to hear one's voice and capture everything going one. Research has also shown that the more words the baby hears the faster their vocabulary will expand. Babies show that they enjoy hearing one’s voice move high to low as they move their head towards the individual. They become very interested and begin to look at one’s face to be able to focus on one’s lips.

In the other hand, behaviorists view language as complex and leaned skill, much like playing piano and dancing. B.F. Skinner argued that language represents nothing more than chains of responses acquired through reinforcement. Putting differently, children learn though process of reinforcement. For example, baby babbles “mama” the mother happily reward the baby with a hug and kisses and eventually will push the baby to say “mama” more and more; due to these reward children are motivated to repeat the behavior, thereby shaping their language and ensuring their development. Children’s language is being built up, this describe a way in which children environmental experiences influence and improve their language skills. Also that’s why parents

There are many different variations of language, language that is seen, such as sign language, body language and written language, then there is the language that is heard, such as people speaking. There are over 7,000 spoken languages in the world alone without taking into consideration nonverbal languages. For adults and children alike, this can be overwhelming because in each language there are different behaviour patterns, different registers, different age groups and what is acceptable in one language may not be considered acceptable in another such as how close is too close to stand to someone else. For children who come from families whose first language is not English, this is even more difficult when trying to live somewhere that doesn’t predominately speak their first language, which is just one of the many differences people have to be aware of when considering diversity. This essay will examine the different environmental and circumstantial factors that may influence the development of children and the role that language can play in their lives as they grow, such as what and who children are exposed to, positive and negative influences such as adults and other children and the lifelong impact these surroundings have on the child.

Language development is much more complex than one would think. Not only are there strategies and factors behind developing one’s native language, but there are also theories set in place to guide the steps of building language.

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).

According to Zukowski (2013), language development refers to the process of learning in early life where infants acquire various forms, meaning and word usage. In addition, language refers to the different utterances in regards to linguistic input. Language development in childhood focuses on major arguments in