Talker Variation Aids Young Infants: Article Analysis

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 around 4-6 months old a baby will have developed an awareness of sound in particularly a person speaking and will turn towards the sound when someone familiar speaks for example their parents. They will start to mimic sounds and start to babble and laugh. Intellectual development is rapid and although they may not be able to speak in more than just babble, their understanding will be greater and they will become much more inquisitive. They will be able to understand simple instructions such as “point to your nose.” By a year old, they’ll be able to say simple words like “Mama” and “Dada” or words with similar sounds. They may start to develop their own language with odd sounding words for common objects that take their interest. Sometimes these words will sound similar to the name of the object particularly if their parents spend time speaking to their child and repeating the names of these objects.

The first two years of a child’s life is filled with adventure and learning. Throughout this time period they will learn to sit up, crawl, walk, talk, amongst many more things. Their psychological development and interactions with their social environment change along with their forms of communication as they mature and learn; all of which can be seen and explained in Erikson’s stages of development and child-directed speech.

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

After the first couple of months, infants become more interactive with their surroundings. They are very curious and have the desire to get in touch with the world. In order to engage in such activity, they begin by utilizing their sense of touch by placing numerous objects in their mouth. In the upcoming months, infants start to use different senses such as hearing and sight to get in touch with their surroundings. Before they are even able to speak, their caregivers speak to them in differentiated speech and vocalizations as opposed to adults. The intonation and rhythm in the adult’s voice is usually different around young children, causing them to be able to get their attention. Over the years, speech language pathologists have conducted a large number of studies where it demonstrates children’s’ fascination with speech generated by humans. Levi, as summarized by the ASHA leader, conducted a study where the children successfully recited words after distinguishing the familiar and unfamiliar voices of the speakers.

The first myth of the monolingual brain means that infant’s brains are monolingual and treat two different languages as the same language. This, however, is untrue; infants can learn two languages at the same time and will not get confused between the two. Evidence for the myth of the monolingual brain comes from developmental milestones, differentiated use of two languages, and grammatical constraints on bilingual code mixing. In regards to developmental milestones, bilingualism versus monolingualism has no known consequences for phonological

When talking about the language development of children it consists of four domains, which are the phonological development grammatical development, lexical development and pragmatic development. Phonological development focuses on the development of speech sounds which deals with the pronunciation of the words. At my field site, which is located at Brooklyn College, I noticed two students’ phonological development. I was observing the ones class. One of the students, Nathanial was given the object ball and the teacher kept repeating herself and said, “Ball, this is a ball. Ball.” N tries to repeat after her and trying to tell he me, he lends against me and said, “ba”. Nathanial could only pronounce the beginning of the word. Then

With over two hundred sounds used throughout the world, English utilizes over forty different sounds. We use these speech sounds to create a form of understand and communication. Vowels and consonants are the classifications of speech sounds while also being able to change the manner and place of articulation to produce different speech sounds. Here is where phonemes which are the smallest sound unit come into understanding and will be incorporated in detail when making connections. Based on the information we have discussed on phonology, it was detailed that preschool children aged three to four are sensitive to some phonological

It is known that babies who are neglected, and who do not get much adult contact, tend to find it much harder later on to learn communication and social skills. It is thought, therefore, that the stimulation of adults and older children communicating with them (even when the baby cannot understand what is being said) is just as important as everything else being done with them. Language is part of everyday sounds that babies listen to hence songs are lovely elements of language that they are thought to enjoy. At around 1 years old, a baby will attempt to speak. However, their pronunciation is often unclear and word are usually spoken singly, rather than in sentences. As language use increases, so does vocabulary. Concepts such as plurals and negatives come in the next 12 months, and sentences become better

A sample of deaf infants and normal hearing infants were studies under laboratory conditions. Infants have good syllable production by 10 months. There are three stages involved in vocal production. These are the phonation stage, gooing stage and expansion stage. In the study, there were 21 normal hearing infants and seven hearing impaired infants. They were studies under three stages; three and six months, eleven and fourteen months. Each of the infants showed different result. The precanonical and canonical vocal types were counted. The ratio of the results were obtaining the canonical syllable in a sample and diving the number of utterances. It was found that the 21 hearing infants started babbling between 6 to 10 months. The impaired infants showed no signs of babbling until 10 months. This ultimately shows that babbling is the under root for all speech

There are several theories regarding language development. Work by Chomsky, Piaget and Kuhl are critical. Studies by Chomsky, as examined by Albery, Chandler, Field, Jones, Messer, Moore and Sterling (2009); Deloache, Eisenberg & Siegler (2003) argued for the innateness of language acquisition due to its complexity. Development is assisted by a language acquisition device (LAD) and universal grammar both of which holding the propensity for commonalities throughout all languages. LAD is the key to the Syntax rule. The knowledge to master the rules is held unconsciously. Chomsky concludes exposure through auditory channels as being the only requirement for learning. Arguably Kuhl (2010) writes infantile exposure to language through auditory channels only, does not contribute effectively to learning indicating the importance of human interaction. Piaget, as discussed by Ault (1977) postulated language as not being part of the earliest stages of development. Signifying within sensorimotor stage, between birth and two years, the child’s development is too reflexive. Gleitman, Fridlund and Reisberg (2004) discuss the critical period hypothesis and suggest the young brain being more suited to acquisition than the adult brain. Lenneberg (1967) (as cited in Gleitman et al 2004) advocates, brain maturation closes language acquisition capacity window. Kuhl (2010) identified, within the critical period babies develop

The question this experiment raised was regarding vocal development in humans and the influence the actions of social partners makes on it. The objective was to determine the relationship between these socializations and vocal development by looking at infants and their caregivers. The more specific questions raised included the “social contingency” and whether it provides opportunities for vocal learning in infants, and whether infants can learn through their caregivers’ responses to the vocalizations they make. Studying infants at approximately eight months old allowed their vocal behavior to be in a transitory state where the sensitive system of acoustic variability could be examined. Having the experiment take place in the large playroom allowed the infants to move around, not feel confined, and not feel forced into interaction with their mothers, allowing it to be more comfortable and natural for the infant. First, infants were assigned to either the contingent condition or the yoked-control condition. Half of the mothers were in the contingent condition group, where they were told to react immediately after the infants made a vocalization. The other half of the mothers were in the yoked-control condition group, and were told to respond by

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.

However, Pinker (1994) then goes onto note that the particular sub-stage of reduplicated babbling occurs around 7-8 months, and states that the children will exercise phonemes and syllable patterns that are not specific to a singular language, but rather are seen as common across a variety of languages. Yet, Pinker (1994) does also argue that the children are able to distinguish between phonemes of their own mother tongue, which has been seen from birth, and this is seen to be more prominent by the time the child reaches the age of around 10 months. Pinker (1994) refers to this as the children no longer being ‘universal phoneticians’, and states that the children will no longer distinguish foreign phonemes.

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).