Chapter 8 - Language, Thinking, & Reasoning

This chapter does a pretty good job of rounding the bases, but what i thought was neat was how children learn language.

Confirmed by the book, babies begin to recognize their mother’s voice as early as 5 months after conception. Get ready for this because it’s adorable: Babbling, the nonsense vocalization that babies produce, aka mock conversation, is them fine-tuning their vocal tracts as well as ears to the sound of their voice. They’re mimicking the conversational tone that they hear from their parents. Comprehension of words comes much sooner than production. By 6 months they can probably recognize their own names around 10-12 months are able to produce commonly used words, a.e. mommy. They can speak about 100 of these simple words by 18 months and recognize hundreds. Come Kindergarten, they grasp language and weave thousands of vocabulary words into sentences. However, in between 6 years and 6 months, a lot of practice has been implemented. Children start speakin the one word stage, which is when children try to portray one entire thought with one word. Pretty self-explanatory. As they accumulate a wider range of vocabulary, they combine words and one word becomes two-word stage. Noun-verb most of the time.

Deaf children activate their conversational skills once they begin to use their hands more frequently. In a way, sign language is very similar to spoken language because it uses words, syntax, and extralinguistic cues like facial expression and posture.  Babies who sign also will babble with their hands. However, with different spoken languages that surround an infant, the child will pick up on the one that is spoken most regularly, usually by the mother, and everything else is a secondary language. We’ve all heard it, children learn 2nd languages better than adults, and it’s true because the critical period for language development is during these years, where the brain is still learning and growing, gained knowledge embeds much more willingly. The opposite also applies. With immigrant children who know one language and then move to America and use English in everyday life, lose their advanced speaking ability of their native tongue that they had arrived with despite their family’s usage.

Given this, I guess you could say language is more nurture than nature…but then…where did it all begin ? The chicken or the egg? Deep…this is deep stuff.