Human Language

Development in Infancy

Overview
Recall information from past lectures
Newborns and speech perception
Infants and sound production
Environmental stimulation from
parents and significant others
Newborns and language form
content and use

First Step
Nature or nurture? How do infants develop
language?
What role does the brain play in language
development? According to Dr. Elmans lecture, is
there a single language area in the brain?
What role does the environment play in language
development with regards to human interactions?
Is there a level of predictability with regards to an
infants language development?
If there is predictability in language skill
acquisitions, can individual children vary in their
acquisition process and still be considered
typically developing?

Review contents of Pence and Justice pages 158 and 159

to develop an awareness and understanding of how the
infants develop perceptual awareness of the following:
sounds used in his/her environment, language content or
word meanings, and language use or pragmatics. Note
what the infant is doing at various ages during the first
year of life. Per the introductory video you noted that
newborn Adam had very limited communication abilities. As
he aged, you watched him attend to his environment and
then begin to interact with significant others in the
environment. You also noted that he produced vegetative
sounds as an infant. As he aged he produced a larger
number of speech sounds to interact with those in his
environment.

Newborn Speech Perception

From birth, infants attend to their environments and the
sounds in their environment. They hear and process
information.
Infants attend to the prosodic regularities of human speech
and thus they are aware of stress and intonation patterns
for the language they are exposed to in their home
environment. In early infancy the child has the ability to
attend to phonetic details across all languages including
their native language. As children age, they develop an
appreciation for their phonetic details of their native
language and thus they lose their universal listener status
prior to 10 months of age.

Watch the hyperlinked video to learn more about infant

speech perception.

Newborn Speech Perception

According to Pence and Justice, Childrens
perception of speech is categorical, page 150.
Recall Piagets theories related to how children
categorize their world using assimilation and
accommodation, thus children categorize
environmental sounds into categories. This
categorization process allows the child to note
variations between human speech sounds and
thus apply knowledge to the sounds. Consider the
words bat and pat. A childs awareness of the
initial speech sounds allows him to differentiate
between the words based on what he hears.

Newborn Speech Perception

As you can see, infants break down
streams of auditory information and apply
meaning to what they hear and they do so
from birth.
Infants do so by attending to prosodic
and phonemic regularities per Pence and
Justice page 156. The attend to rhythms
and sound patterns to process auditory
information.

Infancy and Categorical

Development
Recall that children organize their
worlds using categories. There are
multiple levels to their categorization
process as they categorize broadly
and as they age, they develop the
ability to categorize based on specific
features. Recall the terms schema,
assimilation, and accommodation and
how cognitive organization helps the
child organize his world.

Infants also produce sounds. Initially, the infants

sounds are reflexive in nature. As the child ages,
the childs sounds become purposeful.
1. Reflexive sounds (0-8weeks)- burps,yawns, etc.
2. Controlled sounds (6-16 weeks) cooing and
gooing.
3. Expansion (4-6 months)greater control
4. Control of speech sounds (5-8) marginal
babbling
5. True babbling (6-10 months)
6. Advanced forms (10-18 months) combine
sounds meaningfully and demonstrate
awareness of melodic patterns of native speech
when using jargon.
For audio examples of babbling and advanced forms
please visit http://www.vocaldevelopment.com/

Nurture and the communication environment?

What role do caregivers play in the childs
language development?

Early language foundations are

based on input from significant
others and thus nurturing.
Watch the following hyperlinked
videos and observe what the parents
are doing to promote
communication.
Motherease
Infant-directed speech

Communication EnvironmentInfant-Adult Interactions

The previous videos you observed parents
interacting with their infants using infant-directed
speech (IDS) or motherease. For IDS parents use
exaggerated pitch contours, short and simple
utterances, repeated utterances, more questions
than comments, and they refer to objects in the
immediate environment to facilitate joint focus of
attention.
When mothers encourage their infants to attend,
the language development of those infants is
enhanced (Mullins and Lefver, 2002). Note the
environmental contribution to language
development with the parent providing a rich and
stimulating learning environment.

Recall Vygotskys Theory

Vygotskys work reveals that a childs
development is a process through
which the child interacts with the
environment to facilitate learning.
Thus interactions promote learning.

Caregiver Responsiveness
Caregivers provide the conduit through
which a child learns about language and
communication. Review the specifics
related to caregiver responsiveness in your
Pence and Justice text on pages 175 and
176 and then review the hyperlinked
video. What do you observe the caregiver
doing that demonstrates responsiveness to
the infant?

Now that we have outlined the parents role in the language

development process, consider the childs role per the work
of Adams and Chance (1998).

Phase 1 0-6 months of age. Children attend to

people in their environment.
Phase 2 6-12 months of age. Children
attempt to communicate and engage in joint
attention activities.
Phase 3 12 months of age and older. Children
use language to communicate.
As you can see, language acquisition is a
process with the child showing a keen interest
in and interacting with other humans in his
environment.

Language Content, and Use Revisited.

Content Infants develop an understanding of words
during infancy. They produce their first true words
around 12 months of age with their first words
being 1-2 syllables ba or baba for bottle. The
words are directly related to their environmental
experiences.
Form Infants comprehend multiword utterances
such as, bye bye dog or want drink even though
they dont combine words until they are older.
Use Infants communicate intentionally to control
their environment even though they are not using
words. They use nonverbal means to communicate
through eye gaze, pointing, etc.

Conclusion
Language development is a process and
subject to variations.
Recall Piaget and the concept of ages and
stages. There is some variability within the
stages as the stages are reported within
an age range rather than a specific age.
Some children will produce their first
words prior to 12 months and some after,
thus there is variability across children.
The same holds true for other areas
related to language development.