Language Development and childhood (PDF)

Seminar paper from the year 2019 in the subject Psychology - Intelligence and Learning Psychology, grade: A, , course: Business Administration, language: English, abstract: Language since inception has been hailed as the hallmark of humanity, the ability that separates humans from animals. "Language development is a process starting early in human life". Young children acquire language through significant others by interaction in their immediate environment, through responding to sounds, sentences and experiences expressed by their parents, family and other carers.

They begin by absorbing, listening and then imitating and practicing. Their responses are reinforced by these significant others and patterns begin to emerge, even for the babies, as they try so hard to make sense of what is happening around them. Gradually they learn to reproduce sounds and words and establish an understanding of how language works, the structure and grammatical sense of putting these sounds and words together. Infants start without language, yet by 4 months of age, babies can distinguish speech sounds and engage in babbling. Some research has shown that the earliest learning begins in uterus when the foetus starts to recognize the sounds and speech patterns of its mother's voice.

Usually, productive language is considered to begin with a stage of preverbal communications in which infants use gestures and vocalizations to make their intents known to others. According to a general principle of development, new forms then take over old functions, so that children learn words to express the same communicative functions which they had already expressed by preverbal means (Kennison, 2013). Language plays an important role in an individual development; children use speech not only for social communication, but also to help them solve tasks.