Literacy news
Brain development: making speech and understanding language
21 Sep 2010
Annette Karmiloff-Smith, professorial research fellow, Department of Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck University of London, has written a fascinating article for Nursery World about how infants learn to make speech and understand language.
Questions about the origins and special nature of human speech have been asked by scientists, philosophers and educators for centuries. Research into those areas continues to this day and recent advancements in science and technology are informing the answers to those questions in new and interesting ways.
Before going any further it is important to make the distinction between speech and language. Speech is the patterns of sound of language: intonation, stress and how the sounds are produced. Language includes many different components: semantics, which are the meanings of words; morphosyntax, which is grammar; pragmatics, which is how a speaker takes another person’s state of knowledge into account; discourse, a string of sentences. All of these are “aspects of language that a young child has to acquire progressively over developmental time”.
Babies, actually foetuses, are processing aspects of speech in their final trimester in the womb. During this time the foetus is sensitive to the intonation patterns of the speech they can hear, their mother tongue, and will recognise these patterns at birth. In the first few months of life infants are focused on speech and phonetic differences within their mother tongue. “Research has shown that in the early months of life, babies will prefer to look at a face where the sound and mouth shape match (“ee” with an extended lip shape) than a face which has been contrived to display the rounded shape of “oo” while emitting the sound “ee”.”
Not only are infants sensitive to speech and phonetic differences, they are sensitive to differences among language families, like where the emphasis is placed in a word. For example, English, German and Dutch are “stress-based” languages, which means, usually, only one syllable is stressed within a word. French, Spanish and Italian are syllable-based languages that place equal stress across all syllables within a word. Infants can differentiate English from Italian at a few weeks of age but will have a harder time hearing the difference between English and German.
“Although in the very early months of life babies do not actually produce any language, this does not mean that they are not already communicating,” Karmiloff-Smith writes. A study in Leipzig, Wurzburg and Paris showed that infants' crying patterns followed the same intonation patterns as their mother tongue; French babies cried with a rising pitch and German babies cried with a falling pitch. This demonstrates that intonation patterns learned in the womb shape the crying patterns of newborns, likely contributing to postnatal bonding.
An infant’s sensitivity to communication starts early and they pay enormous amounts of attention to faces, mouths, eye-gaze direction and pointing. Karmiloff-Smith points out that babies “even take conversational turns. For example, when the mother talks and then pauses, the baby will fill in his part of the ‘conversation’ with excited leg kicking or raspberry blowing, then pause, while mother takes another turn.” Before long babies will be making speech-like sounds that are not be limited to any specific language. From these sounds babies gradually, over the first six to nine months, restrict their repertoire of sounds to those of their mother tongue.
It is amazing how quickly babies move from speech to language; from simple words with relatively global meanings to a rapidly increasing vocabulary to saying mini-sentences at the end of the first year. But it is important to remember that “there are wide individual differences in the ages at which children produce their first words, their first two-word utterances, and full language mastery.”
At the end of her article Karmiloff-Smith writes about some of the recent research findings around the developing brain’s acquisition of language. She highlights research that has shown that we are not born with brain structures already in place to process language but that language processing changes throughout the development of the brain. This is contrary to the general belief that language is situated in the left hemisphere of the brain. From birth, several places in both hemispheres of an infant’s brain compete to process language. Moving into adulthood does not changes this as both hemispheres continue to be engaged when processing language in adults.
For more information see Birkbeck’s Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, visit www.cbcd.bbk.ac.uk/babylab.
For the full article visit http://www.nurseryworld.co.uk/news/login/1028258/Unique-Child-Developing-Brain-part-5---Speech-patterns/
(Nursery World, September 2010)
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