Language Learning

God has given us the special ability to communicate with one another through spoken language.  This makes us different from all other species in the animal kingdom.  Before babies are able to speak in a discernable language, they are able to understand language.  I find this very interesting because they are able to communicate their needs to their mother that they are thirsty or hungry without spoken language.  Instead they use cues such as crying and pointing to something to tell us what they want or need. 

            All babies start to speak at different ages.  There are a variety of factors that will determine when a child will start to speak, for example, their personality, their abilities, their desire.  The question is how do they learn linguistics?  How does a child know that their mother is showing them a table if they are simply pointing at the table and saying “table”?  How does the child understand that the mother is not referring to the action of pointing or the color of the table?  Tomasello says that it is because the children already know the object and the intention of the mother but they are not able to articulate the sound of the word just yet.

            The child has already been paying attention to the conversations of their parents for many months by the time they have spoken their first word.  They have learned the art of language.  They know that one person speaks while the other is listening and then they switch turns that is children emulate their parents.  They try to speak and know more vocabulary.  Babies learn very fast by repetition because they hear the same words but in different position and that’s to help them to build more words.

           

Tomasello says that children who spent time with their mothers between 12 to 18 months they had figured out the words faster because they listened carefully with enough attention  every word that their mother saying. For example, if the baby looks at a table all the time I have to follow what is my baby looking at and make contact with him by saying that is table or this is a black table. This is better than asking him to look at another thing like look at this it is TV. This is because the children can not change their attention very fast and if we ask them to change their attention that will confuse them.  From my experiences , when I speak with my daughter and follow her attention and talk with her about what she wants to know, it has led her to know more vocabulary and developed her understanding more and more.

Also, Tomsello says that “ following in” is the best way to get children  to learn more language.  It becomes weaker when the children get older. It is a good way for the babies up to 18 months, but after that we have to use a new ways to help build more vocabulary in our children memory. In order for children to add more  vocabulary, we need  to begin with the words they have previously learned and from there gradually add to their learning.   

In my opinion, the children have ability to speak but they learn words from the people around them, that is babies can understand what their mothers saying  and doing. When was my daughter 6 months I played with her, moving my hand and singing a song she started to laughed and  to move her hands. When I stopped the song she started to say some thing and I heard her voice as she said please said that again or continue.

 Children are very smart and we can explore that through Tomsello when he says babies understand, but they can not talk. The question I am thinking about relates as to how they understand. I wonder if their eye contact, face and body language is enough to help them understand what others saying. For example, last week I went to my friend who has a baby 5 months old. While I was speaking with her mother and her friend, I look at the baby . As I was smiling, I made contact with the baby.  After a while I noticed that she tried to speak for me and all the time while she looked at me I was wondering if  she understood me and if she wanted me to speak with her .

In conclusion, humans have a super ability to learn more than that other of animals. We can know more about that through our children. Babies are smart, creative and have a good attention spen to learn language from their parents and other people around them.   

For my first blog posting I will discuss the first part of chapter 3 in Tomasello.  In the beginning of chapter 3, Tomasello looks at early infant cognition.  He makes the point that neonates are completely helpless in that they are not able to feed themselves, clean themselves or even dress themselves.  They need an adult to do all of this for them.  As well, they have no comprehension of the language and culture surrounding them.  Although the neonates are not able to do anything for themselves, they are able to understand much of their environment even though it is not apparent to the adults surrounding them. 

            From an early age, infants are able to understand what the objects in their immediate environment are even though they are not able to verbalize this.  At the early age of 4 months, infants do not understand that when an object disappears it still exists.  By 7 or 8 months, the same children understand that when an object disappears, that it still exists and that someone moved that object.  They will look for it until they find it.  For example; when my daughter was about 4 months old, if I moved my phone she would not look for it.  She thought it was gone, but by the time she was about 7 months old, if I moved my phone, she would look for it.  She would crawl around me and look behind furniture and other objects to try to find the phone.  She knew that it could not just disappear and that it had to be somewhere near. 

            When children are closer to one year of age, they are better able to understand and navigate their environment.  They are able to construct a kind of cognitive map of their environment.  For example; when my daughter was about one year of age, we were at my home in Saudi Arabia.  She did not know this area well but she was able to figure out the layout of the house and create somewhat of a map in her brain.  She followed me around the house with ease and even when she was not paying attention to where she was going she was able to navigate her way around the house without bumping into the furniture or the doorways.  She had a cognitive map of the house.

            Tomasello says that although infant children are very close in development to infant chimpanzees, human infants are much more social than infant chimpanzees.  He says that human infants may be ‘ultra-social’.  Neonates are able to distinguish between human faces and inanimate objects.  As well, neonates know their care-givers.  They know their mother’s face and voice.  When my daughter was about one month old and she was crying, my mother (her grandmother) tried to pick her up and make her stop crying.  She continued to cry until I picked her up.  My mother said that this was because she knew my voice and my face and my smell.  She felt comfortable and safe so she stopped crying. 

            Tomasello next talks about “proto-conversation”.  This is face to face conversation between the infant and the adult.  There is emotional conversation between the two which includes turn taking structure.  The infants are learning to share their emotions with the care givers that are face to face with them.  They change their intonation and are having conversation in a different language, baby language. 

            The infant also mimics the adults physical gestures, such as; tongue protrusion, reaching and head movement.  They try to do everything the same as the adult and will continue to try until the adult stops.  An example of this is when my daughter was 18 months mimicked everything I did.  I was swinging my hair and she watched me intently and kept trying until she got the same movement as me.  She was very happy and laughed a lot.

            Finally, infants are able to understand their capabilities and interact with their environment within the limitations of their abilities.  If an action exceeds their abilities, they will decide to stop that activity and move on to something else.  For example, if an infant is trying to reach a toy that is out of reach, he or she will try until he or she decides that it is too difficult and they are too scared to try harder.  On the other hand, the child may go ask for help to achieve their goal of reaching the toy from an adult.  As well, children of this age will also set goals and try to achieve it on their own.  For example, if they child wants to see what is behind a cup, he or she will attempt to move it.  If they can, the goal is achieved, if they can’t the goal is not achieve and they may attempt to achieve their goal in a different way, maybe by knocking over the cup or moving around to the other side of the cup to see what is behind it.  However, we are not able to truly understand if the infant has a sense of social self because infants are unable to verbally communicate this to adults.

            When reading Tomasello’s 3^rd chapter of “The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition”, I could identify with the cognitive abilities of the infant because of my experience with my own child.  All of the stages of cognition and the abilities of the infant to understand its environment took me back to my daughter’s infancy and I can follow her development exactly as Tomasello explained it.  I think that this part of the chapter was written in a way that was quite easy to understand and I can see that there has been a lot of research in this area of cognitive development.