Learning how to communicate in infancy
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Danielle Matthews
Abstract
Just like other baby apes, human infants make it their business to stay in safe contact with their caregivers. The difference is that humans do this not just by holding on for dear life, but by ensuring their caregivers are in psychological contact with them. To this end, many of the most important communicative developments take place within the first two years of life. In this chapter we will review how physical mutual responsiveness gives way to the back-and-forth of proto-conversation, where caregivers respond to hiccups, coos and sneezes as if they were speech. Infants discover that they can make sounds and gestures in order to engage others and take turns. They become able to make demands of people, bring things to their attention and ask questions of them. Once they have mastered doing so non-verbally, they soon learn that they can use words for the same purposes (even though they don’t understand words as intersubjectively agreed symbols until sometime later). These communicative developments far outstrip those of any other animal on the planet. And yet it seems that it is precisely the relatively slow development of human infants that affords our species unique mode of communication. Newborns, equipped with a desire to be with others and some basic attentional preferences, are set up to learn from their social environment and thereby guarantee their entry into human culture.
Abstract
Just like other baby apes, human infants make it their business to stay in safe contact with their caregivers. The difference is that humans do this not just by holding on for dear life, but by ensuring their caregivers are in psychological contact with them. To this end, many of the most important communicative developments take place within the first two years of life. In this chapter we will review how physical mutual responsiveness gives way to the back-and-forth of proto-conversation, where caregivers respond to hiccups, coos and sneezes as if they were speech. Infants discover that they can make sounds and gestures in order to engage others and take turns. They become able to make demands of people, bring things to their attention and ask questions of them. Once they have mastered doing so non-verbally, they soon learn that they can use words for the same purposes (even though they don’t understand words as intersubjectively agreed symbols until sometime later). These communicative developments far outstrip those of any other animal on the planet. And yet it seems that it is precisely the relatively slow development of human infants that affords our species unique mode of communication. Newborns, equipped with a desire to be with others and some basic attentional preferences, are set up to learn from their social environment and thereby guarantee their entry into human culture.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Foreword vii
- Introduction 1
-
Part 1. Levels of acquisition
- Learning how to communicate in infancy 11
- Heads, shoulders, knees and toes 39
- Insights from studying statistical learning 65
- From grammatical categories to processes of categorization 91
- The retreat from transitive-causative overgeneralization errors 113
- Where form meets meaning in the acquisition of grammatical constructions 131
- Social cognitive and later language acquisition 155
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Part 2. Levels of variation
- The emergence of gesture during prelinguistic interaction 173
- Individual differences in first language acquisition and their theoretical implications 189
- Understanding the cross-linguistic pattern of verb-marking error in typically developing children and children with Developmental Language Disorder 221
- Sampling linguistic diversity to understand language development 247
- Lessons from studying language development in bilingual children 263
- Language disorders and autism 287
- Index 323
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Foreword vii
- Introduction 1
-
Part 1. Levels of acquisition
- Learning how to communicate in infancy 11
- Heads, shoulders, knees and toes 39
- Insights from studying statistical learning 65
- From grammatical categories to processes of categorization 91
- The retreat from transitive-causative overgeneralization errors 113
- Where form meets meaning in the acquisition of grammatical constructions 131
- Social cognitive and later language acquisition 155
-
Part 2. Levels of variation
- The emergence of gesture during prelinguistic interaction 173
- Individual differences in first language acquisition and their theoretical implications 189
- Understanding the cross-linguistic pattern of verb-marking error in typically developing children and children with Developmental Language Disorder 221
- Sampling linguistic diversity to understand language development 247
- Lessons from studying language development in bilingual children 263
- Language disorders and autism 287
- Index 323
