Language skills
Introduction
Language simply amounts to a large development leap. Case in point, it represents a stunning trip, constituting of words and certain systematic rules that aid to organize the words to pass a message from one person to another. Many people have an assertion that language brings out the uniqueness of humans from all other animal species. It begins with a given child’s use of facial expressions and vocalizations to show feelings and motives to use of words that assist form the personality and emotions. This paper seeks to explore how children acquire, practice and develop language skills.
Apparently, children acquire language skills swiftly, effortlessly, and without any kind of teaching. Case in point, it happens automatically, without their parents necessarily teaching them. However, despite the fact that parents do not directly participate in their children’s ability to speak, they do play a vital role – by talking to them. It implies that infants will not acquire language skills unless if spoken to. The language must be for interaction purposes, otherwise, it will not assist the child to learn to talk (Weisberg, et al., 2013). For this reason, it is vivid that children acquire the skills, particularly through interaction – with both their parents and other children. Thus, those living in a normal household surrounded by a certain conversation end up learning the language used around them. And it is not hard for a child to learn more than one language at the same time, provided they have a regular interaction with the speakers of the languages. Although a distributional analysis is vital in assisting children to break down words and phrases of a given language, they must have the ability to discover rules that generate an infinite set, by use of a finite sample (Weisberg, et al., 2013). In this regard, they evidently possess an additional ability to learn languages, that help them organize language without obvious guidance.
There is no specific point at which a given child begins to talk. Case in point, he or she spends many months playing around with both intonations and sounds of language by the time they utter the first word, to pronounce meaningful words. However, the stages in which children practice language is always the same (Weisberg, et al., 2013). For instance, the sounds of crying are the first sound he or she makes. Then, they proceed to make vowel sounds come six weeks of age – starting with, ah, eh, and ooh. At this stage, the baby is practicing the skills by playing around with the sounds of speech and classifying the important sounds to form words in her language.
The majority of children develop language quickly, from cooing and crying to making use of meaningful words. In connection to this, language development is a crucial accomplishment and a rewarding encounter worth sharing with a child. Being around adults and peers communicating and encouraging children to assist in their learning to speak and understand words (Weisberg, et al., 2013). The development of language skills among young children constitutes three steps. It begins with children hearing the words over and over to become familiar with the particular sounds. Secondly, they try to make a connection of the familiar phrases with their meaning (Weisberg, et al., 2013). For instance, “mama” to refer to the mother. Finally, following the recognition of the sounds and the people the sounds represent, they comfortably begin to try and say the same phrases.
Conclusion
In a nutshell, language skills development is a continuous process, beginning at birth and proceeding for several years. However, it is highly concentrated during the early years of a given child. Precisely, in the first five years, a child’s brain is developing rapidly as it accommodates and tries to make sense of the several sounds and sights. As elaborated above, it is clear that the sounds comprise of listening to the parent’s and caregiver’s speech and language pattern.
References
Weisberg, D. S., Zosh, J. M., Hirsh-Pasek, K., & Golinkoff, R. M. (2013). Talking It Up: Play, Language Development, and the Role of Adult Support. American Journal of Play, 6(1), 39-54.