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Choose some of these resources to look at.

Using evidence from these resources, make  brief notes to help you develop some supported arguments to use in a class debate on important factors for language acquisition and development.

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Vygotsky's view on Language development.

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Theories of language development: Nativist, learning, interactionist | MCAT | Khan Academy

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Research has shown that infants begin to develop communication skills very early in the pre-natal stage.

Many vital skills need to be acquired and practiced before the infant is born:

touch

movement

hearing and listening

memory

the ability to practice 'silent crying'

sucking

These skills directly contribute to the development of speech, language and communication.

Parents can interact and communicate with their unborn child in many ways, and enhance their experiences in the womb.

Communication Support Needs (CSN) and inequalities in pregnancy

A child's speech and language development depends on its development in the womb and the health of the mother, but parental communication support needs can present serious barriers to accessing services.

Reducing health inequalities requires service providers to make their services 'communication accessible' to parents with communication support needs.

Quick links:

What are health inequalities?

The WHO defines health inequalities as "differences in health status or in the distribution of health determinants between different population groups." For a discussion of health inequalities and their relation to pregnancy, please see Inequalities in antenatal care.

Policy context

Activity in this area is consistent with commitments and priorities detailed in The Early Years Framework (external link), Equally Well, Achieving our Potential (external link) a range of NHS Scotland's Quality Indicators and is relevant to Scotland's national practice model for child-centred services: Getting it Right for Every Child (external link).

Under the terms of the Disability Discrimination Act, public sector service providers must discharge their Disability Equality Duty to promote equality of opportunity for people with disabilities, including those with communication support needs or communication disabilities.

What are Communication Support Needs (CSN)?

People with CSN can have difficulty with one or more of the following:

understanding verbal or non-verbal, or written communication

expressing themselves

expressing all they want to get over in a meaningful, appropriate or socially acceptable way

interacting with others in socially accepted ways

Their CSN may be due to many factors such as a physical problem, sensory impairment, learning disability or difficulty, mental illness or low educational attainment. Other factors contributing to CSN may include the individual's personal circumstances and history, such as having been a looked-after child, poor parenting, drug or alcohol misuse or poor health.

How do inequalities relate to CSN in pregnancy?

A 2007 review of literature (external link) concluded that people with CSN are more likely than the general population to:

be unemployed or employed at an inappropriately low level

have difficulties interacting with or understanding information needed to access services

live in socially deprived areas

Approximately 50% of children and young people in some socio-economically disadvantaged populations have speech and language skills that are significantly lower than those of other children of the same age, compared with 7% of all children. ( The Bercow Report) (external link).

Women from these same vulnerable groups are less likely to access antenatal services and other sources of support before and during pregnancy - a high risk factor for maternal and infant mortality ( Growing Up in Scotland 2011) (external link).

Identifying those at risk

Because those at risk can be difficult to identify, it's important to link with other professionals who may know more about the family and their circumstances and communication needs, e.g. Speech and Language Therapists, carers, Health Visitors, GPs, social workers, teachers and other education professionals, and voluntary sector agencies.

A range of risk factors should be considered, including socioeconomic circumstances, literacy and education levels, substance misuse, mental illness and relationship issues. For a fuller discussion of inequalities risk factors, see Inequalities in antenatal care.

A Pathway of Care for Vulnerable Families (0-3) (external link) sets out key contact points and interactions for those working with vulnerable families.

CSN indicators

People with CSN often do not or cannot describe their communication support needs to service providers. They may be unable to comprehend invitations to attend or details of where and when services are available and so may not engage with services at all.

People with CSN may present in the following ways:

1. fail to access, avoid or withdraw from services

2. fail to respond or 'comply' to all or parts of advice

3. appear bored, disinterested or have difficulty maintaining attention

4. irrelevant, nonsensical, vague or rambling responses to questions

5. difficulty describing past or future events, negotiating or planning using verbal language only

6. difficulty with 'why' and 'when' questions

7. challenging behaviour e.g. will only see certain staff, appear inflexible, unpredictable or unreliable

8. express strong emotions - anger, frustration, embarrassment or anxiety - which appear to be inappropriate to circumstance

9. unclear speech

10. attended 'special education provision', been excluded from school or left prematurely

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Speech, language and communication development

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Research has shown that infants begin to develop communication skills very early in the pre-natal stage. Many vital skills need to be acquired and practiced before the infant is born: touch movement hearing and listening memory the ability to practice 'silent crying' sucking These skills directly contribute to the development of speech, language and communication.

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A month before they are born, fetuses carried by American mothers-to-be can distinguish between someone speaking to them in English and Japanese.

Using non-invasive sensing technology from the University of Kansas Medical Center for the first time for this purpose, a group of researchers from KU's Department of Linguistics has shown this in-utero language discrimination. Their study published in the journal NeuroReport has implications for fetal research in other fields, the lead author says.

"Research suggests that human language development may start really early -- a few days after birth," said Utako Minai, associate professor of linguistics and the team leader on the study. "Babies a few days old have been shown to be sensitive to the rhythmic differences between languages. Previous studies have demonstrated this by measuring changes in babies' behavior; for example, by measuring whether babies change the rate of sucking on a pacifier when the speech changes from one language to a different language with different rhythmic properties, Minai said.

"This early discrimination led us to wonder when children's sensitivity to the rhythmic properties of language emerges, including whether it may in fact emerge before birth," Minai said. "Fetuses can hear things, including speech, in the womb. It's muffled, like the adults talking in a 'Peanuts' cartoon, but the rhythm of the language should be preserved and available for the fetus to hear, even though the speech is muffled."

Minai said there was already a study that suggested fetuses could discriminate between different types of language, based on rhythmic patterns, but none using the more accurate device available at the Hoglund Brain Imaging Center at KU Medical Center called a magnetocardiogram (MCG).

"The previous study used ultrasound to see whether fetuses recognized changes in language by measuring changes in fetal heart rate," Minai explained. "The speech sounds that were presented to the fetus in the two different languages were spoken by two different people in that study. They found that the fetuses were sensitive to the change in speech sounds, but it was not clear if the fetuses were sensitive to the differences in language or the differences in speaker, so we wanted to control for that factor by having the speech sounds in the two languages spoken by the same person."

Two dozen women, averaging roughly eight months pregnant, were examined using the MCG.

Kathleen Gustafson, a research associate professor in the Department of Neurology at the medical center's Hoglund Brain Imaging Center, was part of the investigator team.

"We have one of two dedicated fetal biomagnetometers in the United States," Gustafson said. "It fits over the maternal abdomen and detects tiny magnetic fields that surround electrical currents from the maternal and fetal bodies."

That includes, Gustafson said, heartbeats, breathing and other body movements.

"The biomagnetometer is more sensitive than ultrasound to the beat-to-beat changes in heart rate," she said. "Obviously, the heart doesn't hear, so if the baby responds to the language change by altering heart rate, the response would be directed by the brain."

Which is exactly what the recent study found.

"The fetal brain is developing rapidly and forming networks," Gustafson said. "The intrauterine environment is a noisy place. The fetus is exposed to maternal gut sounds, her heartbeats and voice, as well as external sounds. Without exposure to sound, the auditory cortex wouldn't get enough stimulation to develop properly. This study gives evidence that some of that development is linked to language."

Minai had a bilingual speaker make two recordings, one each in English and Japanese, to be played in succession to the fetus. English and Japanese are argued to be rhythmically distinctive. English speech has a dynamic rhythmic structure resembling Morse code signals, while Japanese has a more regular-paced rhythmic structure.

Sure enough, the fetal heart rates changed when they heard the unfamiliar, rhythmically distinct language (Japanese) after having heard a passage of English speech, while their heart rates did not change when they were presented with a second passage of English instead of a passage in Japanese.

"The results came out nicely, with strong statistical support," Minai said. "These results suggest that language development may indeed start in utero. Fetuses are tuning their ears to the language they are going to acquire even before they are born, based on the speech signals available to them in utero. Pre-natal sensitivity to the rhythmic properties of language may provide children with one of the very first building blocks in acquiring language."

"We think it is an extremely exciting finding for basic science research on language. We can also see the potential for this finding to apply to other fields."

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language acquisition; child development; literacy; learning disorders; perception; infant and preschool learning; social psychology; dyslexia

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A month before they are born, fetuses carried by American mothers-to-be can distinguish between someone speaking to them in English and Japanese. Using non-invasive sensing technology for the first time for this purpose, a group of researchers has shown this in-utero language discrimination. Their study has implications for fetal research in other fields.

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Improving early child development with words: Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald at TEDxAtlanta

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Theories of Language Development

Humans, especially children, have an amazing ability to learn language. Within the first year of life, children will have learned many of the necessary concepts to have functional language, although it will still take years for their capabilities to develop fully. Some people learn two or more languages fluently over their lives (often starting from childhood); these people are bilingual or multilingual. Multiple theories have been proposed to explain the development of language, and related brain structures, in children.

Skinner: Operant Conditioning

B. F. Skinner believed that children learn language through operant conditioning; in other words, children receive "rewards" for using language in a functional manner. For example, a child learns to say the word "drink" when she is thirsty; she receives something to drink, which reinforces her use of the word for getting a drink, and thus she will continue to do so. This follows the four-term contingency that Skinner believed was the basis of language development- motivating operations, discriminative , response, and reinforcing stimuli. Skinner also suggested that children learn language through imitation of others, prompting, and shaping.

Chomsky: Language Acquisition Device

Noam Chomsky's work discusses the biological basis for language and claims that children have innate abilities to learn language. Chomsky terms this innate ability the "language acquisition device." He believes children instinctively learn language without any formal instruction. He also believes children have a natural need to use language, and that in the absence of formal language children will develop a system of communication to meet their needs. He has observed that all children make the same type of language errors, regardless of the language they are taught. Chomsky also believes in the existence of a "universal grammar," which posits that there are certain grammatical rules all human languages share. However, his research does not identify areas of the brain or a genetic basis that enables humans' innate ability for language.

Piaget: Assimilation and Accommodation

Jean Piaget's theory of language development suggests that children use both assimilation and accommodation to learn language. Assimilation is the process of changing one's environment to place information into an already-existing schema (or idea). Accommodation is the process of changing one's schema to adapt to the new environment. Piaget believed children need to first develop mentally before language acquisition can occur. According to him, children first create mental structures within the mind (schemas) and from these schemas, language development happens.

Vygotsky: Zone of Proximal Development

Lev Vygotsky's theory of language development focused on social learning and the zone of proximal development (ZPD). The ZPD is a level of development obtained when children engage in social interactions with others; it is the distance between a child's potential to learn and the actual learning that takes place. Vygotsky's theory also demonstrated that Piaget underestimated the importance of social interactions in the development of language.

Piaget's and Vygotsky's theories are often compared with each other, and both have been used successfully in the field of education.

The following timeline gives an overview of the ages at which children generally acquire language:

4-6 months: Babbling using all sounds.

6-9 months: Babbling becomes more focused-narrowing of sounds.

10-12 months: First words develop.

18-24 months: Children begin using two-word phrases (example: "Me up" or "Get milk").

2-3 years: Children begin using three-word phrases in correct order with inflection.

4-5 years: Children start speaking with nearly complete syntax.

5-7 years: Children begin using and understanding more complex language.

9 years and older: Children understand almost all forms of language.

In language acquisition, there is a hypothesis that a "critical period," or a time when it is optimal to learn a language, exists in children. Part of this hypothesis is that if a child is not exposed to a language in the early years of life, he or she will never have full intuitive command of a first language.

One of the canonical case studies that supporters of the critical-period hypothesis turn to is Genie the "feral child," a young girl born in 1957 who, due to horrible abuse and neglect, never learned a language. She never managed to fully acquire verbal language as a result.

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Humans, especially children, have an amazing ability to learn language. Within the first year of life, children will have learned many of the necessary concepts to have functional language, although it will still take years for their capabilities to develop fully.

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talking playing communication help my child doesnt talk how to play what can i do talking to my baby

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speech sppech mil;estones milestones communication milestones what should my baby be doing

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Every child learns at their own pace. Most children will reach speech, language and communication milestones in their own time. However knowing roughly what to expect and when can be helpful. It can often reassure us our child is on track. It can also help parents and carers know if they should seek advice and support.