Children and language

Learning about language over the past week has been a great experience and very helpful as well. I am currently in an internship where I help with early intervention with 2 years. It is nice to be able to apply the stages of language to the stage they are in developmentally. For instance seeing the conversational babbling and knowing that they are learning up to 9 new words a day is absolutely amazing. I have been trying to watch to see if I could notice just by looking if they show any left symmetry when they speak. This can be at times difficult because they are always moving. But after reading the article titled “Left Hemisphere Cerebral Specialization for Babies while Babbling” I found it much easier to understand what the different movements of their mouth mean. And I know that at this age it is already well established that they are not just moving their mouth for motor skills but because they really are trying to talk. However it is still neat to see when they smile its slightly more to the right and when they babble or even say actual words that it is predominately on the left side of their mouth.

With that being said I was trying to apply this concept to the one we discussed about children being able to rebound easier from a stroke or injury to their left hemisphere. How is it then if at 5 months that they are already showing signs that their brain has already assigned a certain area for language that they are able to still compensate for the injury? For example the little girl that was rescued at the age of 6 and was still able to sort of go on and make sentences. Was this possible because she was able to babble even if she wasn’t getting the social interactions that she needed or is it just a completely unrelated topic? Is It possible that someone who has no social interaction will still develop their left hemisphere for language? Is it innate or learned? Obviously the social and physiological tie into one another because without someone to guide us as children through the stages of development we will probably be stunted in some way. I also recently read somewhere that children who are born premature will not develop at the same rate as another child who is also 18 months old but was carried to full term. They said this was because depending on how premature the baby was they are actually that far behind. I will have to find the place I read this and site it later. I just thought it was an interesting idea.

Another interesting thing that I learned in class was about in class is that when teaching children words to go along with what the word is associated to it is important to tell them the words of what they are looking at instead of calling their attention away to show them what we are looking at. I am working on this with the two year old to see how much they can learn just by doing this with them instead of making them look at something they are not interested in. Then also rewarding them with praise when they get something correct. It is nice to see the children progress and I can’t wait to see how everything goes over the next couple of months. Not only do I get to help these children develop their language skills but also their social skills, which I have found can be important in teaching language. Teaching them how to speak correctly in order to express their frustrations, happiness, and needs so that other children and adults can understand what it is that they are need.