THE BEGINNINGS OF LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION

The word ‘infant’ means literally ‘without speech’. Babies cannot join us in verbal conversation, cannot answer our queries, and cannot articulate all of their needs and interests. Yet they can certainly communicate. Communication between the infant and others does not await the emergence of language but proceeds throughout the first year. Very young infants tell us about their feelings and needs by crying and smiling. They show responsiveness to voices, orienting their attention to speakers, and even their larger body movements indicate sensitivity to the rhythm of speech. Caregivers are usually very responsive to the infant’s sounds, treating vocalizations – even the humble burp – as though they were contributions to a conversation (Kaye, 1982). Initially, caregivers have to do much of the work to sustain the to-and-fro of the interchange, but gradually the infant comes to take an increasingly active role (Rutter & Durkin, 1987; Schaffer, 1996). Infants’ ability to discriminate among speech sounds appears t o be quite general at first. In their first few months, they can discriminate among sounds that are critical in the language of their own community but, interestingly, they can also distinguish sounds in foreign languages that are not used in their own (Hernandez, Aldridge & Bower, 2000; Werker & Tees, 1999). But this capacity does not last, which is why you (depending on your linguistic background) may now experience difficulties with some of the sounds of, say, Cantonese or Estonian. Sometime during the second half of your first year of life, you probably began to lose your sensitivity to phonetic contrasts in languages other than the one(s) you were learning. Polka and Werker (1994) found that while four-month-old American infants could discriminate vowel contrasts in German, six-month-old Americans could not. In due course, the child becomes able to understand some of the things that are addressed to him. Labels for key objects or events (e.g. ‘biscuit’, ‘bedtime’) are repeated frequently in meaningful co ntexts, and many parents try to coax words out of the infant (e.g. ‘Da-da. Say “da-da”’). Around the end of the first year, normally developing children typically have a few words available (Barrett, 1995; Barrett, Harris & Chasin, 1991). At this stage, these words may not always conform perfectly to the structure of the adult language (e.g. ‘da’ for ‘daddy’, ‘mi’ for ‘give me’), but they are typically used appropriately, and people familiar with the child usually know what is meant. At this stage, the child’s utterances typically consist of just single words, but, by changes in intonation, and coupled with gesture, these can be used to express a variety of meaningful relations, including possession, location, negation and interrogation. For example, ‘da’, in different situations, could mean ‘It’s daddy’s’, ‘Daddy has it’, ‘Not daddy’, or ‘Did daddy do it?’ Exactly how the child begins to master language presents many mysteries, but two things are clear: the process begins well before overt speech appears, an d it occurs in a social context.