Chapter 8

This chapter is called "Development Across the Life Span" so basically, human development. And after looking at most of the chapter, it mainly focuses on the creation of life, which at this point in our schooling, has been taught multiple times so instead of focusing on that, I'll talk about something else in the chapter that seemed interesting.

The question is: What are the stages of language development?

There are multiple theories on language development but the more modern theory focuses on environmental influences on language such as "child-directed speech." Child-directed speech is defined as the way adults and older children talk to infants and younger children with a higher pitch, sing-song like speech; basically, the way you generally expect an adult to "talk" to a month old baby. Also, when it comes to understanding and producing language, infants have a receptive-productive lag which means they are much better at understanding compared to producing.  

There are 5 stages of language development that every child (regardless of language or geographic location) experiences. The first is called "Cooing" and occurs after 2 months of being born, and is summarized by vowel-like sounds. After 6 months, "Babbling" occurs and this is when consonant sounds are added to the already used vowel sounds. Also, this is around when deaf children start to increase hand signs/gestures and decrease babbling. Then, just before the age of 1 or around 1, children acquire one word speech but generally, children mean more than just the one word that the say. For example "Juice!" could mean "I want juice!" or "I drank my juice!" After about a year and a half,children develop telegraphic speech or very simple sentences such as "Daddy go bye-bye." After this period, children slowly learn more words and proper grammar, and by the age of 6, they become nearly as fluent as an adult, although the vocabulary levels obviously aren't the same.