Language Acquisition

Have you ever found yourself having to deal with someone who is incapable of properly communicating their needs, wants, dislikes, emotions and what they are feeling or, even their current state of mind? These can be some of the most underwhelming and frustrating encounters life can throw at us.

Effective communication is a truly underrated ability by those who haven’t mastered it. It can be a difference between a yes and a no, and when the question is ‘will you invest your millions into my idea?’, it kind of makes you want to make sure you have this skill down.

Language and communication skills are a very important and essential part of our everyday lives. People are required to develop their ability to communicate in order to express themselves, their wishes, their needs, desires, distresses and so on. Communication is broken into two main categories, verbal communication and non-verbal communication, and this process begins very early in the infant’s development year. While the child is still in its mother’s womb, a mother can read to her child daily and the child will learn to identify her voice. And so when the child is born, there is an emotional connection to this voice, something it can identify with in the new environment. This allows for concentrated engagement, leading to a relationship in which the child acquires communicative and language skills from its mother.

Where I come from, when someone is able to effectively communicate, and the people around can follow and understand what the other person is talking about, we say ‘nashika hiyo signal’, which means I am with you, or I am receiving what you are communicating, and I see what you are talking about clearly. In the right environment, anyone and everyone can acquire language skills and non-verbal communication skills no matter what part of the world they are from. Language acquisition is a universal stage of development, which begs the question of whether the process of language acquisition is the same globally, and what are some of the positive influences?

Physically we are all born with the necessary hardware for the development and acquisition of language, however, a large part of this developmental stage is influenced by the environments we are raised in. Case in point are the two boys who were found in France (the wild boy of Aveyron) and Los Angeles (Named Genie by researcher) who had never learned how to communicate effectively. Both boys were born with the necessary biological means for communication, but never grew up in the environments necessary for language acquisition.

In an article by Kathy Hirsh-Pasek et al. she looks for contributions of successful early communication quality in low-income families and higher-income families. Generally speaking, low-income families have been repeatedly associated with low levels of communication development, i.e. there is lower quality and quantity of communication in these homes. However, this is not to say that every low-income home will result in poorer communication and language acquisition. Some of the reasons poor communicative quality is true for low-income homes, is because of lower levels of education for the parents, stressful life events and values

(i.e. a mother in a low-income family would rather spend time trying to make extra cash for the family on the weekends than spend the day reading with her child or communicating with them).

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According to the 30-million-word gap, children in more affluent homes are exposed to more language of a higher quality compared to their peers in low income-families. However, as stated earlier, not every child born into low-income families will develop poorer language skills, neither will every child born into an affluent family acquire proper communication skills.

In the article by Hirsh-Pasek et al. they discuss how symbol-infused joint engagement, routines and ritual, and, fluent and connected communication, all influence language acquisition. An example of symbol-infused joint engagement would be when a mother to her child, eats a spoonful of food and makes a pleasant noise while rubbing her belly to communicate to the child that the food is good, routines and rituals involve activities such as reading to your child daily, and fluent communication would involve the quality and precision of communication. To see how these three dynamics worked together they observed parents communicate with their children from behind a one-way glass as they interacted with their children using the three-box task. This is a play activity where mothers and their children play with items in three boxes. Container one had a storybook, two had a stove and cooking accessories and three had a simple dollhouse with a few moving parts.

This study asked the question of which between higher quality of communication, quantity of communication and sensitive parenting, influence language acquisition more. They looked at mothers from different social-economic backgrounds and educational levels.

What they found was that the quality of communication and the sensitive parenting were major factors in determining the quality of language acquisition compared to the quantity of communication (amount of communication) regardless of social-economic status.

You know the moment when you and another person are having an argument, and so you end up trying to talk before the other person is done talking and end up talking over one another. And now, neither of you can agree on anything because there is no cooperation. In a separate article by Marc Bornstein et al. there is a discussion about the process of turn-taking in the development of language and whether certain processes of language acquisition are universal or whether they are specific to certain regions and communities. What they found was that turn-taking was an essential part of communication and was found universally, a skill passed down from parent to child, however, every region and community had variations in their processes. Think of turn-taking this way, without it, we wouldn’t be able to have conversations.

In conclusion, we see that language and non-verbal communication are a universal phenomenon, however the right environment and practices are still necessary for its development, particularly the quality of communication between parent and child and sensitive parenting, which is the caregiver’s provision of warm, responsive, and stimulating engagement with their child.

By –Simon D.M. Karanja