Session 2: The social foundations of language learning

Introduction

In the previous session you started to think about language development from the infant’s perspective. This raised your awareness of the learning challenges they face and the remarkable ways they overcome them. In this session you will continue to consider what is important in the world of infants, paying special attention to their early social experiences.

Amazingly, these experiences start even before birth when babies listen to language in the womb. Once born, children start to engage in a range of social skills with others that lay the foundation for more sophisticated language to come. In this session you’ll explore some of these skills, such as imitating others, coordinating behaviour with others, and pointing and gesturing.

By the end of this session, you should be able to:

• describe some significant aspects of infants’ social worlds
• understand the role of joint attention, common ground, imitation and norms
• explain why child–caregiver interaction is fundamental
• consider how pointing and gesturing are related to language.