9 Summary of Session 1

This session raised your awareness of what an extraordinary skill language is, despite being very familiar to us. The course started by considering what aspects of development we are attempting to explain. You learned that children’s language learning skills and the environment change over time; children have the potential to learn any one (or more) of 7,000 languages; and that language learning is fundamentally a social activity.

You considered some of the key challenges children face on their language learning journey and started to consider how they might tackle them. You then started to explore why studying language development is a worthwhile activity and took a bird’s eye view of some key developmental milestones.

As adults, these skills come naturally to us and that can sometimes make us unaware of how special they are. The naturalness of language is the result of a species-specific adaptation to language and years of practice. Infants are not explicitly taught any of these strategies and nor are they consciously aware they are using them most of the time.

There is a lot of sophisticated learning going on beneath the surface of a smiling baby. They are not passively listening but actively trying to make sense of complex patterns of social and perceptual information. They acquire that complexity at a time when they cannot achieve more basic tasks such feeding or looking after themselves, and that is an interesting paradox of development.

In the next session you’ll look at the social foundations of language learning and how the journey towards speaking begins while they are still in the womb.

You can now go to Session 2 [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] .