All the human beings speak a certain kind of language and more. But have you ever ob serve the process of an infant’s beginning of learning a language from its parents What is the importance of a language to an infant Is language, like food, a basic human need without which a child at a critical period of life can be starved and damaged Judging from the drastic experiment of Frederick Ⅱ in the thirteenth century it may be. Hoping to discover what language a child would speak if he heard no mother tongue, he told the nurses to keep silent.
All the infants died before the first year. But clearly there was more than language deprivation here. What was missing was good mothering, in the first year of life especially; the capacity to survive is seriously affected.
Today no such drastic deprivation exists as that ordered by Frederick. Nevertheless, some children are still backward in speaking. Most often the reason for that is that the mother is in sensitive to the cues and signals of the infant, whose brain is programmed to mop up language rapidly. There are critical times, it seems, when children learn more readily. If these sensitive periods are neglected, the ideal time for acquiring skills passes, and they might never learn so easily again, A bird learns to sing and to fly rapidly at the right time, but finds the process slow and hard once the critical stage has passed.
Linguists suggest that speech milestones are reached in a fixed sequence and at a constant age, but there are cases where speech has started late in a child who eventually turns out to be of high IQ (Intelligence Quotient). At twelve weeks a baby smiles and utters vowel-like sounds; at twelve months he can speak simple words and understand simple commands; at eighteen months he has a vocabulary of three to fifty words. At three he knows about words which he can put into sentences, and at four his language differs from that of his parents in style rather than grammar.
Recent evidence suggests that all infants are born with the capacity to speak. What is special about man’s brain, compared with that of the monkey, is the complex system which enables a child to connect the sight and feel of, say, a teddy bear with the sound pattern "teddy-bear". And even more incredible is the young brain’s ability to pick out an order in language from the hubbub of sound around him, to analyse to combine and recombine the parts of a language in novel ways.
But speech has to be triggered, and this depends on interaction between the mother and the child where the mother recognizes the cues and signals in the child’s babbling, clinging, grasping, crying, smiling, and responds to them. Insensitivity of the mother to these signals dulls the interaction because the child gets discouraged and sends out only the obvious signal. Sensitivity to the child’s non-verbal cues is essential to the growth and development of language.