Читать книгу Developmental Psychopathology - Группа авторов - Страница 67

Humans appear to be born with a brain for language, as newborns are able to distinguish between phonemes from all the world’s languages at birth (although this ability becomes extinct by the end of the first year of life), and there are special structures in the brain that, when damaged, severely affect language production (Broca’s area) and language comprehension (Wernike’s area). Despite our biological and genetic predisposition to learn language, there are also environmental influences of language learning. The environmental key to language is best illustrated when examining language development in children raised in language‐impoverished environments (e.g., extreme neglect).

Generally, language acquisition proceeds through four universal stages. In the phonological stage infants learn how to segment strings of speech into meaningful units. During semantic development, infants and children learn the meanings of words and word combinations; children’s first words usually develop by 12 months and at 18 months many infants undergo a vocabulary spurt in which they rapidly learn the meaning of many new words. In the third stage, known as the stage of grammar development, young children learn the rules of a particular language for sequencing words in a sentence and word parts within words. Finally, in the fourth and final stage of language development, called pragmatic development, preschool‐aged children learn the social and cultural conventions of language use in particular contexts; that is, they learn what is (and is not) appropriate to say across different settings.