C_S_D 3020 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Phoneme, Categorical Perception, Language Change
10 Jul 2016
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Document Summary
The ability to interpret, or read, the intentions of another person is a critical social skill. Prelinguistic infants can read the goals of another person using eye gaze, intonation, and other social cues: the communicative use of gesture. Children typically use gestures before they use words. Children"s early gesture use is predictive of their language use. Referential gestures for objects may lead to words for those objects. Size of children"s gesture vocabulary predicts their later verbal vocabulary. Children sometimes combine two gestures or a word + gesture before combining two-words: from gesture to language. Gesture may tap into the same general cognitive mechanisms as language. Gesture may lead to communicative interactions that support language learning. How do children perceive speech sounds before they can produce language: perceptual foundations of speech & language learning. The ability to hear develops in utero at about 6 months gestation. Newborns recognize and prefer their mother"s voice.
