Language development is a process starting early in human life. Infants start without language, yet by 4 months of age, babies can discriminate speech sounds and engage in babbling. Some research has shown that the earliest learning begins in utero when the fetus starts to recognize the sounds and speech patterns of its mother's voice.
Usually, productive language is considered to begin with a stage of preverbal communication in which infants use gestures and vocalizations to make their intents known to others. According to a general principle of development, new forms then take over old functions, so that children learn words to express the same communicative functions which they had already expressed by preverbal means.
Read more about Language Development: Theoretical Frameworks of Language Development, Biological Preconditions, Environmental Influences, Social Preconditions, Different Connotation of "Development"(Economics)
Famous quotes containing the words language and/or development:
“They who in folly or mere greed
Enslaved religion, markets, laws,
Borrow our language now and bid
Us to speak up in freedom’s cause.”
—Cecil Day Lewis (1904–1972)
“If you complain of people being shot down in the streets, of the absence of communication or social responsibility, of the rise of everyday violence which people have become accustomed to, and the dehumanization of feelings, then the ultimate development on an organized social level is the concentration camp.... The concentration camp is the final expression of human separateness and its ultimate consequence. It is organized abandonment.”
—Arthur Miller (b. 1915)