be starved and damaged at a critical period of life? In the thirteenth
century, Frederic II made a frightening experiment to find an answer to
this question. He was hoping to discover what language a child would
5 speak if he heard no language at all so he. told the mothers in the
experiment to keep silent. The results of the experiment show that
hearing no language at all can be very harmful for a child.
All the babies in the experiment died before the first year. Was the
deprivation of language the only reason for their death? Obviously,
10 there was more than language deprivation here. What was missing was
good mothering. Without good mothering, in the first year of life
especially, the capacity to survive is seriously affected.
Today no such extreme language deprivation exists as that in
Frederic II's experiment. However, some children are still backward in
15 speaking. Most often the reason for this is that the mother can't
understand or doesn't notice the cues and signals of the baby, whose
brain is programmed to absorb language rapidly. There are critical
times, it seems, when children learn more easily. If the mother can't
deal with these important periods properly, the ideal time for learning
20 skills passes and they might never be learned so easily agajn. A bird
learns to sing and to fly rapidly at the right time, but the process is slow
and hard if the critical stage has passed.
Linguists suggest that certain stages in language development are
reached in a fixed sequence and at a constant age, but there are children
25 who start speaking late and who, eventually, become very intelligent.
At twelve weeks, a baby smiles and produces some 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 1000 words which he can put into sentences, and at
30 four his language differs from that of his parents in style rather than
grammar.
Recent evidence suggests .that a baby is born with the capacity to
speak. What is special about man's brain is the complex system which
enables a child to connect the sight and feel of things with their sound
35 pattern. The child's brain is also able to pick out an order in language
from the sounds around him, to analyse, to combine and recombine the
parts of a language in new ways.
However, the child's language development depends on his
communication with his mother. The mother should always understand
and respond to the cues and signals in the child's crying, smiling and
his attempts to speak. If she fails to do that, the child will stop trying to
speak. In other words, paying attention to the child's non-verbal cues is
verj' important for the growth and development of language.
