Parents have a key role to play in the basic language development of their kids. The babies learn to speak by hearing and the first words they hear are usually from their mom or dad. Therefore, in most cases, the baby’s first language teachers are undoubtedly its parents and the degree and level of their language acquisition depends on the parents.
Hence, it is very important that the parents speak to their babies from the day of birth and continue to do so every day until the babies are able to speak properly by the time they become 4 to 5 years old. It is no matter whether the babies can understand what their parents are talking, but what is important is that they hear what the parents are speaking. They gradually pick up language understanding skills along with speaking skills.
There is no need for any special reason or topic to talk. The mother can simply tell a story to the baby, or sing a rhyme while breastfeeding, cuddling, bathing or at any other time or occasion. The same words or sentences can be simply repeated many times so that these words get imprinted in the baby’s mind and he/she will soon learn to speak them.
In the above scenario, a normal baby should be able to understand common words and phrases by the time he/she is around the age of 9 years and say some words. It has been observed that almost all the people understand a language much more than they can speak it. Similarly, babies and for that matter all human beings at every stage of life are able to understand a language better than their ability to use it in the spoken or written form.
The reason for the above phenomena is that human beings use language in two forms, firstly to understand a language, and secondly to speak and write it. The former is called passive vocabulary and the latter is called active vocabulary. We use our passive vocabulary to understand when we hear or read something. The passive vocabulary is considerably more in number than the active vocabulary in any language.
When a passive vocabulary is used over and over it gets imprinted in the mind and it becomes part of the active vocabulary. Therefore, when a child hears a word or phrase repeatedly over time, these become part of his/her active vocabulary and consequently the child is able to speak. Hence, acquiring a number of passive vocabularies is a prerequisite for the toddler to speak, and the child learns the passive vocabularies by repeatedly hearing the spoken language of their parents.
Posted on February 13th, 2008 by admin
Filed under: Baby, Child Care, Language Development, Toddler
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