Birth through 6 months

what perceptual skills do infants have

sensitive to face-like objects

prefer mothers face by 4 days

detect intonational changes in speech at 1-4 months

participate in vocal turn taking by 3 months

What are mirror neurons

cause babies to mirror things that are sensed or perceived

it’s an incontrollable (automatic) response

able to perceive their caregiver’s internal mental state

Theory of Mind

the ability to understand/take on someone else’s perspective

first emerges in mirror neurons

Phase 1 of Joint Attention: attendance to social partners

share the same direction of eye contact or same action on object or task

by the first month they are able to able to hold attention for longer

Phase 1 of Joint Attention: Motor development

expression through head, body, and limbs

2 —> 6 months: smile, hold objects, reach for toys/objects, roll over, discover hands and feet, sit up

• moving more allows language development to occur because the infants are able to interact with more things in their environment and have so autonomy in what is at their line of attention

Phase 1 of Joint Attention: Motor and Cognitive Development

6 months: infants imitate gestures (introduce sign, perlocutionary)

8 months: understand object permanence (caregiver can talk about more abstract topics)

Content: Speech perception

infants understand words and begin to segment speech into meaningful phrases and words

know there is a source, prosodic regularities, phonetic regularities, categorical perception of speech by 12 months

Categorical formation/ semantic network formation

4 months

form a hierarchical structure of categories, all part of the lexicon

What is unique about Syntax and Morphology in infants

there aren’t any significant infant milestones in either category

Phonology

babies are noisy

0-2 months is typically reflexive and vegetative sounds - no control over the sounds and adult assign its meaning

1-4 months they gain control over their phonation - vowel-like sounds, some consonant sequences, raspberries - experimenting with vocal tract

Pragmatics - Play and language as local homologies

these events co-occur in development

• if they are developmentally behind in their language, you can look at their play to see where they are developmentally

acts as a window to their overall development

Presymbolic stage of pragmatics

>18 months

• visual regard, mouthing, banging objects, manipulating objects

play aligns with language