Birth to three matters - Communities and Local Government

especially moving, objects, so babiesare pre-programmed to pay attentionto language. One problem with thistheory is that children seem to havegreat proficiency in acquiring whateverlanguage/s they hear around them andduring their first year of life they willgradually discard from their reper toireof voca l i s ations sounds which they do nothear in the speech of those with whomthey spend their lives – but of course thepre-programming does not need to bethought of as tied to a specific language.Like Trevarthen and others, Chomskyindicates the centrality of interactionswith familiar adults and older childrenfrom the earliest days of life. Parentsand practitioners need time to enjoy‘proto-conversations’ and as we will seelater, research has shown,treating babiesas if they understand talk and involvingthem in conversational exchangesare experiences on which later abilitiesare founded.Piaget argued that language is an exampleof symbolic behaviour, and no differentfrom other learning. One of his colleagues,Hermine Sinclair (1971),proposed that achild’s ability to nest a set of Russian dollsuses the same cognitive process as a childneeds for understanding how sentencesare embedded in one another. Nelson(1985) and others, using this cognitiveprocessing explanation,think languageis an extension of the child’s existingmeaning-making capacity. This seemsto fit with the fact that children willgenerally begin to engage in pretend playat about the same time as their first wordsare expressed, indicating that they areusing symbols in the form of words andalso symbolic pretend objects (forexample using a block as a pretend cake).Following on from Vygotsky’s sociallearning tradition, Bruner (1983) stressedthe importance of opportunities for babiesand children to interact with and observeinteractions between others. As weexplained above, this idea is supportedby research showing that mothers whobehave as if their babies and youngchildren understand language right fromthe start, make eye contact with themand engage in dialogue, responding totheir babies’ reactions (kicking, wavingarms, smiling, etc) are laying thefoundations of conversation.Karmiloff and Karmiloff-Smith (2001)argue that none of these theories aboutlanguage is, on its own,adequate inexplaining language development andlearning in the first three years of life,and that we need to take account of eachof them for their ability to explain partof the story.36 EDUCATIONAND SKILLS B I RT H T O T H R E E M AT T E R S