Spoken Language

Making sense of the spoken word is a task that we accomplish every day, more times without any thoughts or efforts. Nevertheless, we go about our daily activity talking to the people around us with the assumption that they will comprehend what we are saying and in return, we will reciprocate and understand their spoken words. But what if we were dropped in a world where we did not know the language and we must learn to communicate or die; so it is with babies, every day new babies are born not knowing the language spoken around them. By the age of three, most kids have mastered the art of the spoken language.

The reading states, “Learning to understand a language is like cracking a deeply encrypted code” something we did effortlessly

We are all the same with the potential to learn which every language our parents use. However, that is not so “babies are born knowing a great deal about language.” In the article, the writer wrote “Babies don 't know beforehand which language they are going to be exposed to. Potentially they have to be able to master any one of thousands of different languages. And, yet by the time they are four or five, children have figured out precisely which language is spoken in their community.” However, babies are fast learners. Children start learning their parent’s language long before they say their first word. Although newborn babies can differentiate the different sounds in the many different languages, by the age of one to one and a half, they lose this ability and start to make the sounds of their community. So maybe babies are not blank slates when they are born, perhaps they are a book filled with the world’s languages, and as children grow older and start to learn the language of their community, they start erasing pages of sounds that are not used in their community. So babies are born knowing more about languages than the adults in their

One of the stages of language identified in the article is the decoding stage; during this juncture, the babies are not taking but are trying to make sense of the words that are spoken in its community. The next stage is the babbling stage; at this time, the babies are working out their vocal cords and learning to make the sounds of its community. After the babbling stages babies go through using one word to communicate, then two words, then soon they are talking in complete sentences. At the end of the last stage and even before they have attended school babies have mastered most of the nuances of its community