Horizon- who do we talk?

• Talking is a unique ability that defines us as humans
• We are the only ones on the planet that can talk
• Expressing thought processes
• Children learn to speak with minimal effort
• Despite decades of research, how we learn to talk is a mystery
• Is it something we are born with or what we learn
• Dr Deb Roy turned his home into a laboratory and captured his sons language from the day he was born until the age of three
• The parent simplifies language to match the child's language but when the child develops, the parents language becomes more complex

http://ed.ted.com/lessons/deb-roy-the-birth-of-a-word
MIT researcher Deb Roy wanted to understand how his infant son learned language -- so he wired up his house with video cameras to catch every moment (with exceptions) of his son's life, then parsed 90,000 hours of home video to watch "gaaaa" slowly turn into "water." This astonishing, data-rich research has deep implications for how we learn.

• Dr Cathy Price work and research is highlighting that there are key parts of the brain linked with language
• Speech therapy- working with people, who had strokes
• The innate ability for language- we are born, able to pick up language- born with the ability to speak
• Noam Chomsky- language is innate and we all have L.A.D (Language acquisition device0
• We have the blueprint for language but need to be exposed to it early on
• Fx P2 part of DNA- supports Chomsky's theory that language is innate

Child Language Acquisition

• They see it more than hear it
• Need eye contact to communicate
• NVC (non-verbal communication) as the main source of communication
• Intonation- sound of words, rhythm, stress
• Lip reading
• At around 18 months, a child learns about 10 words a day
• Deaf children exposed to sign language show the same stages of language acquisition, as do hearing children exposed to spoken languages
• If a person develops his/her language after puberty he/she will never be able to fully acquire language
• Children at the age of 18 months will have a productive vocabulary of around 50 words
• A child can understand more words than he/she can speak
• If you can expose a baby to two languages at the sane time, he/she will learn both 

Stephen Fry- Planet Word- Origins of language

This is a documentary series on how we adapt to language.

• Over 7,000 languages used on our planet today
• 2 years old is a key stage when children speak 
• In the build up to that stage, they are listening and watching others