University Hassan I Faculty of Letters Mrs.QORCHL Psycho-Neurolinguistics Stages of first language acquisition: 1) The prelinguistic stage: Newborn babies start learning language in the womb and are born with what you might call aceents,a new study of newborn babies says. ‘That foetuses hear and become accustomed to language is nothing new. Several studies have shown that,when exposed to different languages shortly after birth,a baby will typically indicate a preference for the language closest to the one he or she would have heard during gestation.But recognizing a language and being able to speak itor cry it-are two different things. This is sensory discrimination ,in which the child has the physiological capacit / to react differently to different sounds ,not linguistic discrimination,in which the person has learned that different sounds may be used contrastively to distinguish between different words. Prior to any development of articulation, prior even to babbling is the ability of the infant to hear sounds,perceive their characteristics and distinguish different sounds from each other. Speech development begins with hearing and hearing begins to develop before the child is bom. At the fifth month of fetal life,both middle and inner ear structures are presentadult-size and functional (Elliot and Elliot,1964),but the foetus can probably hear before that time (Ando and Hattori,1970).At Six months of fetal life the foetus can hear pure tones (Bench,1968). At birtha baby’s hearing ability suggests that the infant is already destined to be a highly communicative organism.First,the hearing of newborn babies is remarkably like that of adults,Infants probably hear as well as adults do.The newbom is particularly responsive to sounds that resemble human speech. When tests are made comparing the reaction of newborn infants to different kinds of sounds,the babies always react more strongly to the human voice (Eisenberg,1970). The infant's ability to discriminate different sounds from each other is also remarkably well- developed Certainly,by five to six months babies can discriminate between different speech sounds (Eimas,1974),even between many individual features of speech sounds (Hillenbrand, Minifie,and Edwards, 1979) and between different intonation patterns (Morse,1972).Perhaps most amazing is that newbom babies move their bodies in time to the rhythm of any speech sounds they hear. What appears to be jerky,random movements are often a kind of dance to the tune of their future language,as it were,in which the beginnins and endings of movements coincide with word and syllable boundaries (Condon and Sander,1974). A team led by Kathleen Wermeke at the center for prespeech development and developmental disorders at Wursburg University in Germany studied the ery ‘melodies" of sixty healthy newborns -30 French and 30 German. The researchers knew that French speakers typically raise their pitch at the ends of words and phrases, While German speakers typically do the opposite. They also knew that melody — or in the case of spoken language,intonation — plays a crucial role in language learning. “Thisthe idea to look for specific melodic properties in newborns” ultimately gave crying.“Wermke said. The melodies of newborn babies followed the same intonations of the languages the babies had heard in the womb. The French babies cries,for example,tended to end on a rising note. Clearly.the long process of language learning begins with the perception and production of melody by human foetuses and infant The discovery may yield more than just an understanding of how language develops.’ Further analysis of human infants‘erying and other utterances .” she said ‘may contribute to resolving the enigma as to how language may have emerged in early human ancestors.” Only days after birth, \babies have a bawl with language Newborn babies cry in melodie patterns that they have heard in adults conversations ~even while in the womb,say medical anthropologist Kathleen Wermke and her colleagues. By two to five days of age infants cries beer the tuneful signature of their parents native sign that language learning has already commenced,the researchers report ina paper tongue, published online November 5 in Current Biology. Fluent speakers use melodic patterns and pitch to imbue words and phrases with emotional meaning.Changes in pitch and rhythm, for example,can indicate anger. During the last few months of fetal life,babies ,babies can hear what their mothers or other nearby adults are saying. providing exposure to melodies peculiar to a specific language. Newborns,then,recreate those familiar patterns in at least some of their cries “Our data support the idea that human infants’ crying is important for seeding language development,” Wermke says. “Melody , lies at the roots of both the development of spoken language and music.” Newboms’ facility for imitating the underlying makeup of adult speech gets incorporated into babbling later in infancy, Wermke proposes.Earlier research has shown that,from age 3 months on,infants can reproduce vowel sounds demondtrated by adults. Scientists already knew that,in the final months of gestation,babies can hear people talking,especially their mothers. Newboms prefer the sound of their mothers’s voices to the voices of other people.In the days afier birth,babies show signs of discriminating the sound of their native language from others and of recognizing when voice-like tones change in pitch. m goes further.suggesting that newboms adapt their cries to melodie pattems characteristic of whatever language they have heard spoken.German newborns" cries,for example.tended to start out high-pitched and gravitate to increasingly lower pitches,but French Newboms’ cries started out low-pitched and then moved higher, Comparable high-to- (o-high intonation patterns characterize words and phrases used by fluent low and low: speakers of German and French.Ain Chock University English Department Mrs. QORCHI An observation and an explanation I tis worth looking at one or two aspects of the way a mother behaves towards her baby , ‘The usual fondling ,cuddling and cleaning require little comment,but the position in which “She holds the baby against her body when resting is rather revealing.Careful American studies have disclosed the fact that 80 per cent of mothers cradle their infants in their left arms,holding them against the left side of their bodies.If asked to explain the significance of this preference most people reply that it is obviously the result of the predominance of right- handedness in the population.By holding the babies in their left arms,the mothers keep their dominant arms free for manipulations.But a detailed analysis shows that this is not the case. True,there is a slight difference between right-handed and left-handed females,but not enough to provide an adequate explanation.|t emerges that 83 per cent of right-handed mothers hold the baby on the left-side,but then so do 78 per cent of left-handed mothers.In other words,only 22 per cent of the left-handed mothers have their dominant hand free for actions.Clearly,there must be some other less obvious explanation. The only other clue comes from the fact that the heart is on the left side of the mother’s body.Could it be that the sound of her heart-beat is the vital factor? And in what way? Thinking along these lines it was argued that perhaps during its existence inside the body of the mother ,the growing embryo becomes fixated (imprinted) on the sound of the heart-beat.If this is so,then the re-discovery of this familiar sound after birth might have a calming effect on the infant,especially as it has just been thrust into a strange and frighteningly new world outside.If this is so then the mother ,either instinctively or by an unconscious series of trials and errors at the discovery that her baby is more at peace if held against her heart ,than on the right. This may sound far-fetched, but tests have now been carried out which reveal that it is nevertheless the true explanation.Groups of new-born babies in a hospital nursery were exposed for a considerable time to the recorded sound of a heart-beat at a standard rate of 72 beats per minute. There were nine babies in each group and it was found that one or more of them was crying for 60 per cent of the time whe the sound was not switched on, but that this figure fell to only 38 per cent when the heart-beat recording was thumping away.The heart- beat groups also showed a greater weight-gain than the others,although the amount of food taken was the same in both cases.Clearly the beatless groups were burning up a lot more energy as a result of the vigorous actions of their crying. Another test was done with slightly older infants at bedtime.In some groups the room was silent,in other recorded lullabies were played.In others a ticking metronome was operating at the heart-beat speed of 72 beats per minute.In still others the heart-beat recording itself was played. it was then checked to see which groups fell asleep more quickly. The heart-beat group dropped off in half the time it took for any of the other groups. This not only clinches the idea that the sound of the heart beating is a powerfully calming stimulus,but it also shows that the response highly specific one.The matronome imitation will not do _at least not for young infants. So it seems fairly certain that this is the explanation of the mother’s left-side approach to baby-holding.tt is interesting that when 466 Madonna and child paintings (dating back over several hundred years) were analysed for this feature,373 of them showed the baby on the leftbreast.Here again the figure was at the 80 per cent level. This contrasts with observations of females carrying parcels ,where it was found that 50 per cent carried them on the left and 50 per cent on the right. What other possible results could this heart-beat imprinting have? It may, for example s of love in the heart rather than the head.As the song explain why we insist on locating feelin; says: "you gotta have a heart’.It may also explain why mothers rock their babies to lull them to sleep. The rocking motion is carried on at about the same spced as the heart-beat,and once again it probably ‘reminds’ the infants of the rhythmic sensations they became so familiar with inside the womb,as the great heart of the mother pumped and thumped away above them. Nor does it stop there.Right into adult life the phenomenon seems to stay with us.We rock with anguish. We rock back and forth on our feet when we are in a state of conflict. The next time you see a lecturer or an after-dinner speaker swaying rhythmically from side to side scheck his speed for heart-beat time.His discomfort at having to face an audience leads himto perform the most comforting movements his body can offer in the somewhat limited circumstances;and so he switches on the old familiar beat of the womb. Whenever you find insecurity you are liable to find the comforting heart-beat rhythm in one kind of disguise or another.It is no accident that most folk music and dancing has a syncopated rhythm.Here again the sounds and movements take the performers back to the safe world of the womb. From the Naked Ape (Jonathan Cape and Mc Graw Hill,1967)