The most important part of this week's material for me was the speed at which babies pick up language. To me it is truly amazing that a child is always listening and learning unconsciously as they move through the process. Also, as I was looking into the development of language in babies, I stumbled across dozens of websites about what to do if your child has not hit certain speech milestones by a certain time period. For example, if your child is not in the one word phase by age three, then you as a parents should be worried and take them to the doctor. It got me thinking about why the process is stunted for some children, and I thought of deaf children as an example.
If the child is deaf, then he or she cannot hear all of these words and make those connections; however, the parents may not realize that their child cannot hear until they have surpassed these milestones. I suppose my question here is how do parents with children that are lagging behind in language development catch up? For deaf children it seems as though they can catch up quickly by learning American Sign Language, but how do children without a physical disability catch up? I assume that more affluent families can afford to take their children to speech therapists and work on that, but if the parents live below the poverty line, then this could be an impossibility. What happens when a child has speech difficulties and never gets help? Do they figure it out on their own?
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