Communication and Early Development of Brain

Children will start to understand simple language and some key sentences as early as six months. At the end of the child's first year, they will have a small vocabulary built up in their brains. All this happens even before they say their first word.


Raising trilingual kids. You won't find a better example of how little multilingual children talk. - YouTube

In this video there are three children having a conversation with adults, switching between Polish, Italian, English and Spanish throughout the whole video. I tried to find a representative video of how children and in general people tend to communicate when they are able to use different languages in a single conversation. Rather than switching languages between sentences (so one sentence is Polish, for example, and the next sentence in English), the children tend to switch within sentences so a whole sentence in Polish for example, and include within that sentence one or more English words. This shows how the switching process ( code mixing ) and language selection develops at a really early age as the children would respond with the language used in the question. This implies that from a young age, brain plasticity of children is affected by being able to communicate with two or more languages.


Brain Development in babies 

Babies start to communicate from an early stage using verbal and non verbal cues, such as gesturing, pointing and babbling. However these cues do not necessarily represent language. 

"Newborns can distinguish utterances in their native language from utterances in another language", and this proves that babies are able to hear their mother from the womb as they are able to recognise the mother's native language or her most used language. Although babies can recognise language, they do not start to communicate until later on. 

"The first 3 years of a child's life is the most intensive period of acquiring speech and language skills" and although every child is different and develop in different times, they mostly adhere to this timeline. 

Structural development in babies

The first structure that develops in a baby's brain is the neuron ( definition of neuron in previous post ). Neurons will differentiate into specialised cells and this happens from the bottom part of the brain called brainstem. This develops first in babies because it is responsible for vital functions of life which is also the reason why it is called primitive brain. The mid brain is the next part of the brain to develop and this is responsible for vision and hearing. 

"Brain development or learning, is actually the process of creating, strengthening and discarding connections among the neurons". By the time children are 2, they have more synapses that they need so the process of elimination start to happen where the most used synapses grow stronger and the least are eliminated. 

Myelination is also important in terms of language ( definition in previous post ). This process also happens from the bottom of the brain and since language is processed towards the front of the brain, children struggle to process this. 




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