How does infants’ and children’s social understanding aid language acquisition?
3. How can parents or caregivers best promote language learning through the social input they provide to children? In what ways are language-acquiring infants and children tuned in to social interaction, and how do adults construct and modify these interactions? Human infants display a remarkable sensitivity to social input in the form of language. Even in utero, infants are capable of learning something about the speech that surrounds them. In a now-classic study, DeCasper and Spence (1986) asked expectant mothers to read one of two simple rhyming passages during the third trimester. When the babies were born, these newborns changed their sucking rate as long as this behavior was rewarded by presentation of the passage that their mothers had read previously. Newborn infants also modify sucking rates to hear their own mother’s voice and to hear speech in their native language (DeCasper & Fifer, 1980; Moon, Cooper, & Fifer, 1993). Newborns are even capable of discriminating between actu
