This essay will be discussing and unpacking the correlation of certain children development themes in

regards with concepts explored in the process of language acquisition. The two underlying themes that
I have chosen are the active child and the interaction between nature and nurture. These discussions
will be provided with particular research as evidence for the relevancy of my chosen theme.

One of the enduring themes in child development is the relation between nature and nurture. Nature
refers to our genetics, what we were born with and our innate qualities while nurture is the impact of
how the physical/social environment shapes us. The classical debate between nature and nurture often
pits one against the other, yet the reality is far from black and white. Constant interaction between the
children’s internal biology and the environment that surrounds them helps to enhance a child’s
development by dynamically shaping genetic predisposition through environmental influences.
An example of both nature and nurture interacting would be a child born with a natural talent for
music (nature) and having a supportive environment (nurture) that helps them to develop their skills.
If the child grows up in an environment that values and encourages access to musical instruments and
lessons, then they are more likely to have a strong appreciation for music then those that do not.
Another enduring theme in child development that will be discussed in this essay is the Active Child.
This theme explores the idea that children themselves contribute to their own development. There are
three major parts that play a vital role in their development: attention, language, and play. Children's
display of independent learning becomes more evident as they grow up; however, during their infant
and toddler years, they also have the capability to interpret the world around them through selective
attention without the help of caregivers or expert guidance. (Siegler et al., 2020)

The ability to understand speech sounds is evident before the infant is born. Fetuses during the last
trimester are able to listen and have a preference towards their mother’s voice. Naturally, during their
time in the utero, fetuses are exposed to auditory information which allows them to remember basic
characteristics, rhythmic, and intonation patterns called prosody. This exposure enables them to
become skilled in recognizing language spoken around them once they develop into young infants.
During the early stages of life of 6 to 8 months, infants will become highly sensitive to language
gathering from their native or outside their native language. However, due to developmental changes,
especially during 12 months of age, infants will become less sensitive to sound speech that differs
outside their native language. This specialisation or perceptual narrowing is greatly influenced by the
input of speech sounds that comes from caregivers and what is most frequently exposed in the
environment. For example if a Mandarin-speaking infant grows up in a household where Mandarin is
the only language spoken, their proficiency in Mandarin will be greatly refined and enhanced due to
perceptual narrowing, compared to their exposure to other languages. Overall, while infants are
innately equipped with the ability to discriminate between speech sounds across different languages
(nature), the environment they are exposed to allows them to specialise in the language that is most
prevalent, enabling them to fit into their surroundings (nurture).(Siegler et al., 2020)

A relevant research that contributes to speech perception is the study on categorical perception on
infants (Eimas Esal, 1971). Categorical perception is the ability to distinguish sounds into different
groups. Infants have higher levels of sensitivity to language input which allows them to be much
better at doing this than adults. In the study on categorical perception, 1 and 4 months olds sucked on
a pacifier hooked up to a computer. The researchers play a recording of the same syllables for the
infant to hear. The decrease of sucking of on the pacifier tells researchers that the infant has gotten
used to hearing the same syllables which is called habituation. However when the researchers
transition to a new syllable for the infant, its sucking rates seem to increase which is called
dishabituation. This highlights the theme of nurture because exposure to more language and speech in
the environment shapes infants' perceptual abilities and nature as we can see how innately the infant
can easily tell the differences apart as they come equipped with the genetic predisposition to perceive
differences in speech sounds from one another. Infants having the capability to be familiarised with
stimuli through hibernation shows that they are able to remember patterns in their environment and
are quite fast at responding to new syllables. (Siegler et al., 2020)

Active child learning is shown through word segmentation as infants are able to problem solve their
way into recognizing individual words from a stream of spoken words in their native language, for
example “lookattheprettybaby!”. The infant displays attentiveness to regularities in words and picks
up on them familiar sequences of sound through using stress patterning on elements of prosody of
spoken words from caregivers using infant directed speech IDS. This is when caregivers put more
significance to particular words that are stressed in the second syllables which allows the infant to
understand that the words begin and end. However IDS is not a universal language since not all
cultures include IDS when teaching their infants to acquire language. They would also pay attention
to unknown words coupled with familiar ones such as their own name. This is called perceptual
scaffolding which allows children to leverage their existing knowledge to comprend new information.
For example “ this is Emily's cup, here’s Emily’s cup." Since the infant already knows its own name,
it can make a distinction between the new word “cup” and grasp the idea that an object that was
unknown before is in fact a cup. (Siegler et al., 2020)

Another relevant word that contributes to word segmentation was conducted (Jusczyk and Aslin
1995), on 7 month old infants. The study was conducted to investigate how infants are able segment
words through listening. They had the infants listen to passages of speech “The cup was bright and
shiny. A clown drank from the red cup. His cup was filled with milk.” In these sentences the word
“cup” has been repeated multiple times. After listening to the passage the infants go through a method
of measuring how they are able to distinguish words that they hear and words that are not familiar to
them. When lights flashed near the infants mounted near two louder speakers on each side of where
the infant is centred. When infants turn their heads to look at the light source, sounds will play
through either side of the speaker when infants are faced with listening to a known word from the
passage (cup). Infants seem to show more interest in listening longer to words that they have heard
from the short passage than words that they have not heard (bike). The active child theme is
demonstrated here because infants can distinguish between words that they have been exposed to
rather than those that they haven’t.(Siegler et al., 2020)

In summary, this essay has discussed what the two featured themes were used for and how those
themes correlated with the aspect of language acquisition. Further i have discussed how two
researches related to the selected themes

references:
Siegler, R. S., DeLoache, J. S., & Eisenberg, N. (2014). How children develop