Language development  (developed by Veronique Bure)

 Language building through emotional experience..

 Emotional experience helps master affective transformation.  Affective transformation is part of any learning process.  It allows an individual to gain awareness of self and of surroundings.  Affective signaling has early patterns; they have been interpreted differently but in complementary ways by Chomsky, Bates, and Greenspan.

Chomsky[1] theorized that the acquisition of regulation of emotions and language has to occur during a critical learning period.  But that language is/can be attained through brief exposure because linguistic knowledge is largely predetermined.

Bates[2] appreciates language and affective maturity as evolving from developmental perspective. She developed the concept that language knowledge is distributed throughout the brain rather than in a specific language center.  She demonstrated the brain’s extraordinary plasticity in learning language. She showed that the brain organizes language information differently according to the characteristics of the world’s languages, or/and as a response to illness/injury. Bate

Greenspan  [3] differentiates six formative stages of affect signaling.  They are the mandatory milestones to master in order to build language. Each stage provides the foundation for the next but does not ensure that the next step will be mastered.  He contends that there is no separation between language, cognition and emotions, each domain reinforcing the two others.  Greenspan developes an empirical approach to the building of being depending upon experience.  Affect derives from sensations which come to build an affective repertoire.  In order to find affective meaning, sensory information integration has to be developed through social interaction.

 The six different stages are:

• 1-2 months.  Emergence of the capacity to elaborate motor response.  Actions respond to sensory information, both external and internal.

• 2-5 months.  Discrimination of faces of caregivers, some pattern recognition.  Better command of  motor execution such as orienting body to stimuli, ( voice, schedule).

• 4-10 months.  Engagement  in 2 ways interaction such as smile, smile back, vocalizations.

• 9-18 months.  Shared attention for problem solving, back and forth interaction (take hand, point, ask for help) translate complex emotional and social signals, in affective meaning and into behaviors.

• 16- 30 months.  Multi sensory perceptual images become paired with symbolic meaning, (image of Mom symbolizes Mom and comfort).  Language has an affective dimension, a purpose of conveying wants needs, feelings, and experience.  It enables the acquisition of appropriate pragmatics of speech (use of grammar such as pronouns, meaning in context).  Without affective dimension language tends to be very stereotypical, mechanical.

• 30- 40 months.  Pleasure of relating as much as requests for satisfying needs are conveyed through language.  Language reflects self relation to the world. It seems to enable self awareness and relatedness by making bridge between experiences.   The mastery of language contributes to acquiring an understanding of time and space, developing some insightfulness (explain/understand the reasons of behavior), and building up the capacity to relate past events, inquire about the future. With language emerge elaborated social skills such as intuitive skills (sense of predictability, intent reading).

This capacity to recognize affective patterns in others and in self allows a sense of predictability, (intend reading in others) and social readiness (elaboration of appropriate social response for self).

The mastery of this last stage enables the regulation of emotions. Affective patterns integration requires a healthy nervous system which involves all the senses.  The impairment in the acquisition of a language seems to be directly linked to an impaired central nervous system. (For more on nervous system impairment click here).

Chomsky insistence on a critical period for developing social emotional skills parallels the discovery that early deficit in social interaction has a negative impact on the biological development of the brain.  It limits an individual‘s capacity for learning, relating, and adapting

It is hoped that through early behavioral intervention, due to the plasticity of the brain and CNS, exposure to monitored interactions could reorganize the sensory information pathways and shape up the CNS (for more on instruction suggestions click here).