Vocal communication is a vital part of our ability to communicate, and this goes beyond language! Before there was language or written text, vocal communication played a vital role in human history. We can see many forms of vocal communication today; spoken language, music, crying, laughing, screaming, etc... While vocal communication is important to how we interact as humans, it also plays a major role in the animal kingdom. Wolves howl, cows moo, cats meow, dogs bark. 
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~phyl/anthro/vocal.html Shed some nice light on how Vocal communication is used, learned, and how we develope it.
This post and link brought to mind one of the controversies of the show Teletubbies just a few years back.
ReplyDeleteDoes anyone remember the backlash from confused parents and educators? They were worried that the gibberish the creatures spoke to each other with would be a detriment to a child's learning development. I learned that those noises were actually based on phonemes that were proven to help toddler develop language skills. The Teletubbies were criticized, as role-models would promote poor speech. The reality was that in addition to helping babies learn to speak they were helping them come to recognize technology as a natural component of modern life.
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ReplyDeleteThis is slightly off topic, but... There was a period in deaf culture from the late 1800's to the early 1900's referred to as the dark age where speech was stressed. The use of sign language was widely discouraged, and hearing teachers were put into deaf schools in the attempts to better integrate the deaf into society. This had a huge negative affect on deaf culture, because it was not a decent form of communication and left most children confused and frustrated. So, though vocal communication plays a huge role in human life, it is not vocal communication that is vital, but communication itself through whatever form it may take.
ReplyDeleteI really like this group's focus on communication. Verbal communication is obviously the most important. I work with children who live in households where English is not spoken at all. The children aren't even introduced to English until a) they enter kindergarten or b) come to me. We focus on universal sounds such as those of animals to convey messages and learn basic words that most children know very early on like 'dog' and 'cat'. I also use growling sounds to help the children who have difficulty pronouncing their 'r's.
ReplyDeleteI think it's fascinating that the children learn so much just by sounds. I mean, that's all language is; just different groupings of sounds.