Perceptual and language development are closely linked processes that occur rapidly in the first years of life. Perceptual milestones include visual acuity improving to adult levels by age 1 and the ability to crawl and walk allowing engagement with the environment. Language development moves from pre-production to using two-word phrases in toddlers to more complex sentences with vocabularies of thousands of words by ages 5-6. Critical periods exist where lack of appropriate stimulation can impact development of certain perceptions.

1. UNIT 4
PERCEPTUAL AND
LANGUAGEDEVELOPMENT
RADAN ARLENE
Reporter

2. INTRODUCTION
• Perceptual and language development play a
major role in the socialization of an individual.
Normal developmental progression is possible
only if the development in all spheres of life goes
according to the standard pattern.

3. PERCEPTUAL DEVELOPMENT
- Perceptual development is an aspect of cognitive development
which allows a young human being to start interpreting and
understanding sensory input.
- In the first year of life, perceptual development proceeds extremely
rapidly. development occurs in leaps and bounds for many children
at this age as they engage with the world around them and learn
more about what they touch, see, smell, hear, and taste.

4. Process of Perceptual Development
• The process of perceptual development is very closely linked to motor
development.
– For example: as infants grow, they begin to be able to support their heads on
their own, and to turn their heads so that their eyes can scan their
environment.
– Likewise, the ability to crawl and later walk allows opportunities for
purposeful engagement with the surrounding world.
• For example: as an infant develops manual dexterity, she or he can start to
manipulate objects such as rattles and balls.

5. Milestones in Perceptual Development
• Newborns
• Recognize mother’s face
• Discriminate sound of mother’s voice
• Differentiate smell and taste stimuli
• Inter-modal matching
• 2 weeks
New eye movements
A developing startle reflex
1 month
Visual acuity of 20/600, vision slightly worse than adult night vision
Able to see large objects with high contrast

6. • 2 months
• Language production begins (‘cooing’)
• Minimum audible angle = 27 deg
• 3 months
• Perception of facial expressions
• They can wave their arms and pump their legs
• Binocular fixation
• Following moving stimulus with smooth eye movements
• 4 months
• Spontaneous reaching for nearer object
• Discriminate between different categories of objects
• Perceive biological movement

7. • 5 months
• Start showing signs of stranger anxiety
• 6 months
• Visual acuity is close to an adult’s (fully parity after one year)
• 8 months
• started crawling
• They can eat solid foods

8. Critical Periods
• This refers to the time during which infants must receive appropriate
stimulation. If such stimulus is not sufficient they may lose the ability to
perceive certain stimuli.
• Children remain susceptible to the adverse effects of visual deprivation
until about 7 to 8 years of age.

9. Perceptual Processing in Infancy
i) Neural and Sensory Competencies: Prenatal development is the most critical
time to ensure optimal sensory functioning. Human infants are born with
well-functioning sensorineural systems.
ii) Visual Sensory System: Some aspects of newborn visual sensory processing
are fairly well-developed in the newborn infant. Newborn visual acuity is far
worse than adults, but improves to adult levels by the age of eight months.
iii) Auditory Sensory System: The human fetus responds to sounds by 28 weeks
of prenatal development.
iv) Chemical and vestibular senses: infants’ tactile and vestibular sensory
systems develop somewhat in advance of their more remote-sensing visual
and auditory systems.
v) Space Perception: Very young infants are capable of interpreting motion
cues of objects, however, they may not use as many of these cues during
perceptual processing as an adult would.

10. • vii) Face Perception: Newborn infants visually track a moving face pattern
farther than a pattern with scrambled face features, they show greate sucking
responses and visual preferences for their mothers’ faces over strangers’ faces,
and surprisingly, will look longer at attractive faces than unattractive faces
(as judged by adults) within 6 days of birth.
• viii) Auditory Perception: One of the most basic and researched components of
language perception involves the infants’ ability to discriminate between
fundamental sounds, phonemes, present in the infant’s native language.

11. LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT
• Language development is a process starting early in human life,
when a person begins to acquire language by learning it as it is
spoken and by mimicry. Children’s language development moves
from simple to complex.

12. Stages of Language Development
(Berk, 2006)
• 1) Infant (0-1yr): It is called pre-production stage. The infant comprehends
minimum, vocalization with intonation, responds to his name, responds to
human voices without visual cues by turning his head and eyes, and responds
accordingly to angry and friendly tones.
• 2) Toddlers (12-24 months)
Produces considerable “jargon”: puts words and sounds together into
speech-like (inflected) patterns.
Holophrastic speech: uses one word to convey an entire thought;
meaning depends on the inflection (“me” may be used to request more cookies or
a desire to feed self). Later; produces two-word phrases to express a complete
thought (telegraphic speech): “More cookie,” “Daddy bye-bye.”
Follows simple directions, “Give Daddy the cup.”

13. • 3) Two year old
• Has a vocabulary of 150 to 300 words
• Uses two- to three-word sentences, usually in noun-verb combinations, such as
"Dog bark," but also using inflection with combinations like "More cookie?"
• Refers to self by name and uses “me” and “mine”
• Receptive Language is more developed than expressive Language; most two-
year olds understand significantly more than they can talk about.
• Repeatedly asks, “What’s that?”
• 4) Three-Four year old
• Has a vocabulary of about 1,500 to 2,500 words
• Uses sentences of five or more words

14. • 5) Five year old
• Vocabulary of 1,500 words plus.
• Tells a familiar story while looking at pictures in a book.
• Defines simple words by function: a ball is to bounce; a bed is to sleep in.
• Identifies and names four to eight colors.
• Produces sentences with five to seven words; much longer sentences are not
unusual.

15. • 6) Six year old
• Can identify right and left hands fairly consistently.
• Talks a lot.
• Loves telling jokes and riddles; often, the humor is far from subtle.
• By age 6, a child's language begins to sound like adult speech, including the
use of complex sentences, with words like "when," for example. However,
children tend not to use sentences with "although" and "even though" until
about age 10.