Social scaffolding of vocal and language development

Abstract

Human infants achieve remarkable feats in language acquisition within the first 2 years of life. Social inputs from other individuals, who primarily tend to be caregivers, facilitate their language development. Across several non-human species, social inputs shape vocal learning through social reinforcement, sensory enhancement, and vocal imitation. Similar mechanisms appear to contribute to the development of vocal production and phonetic perception in humans. However, it remains unclear whether such similarities stem from shared evolutionary roots or convergent evolution. In addition to such shared mechanisms, humans use other types of social learning strategies to acquire the ability to analyse and produce more complex forms of linguistic information. The findings of basic researches will surely contribute to the development of behavioural and pharmacological intervention programmes that provide more enriched social scaffolding of language development to at-risk children.