Notes on 'Horizons'

Unfortunately couldn't find a link to the BBC documentary 'Horizons'.

-Named 'the speech home project', in this documentary you can see that babies begin with gibberish, then progress into single words which in turn develop into requests. Gradually an infant learns to speak.
-The experiment also illustrates how you need positive reinforcement (what some might call a 'baby voice') when communicating with your child so that they are encouraged when talking - this suggests that we all have the innate ability to use language but it must be stimulated at a young age.
-It also appears that parents simplify their speech subconsciously by elonging their pauses - they simplify their lexis and their syntax. This is called CONVERGENCE (adopting language for the audience).
-Furthermore, children will listen to the phonological features - at first, a child's phonological awareness outweighs their semantic awareness. They listen to the SOUNDS first.
-As the child's own speech develops, parents will use longer sentences - mirroring their development. By the time a child is 5, they know 5000 words - mostly nouns and verbs. At certain stages they don't have the nouns so instead they use determiners ("this one, that one, this one!")
-As they grow up they will learn 3000 new words each year.
-This documentary also answers some more fundamental questions by demonstrating how we have a laryx deep in our throat which causes our vocal tracts to be longer - whereas animals have high ones disabling them from making complex speech sounds.
-The left part of the brain is for language, the front is for speaking and the back is for understanding. After studying a man with severe brain damage, doctors noticed that nouns appeared to come before actions (for example, he could name the cat in the picture but not what it was doing).