“They are not always easy to understand for the first time,” says Professor Stephen Jones, director of the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience. “If you are an infant, you don’t understand them quite because you have to use your mind.”
Children’s brains tend not to work that way. “We use two kinds of thoughts, we use our thinking language. There’s language with an internal part and language you know. But once your brain becomes large enough, you start to use language externally with the language that your brain doesn’t know yet. And then you start to use your imagination.”
“Most of our children can read, which is an excellent result for an infant,” says Prof Jones. “But they don’t have the kind of mental skills or resources to understand all the linguistic structures and all the ways in which they might be communicating with each other.”
As well as being a challenge, voice in children can be awkward. At the end of the day, the young person has to cope with all this – what to say, what they can see, what sounds are correct and what they don’t.
They can’t just start to imagine their voice and expect to have an understanding of what it is that they are saying.
“The difficulty is the voice is very personal and very personal language. It is really hard to convey a lot of the things you are talking about without an emotion. And at times you are not listening and there is something a bit wrong about the timing and the delivery.”
Children are just as at fault as adults as children make mistakes. They could say anything: a toddler might say “I’ll jump out of a tree” and then be disappointed.
“They come to believe the things they say and the result is that they feel bad about their speech and they do not express the content of what they say but they feel sorry for themselves.
“That’s why speech therapy is so important to try to make this less of an issue.”
Can I tell people I am deaf?
Some children are in a minority where they are unaware at all about their ability to hear. But others, especially the most difficult children, have a sense of their own language.
“In some ways, a child is more special than others, a child is more special because there isn’t that sense that people are always talking about these things to them but not to them,” says Prof Jones. “I think kids who are
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