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Communication and Developmental Milestones

  • Living reference work entry
  • First Online:
Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science

Synonyms

Gesture; Language; Pointing

Definition

Watershed skills that human children develop early in life.

Introduction

Even before birth, children are making sense of the sounds they hear. The human ear is functional in the final trimester, and fetuses respond to a range of auditory stimuli from outside the womb. Evidence suggests that infants are in fact highly sensitive to the sounds they hear from within the womb and newborns can identify sounds from the language to which they have already been exposed while in the womb (May et al. 2011). De Casper and Spence (1986) asked pregnant women to read a short passage of text aloud daily for the last 6 weeks of their pregnancy. At just a few days old, the newborn infants actively sought to hear the speech passage they had heard prenatally, rather than a novel passage. A control group of infants who had not been regularly read to during pregnancy showed no preference for either passage. Taken together, these findings suggest that language...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Psychology, University of Sussex, Falmer, East Sussex, UK

    Zoe M. Flack & David A. Leavens

  2. School of Applied Social Science, University of Brighton, Falmer, Brighton, UK

    Zoe M. Flack

Authors
  1. Zoe M. Flack
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  2. David A. Leavens
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Zoe M. Flack .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan, USA

    Todd K. Shackelford

  2. Rochester, Michigan, USA

    Viviana A. Weekes-Shackelford

Section Editor information

  1. University of South Carolina – Beaufort, Bluffton, SC, USA

    Carey Fitzgerald

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Flack, Z.M., Leavens, D.A. (2018). Communication and Developmental Milestones. In: Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_3634-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_3634-1

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