Why is early augmentation for children who are low-verbal or non-verbal so important, and the 'wait-and-see' approach unethical?
"From birth, the social forms of child-caretaker interactions, the tools used in human society to manipulate the environment, the culturally institutionalized patterns of social relations, and language operating together as a socio-semiotic system are used by the child in cooperation with adults to organize behavior, perception, memory, and complex mental processes. For children, the development of language is a development of social existence into individual persons and into culture. (John-Steiner and Tatter, 1983, p.83)."
The inability to engage with language learning in a feedback loop, meaning the ability to both understand it and produce it, in a social and meaningful context, impacts not just language development itself, but cognition and behavior as well.
"From birth, the social forms of child-caretaker interactions, the tools used in human society to manipulate the environment, the culturally institutionalized patterns of social relations, and language operating together as a socio-semiotic system are used by the child in cooperation with adults to organize behavior, perception, memory, and complex mental processes. For children, the development of language is a development of social existence into individual persons and into culture. (John-Steiner and Tatter, 1983, p.83)."
The inability to engage with language learning in a feedback loop, meaning the ability to both understand it and produce it, in a social and meaningful context, impacts not just language development itself, but cognition and behavior as well.
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