The Formation of Mind Language, Learning and Logic in Early Childhood

Dr Annette Haines is an AMI Director of Training, holdings both AMI Primary and Elementary diplomas. In this lecture she talks about how language is present in a human being's life from day one. She addresses physical, biological, and psychological aspects and also touches upon the difference in language acquisition in the early years between boys and girls.

"Human beings are not born with language. Little mammals, babies are born with just those instincts necessary for life. Yet, beneath this apparent helplessness (and Montessori was struck with this fact) babies can do amazing things. Newborn infants can do something we cannot: they can suck and swallow without stopping for a breath. As Dr. Montessori understood (being a physician), the necessary muscular coordinations are not yet in place which are needed for speech–coordinations which allow an extended stream of air to pass over the larynx. The baby can only breathe, cry and suck (and a few other things). But, as Montessori said ‘the child possesses a psychic life antecedent to its life of motion’. (1936/1983, p. 34) The baby can look and listen.

(…) Language learning starts as motor movement and remains motor movement stimulated by auditory signals of the mother. The mother does not teach her baby to talk, nor does the baby teach himself. Both are doing this work together, equally drawing on what Howard Gardner calls a universal intelligence of language which is over and above both of them. The infant’s body moves ‘in a precise shared rhythm with the organisation of the speech patterns of the culture’.

Dr Haines concludes " Language is made up of words, and words in language make certain patterns and take on a certain structure which give them their meaning. These patterns adapt to a certain order and, for the most part, maintain that order. The child, with each new generation, absorbs and maintains the patterns, the structure and the order of language. In completing this task, order is created in the child’s inner world; order is given to that internal universe, and to all the matter and energy of that universe which is the mind."