The Growth/Learning Spiral from Conception

The narrative of language acquisition proceeds in a growth spiral. The story begins and ends with meaningful words from the baby’s first molecules. The story is about words from start to finish. There may have been a time when the majestic statement that “in the beginning was the Word . . .” might have seemed fanciful, but in the 21st century, now that we know more about the human language capacity — the unique power of humans to learn and use one or more languages, a capacity coded into our genetic inheritance. Billions upon billions of successful communications must be are written in our own dust, and that of our parents. To survive and have the language capacity, many genetic messages between the chromosomes of our parents have to be quite perfectly understood. Otherwise, conception would fail and the baby would not be born. At a macrocosmic level, the growth spiral depends on communication events in words. Our lives are expressed somehow in the dust we are made of. At the beginning of the growth spiral, the physical love of the parents leads to the conception of the child. From there forward, nurturing is required. Without the life of the child there can be no learning, no language acquisition, no literacy, nor any normal human experience for the child. As a result, love, life, learning, language, and literacy fall into an enabling rank order. At a microcosmic level successful communications must occur in genetic, epigentic, proteomic, and higher biosignaling events that must succeed if the child is to survive and mature.

Language acquisition proceeds in a growth spiral. The story begins and ends with words. The majestic statement that “in the beginning was the Word . . .” might have seemed fanciful to unbelieving souls at the beginning of the 20^thcentury, but in the 21^stcentury, we know the unique power of humans to learn and use one or more languages is a capacity coded into our genetic inheritance. At a macrocosmic level, the growth spiral depends on communication events between other human beings, but at a microcosmic level our lives are written in the dust of which we are made. The growth spiral for each of us begins with the physical love of parents leading to the conception of the child followed by nurturing. Without the love and nurturing there can be no life of the child no learning, no language acquisition, no literacy, nor any normal human experience for the child. Because love, life, learning, language, and literacy fall into an enabling rank order if one is missing, the child will not arrive at literacy. At a microcosmic level successful communications must occur in genetic, epigentic, proteomic, and higher biosignaling events that must succeed if the child is to survive and mature. A great deal more is required to arrive at literacy, but babies can do it, as the second video shows, way ahead of what some of the experts have said.