At birth, the brain is the only organ not fully developed. This is because the brain develops as the child learns new things, and they haven’t yet had any life experiences when they are first born. The brain consists of many different regions that perform many different tasks. Within each of these regions, there are nerve cells that send messages to …show more content…
Learning a language is a good example of how experiences effect the patterns in a person’s brain development. The ability for a child to speak, or understand another’s speech, only requires the minimal amount of communication. The type of language the child learns depends on which language they hear around them. The more they hear it, the more the brain will adapt to it. The more the child is exposed to said native language as a child, the more proficient they will be as they get older. When the child is only a few months old, the brain can recognize sever hundred sounds, but even a few months later the brain starts to sort those words so that the brain starts to only recognize those sounds in the language regularly heard. The ability for a brain to be flexible in language/sounds is referred to plasticity. Plasticity can be better fined as “the quality of being easily shaped or molded.” (Just googled “meaning of plasticity”). The child says their first word between the ages of 12 and 18 months. By age 4-4½ they are starting to use complex sentences, and by the time the child starts kindergarten the child knows most of the fundamentals of their language (Young Children’s Oral Language Development by Celia Genishi). By the age of ten, this plasticity is greatly decreased, making it harder for adolescents and adults to learn a new language. Equally so, it is hard for a foreigner to learn another