Speech therapy portal / Dysarthria / Social situation in the period of infancy. Social situation of development in infancy

Social situation in the period of infancy. Social situation of development in infancy

10.05.2019

At first glance it may easily seem that the baby is completely or almost antisocial. He is also deprived of the main means of social communication - human speech. His livelihoods are largely confined to the satisfaction of the simplest necessities of life. He is much more an object than a subject, that is, an active participant in social relations. This easily gives the impression that infancy is a period of antisocial development of the child, that the infant is a purely biological being, devoid of yet specific human properties, and above all the most basic of them, sociality. It is this opinion that is the basis of a number of erroneous theories of infancy, to the consideration of which we turn below.

In fact, both this impression and the opinion about the asocial ™ of the infant based on it are a profound error. Attentive research shows that we meet in infancy with a very specific, deeply peculiar sociality of a child, which follows from the one and only social situation of development, the originality of which is determined by two main points. The first of them consists in the totality of features of the infant, which at first glance appears, which is usually characterized as its complete biological helplessness. The baby is not able to satisfy any vital need. The most basic and basic necessities of life of the infant can be satisfied only with the help of

BABY AGE

adults caring for him. Eating and moving the baby, even turning it from side to side, is carried out only in collaboration with adults. The path through others, through adults is the main path of the child's activities at this age. Absolutely everything in the behavior of the baby is interwoven and woven into the social. Such is the objective situation of its development. We can only reveal what corresponds to this objective situation in the consciousness of the subject of development itself, m. e. baby.

Whatever happens to the infant, he always finds himself in a situation related to the adults caring for him. As a result, a completely peculiar form of social relations arises between the child and the adults around him. It is thanks to the immaturity of biological functions that everything that will later relate to the sphere of individual adaptations of the child and be performed by him independently, can now be done only through others, only in a situation of cooperation. Thus, the first contact of the child with reality (even when performing the most elementary biological functions) turns out to be entirely and completely socially mediated.

Objects appear and disappear from the sight of the child always thanks to the participation of adults. The child moves in space always on the hands of others. Changing his position, even a simple turning over, is again woven into a social situation. The elimination of irritations that hinder a child, the satisfaction of his basic needs is always accomplished (in the same way) through others. Due to all this, such a unique and unique dependence of the child on adults arises, which permeates and permeates, as already mentioned, the most seemingly individual biological needs and needs of the infant. The dependence of the infant on adults creates a completely peculiar character of the relationship of the child to reality (and to himself): these relationships are always mediated by others, always refracted through the prism of relationships with another person.

Thus, the attitude of the child to reality from the very beginning is a social relation. In this sense, the infant can be called the maximum social being. Any, even the simplest, attitude of a child to the outside world is always an attitude, refracted through relation to another person. The whole life of the baby is organized in such a way that in any situation another person is visibly or invisibly present. This can be expressed in a different way, saying that every child’s attitude to things is an attitude, carried out with the help or through another person.

The second feature, which characterizes the social situation of development in infancy, is that with the maximum dependence on adults, with full interweaving and embedding of all the behavior of the infant in the social, the child is also deprived

L. S. VYGOTSKY

the main means of social communication in the form of human speech. It is this second trait in conjunction with the first that gives the uniqueness of the social situation in which we find the infant. Throughout the organization of life, he is forced to maximize communication with adults. But this communication is communication wordless, often silent, communication of a completely peculiar kind. In contradiction between the maximum sociality of the infant (the situation in which the infant is located) and the minimal possibilities of communication and the foundation of the entire development of the child in infancy.

Infancy is a special time in the development of a child. The social situation of development in the first year of life is made up of 2 points.

First, the baby is even biologically a helpless creature. He is not able to satisfy even the basic necessities of life on his own. The life of an infant entirely depends on the adult caring for him: food, moving in space, even turning from side to side is carried out only in the help of an adult. Such mediation allows us to consider the child as a maximum social being - his attitude to reality is initially social.

Secondly, being woven into the social, the child is deprived of the main means of communication - speech. Throughout the organization of life, the child is forced to maximally communicate with an adult, but this communication is peculiar - wordless.

In contradiction between the maximum sociality and the minimum communication possibilities, the foundation for the whole development of a child in infancy is laid.

The beginning of the infant age coincides with the end of the neonatal crisis. The turning point is between the 2nd and 3rd months of a child’s life and is marked by the release of an adult as a central element of the surrounding reality.

The first specific form of response specifically to a person (on his face or voice) appears by 2-3 months. In psychology, it is called the “revitalization complex”. It includes 3 components:

smile: the first smiles can be fixed on the 1st week of the 2nd month of life. In the experiments of M.I. Lisina found that with age, the child's smile changes. The first smiles are light, with stretching the mouth, but without opening the lips. Gradually, the child begins to smile calmly, with serious calm facial expressions. In a developed “revitalization complex”, the smile is lively, wide, with mouth opening and lively mimicry;
the vocalizations, the child glitches, gurgles, babbles, cries out to meet an adult;
motor reactions, revitalization: a “revitalization complex” is opened by turning the head, mowing the eyes on an adult, weak movements of the handles and legs. Gradually, the child begins to throw up the arms, bend at the knees, turns on its side with the back arching. In the developed complex, energetic repeated back bends with an emphasis on the back of the head and heels (“bridges”) with equally vigorous straightening, as well as walking movements of the legs, raising, swinging and lowering the handles are noted.

The “revitalization complex” goes through 3 stages:

smile;
smile + gully;
smile + vocalizations + motor animation (by 3 months).

In addition, the beginning of the “revitalization complex” is associated with the generalized involvement of any adult, the end is characterized by the appearance of selective intercourse. So, already a 3-month-old baby separates his mother from the environment, and by 6 months he begins to distinguish his from others. From 8 = 9 months, the child will be active, starting the first games with adults (not because of the game itself, but because of the pleasure of communicating with adults), and by the age of 11-12 months, children already know how to not only watch adults, but also contact them for help. The child always imitates man only.

Up to 5 months, the “revitalization complex” develops and remains as a whole, and by 6 months it dies off as a single complex reaction, but its components begin to transform: smile - into facial expression, strumming - to speech, motor revival - to catch.

The general principle to which the development of the infant is subordinated is as follows: sensory development is ahead of the motor one, and this essentially distinguishes the infant from the young animals, which are the opposite: sensorics lags behind motor skills.

The development of infant motility is subject to a certain pattern: movements are improved from coarse, large, sweeping to smaller and more precise, with the movements of the handles and the upper half of the body, then the legs and the lower part of the body, improved first.

In the range from 2.5-3 months. up to 5.5-6 months. a peculiar, constant and clear reaction of feeling one's hands appears - retaining the individual muscle groups to a certain degree of contraction is new for the child. Therefore, it becomes possible to grip, abduction of shoulders, making a bridge, raising the head, lying on your back, turning to the side, feeling the breast of the mother during sucking and pronouncing syllables.

Psychologically, the most important is the development of the act of grasping - this is the forerunner of the subject-manipulative activity of the child. The dynamics of the formation of grasping are the following: in the 10-14th week - feeling of one's hands; on the 13-16th week - feeling the other items; on week 11-17, the reaction of examining one's hands; on week 15-18 - the reaction of holding the seized object; but week 17-20 is actually grasping; on week 17-23 - grabbing the legs; at week 18-21 - grabbing objects as they approach; On the 20-24th week - waving a rattle from side to side.

Of the other motor reactions of the first half of life, we note the reactions that prepare the seat (at 22-30th week the child is able to sit without support) and standing (at the 19-25th week the child stands holding adult hands).

In the second half of the year, repeated, chain reactions and the reaction of imitation appear.

Repeated reactions are tapping with a hand, an object, tapping an object with an object, swinging it while sitting, shaking the perils of the crib, patting it with a foot, pronouncing repeated syllables. Chain reactions - crawling, landing, getting up, walking. Imitation is the movement of the hands of a child, imitating the actions of adults ("ladies", "goodbye", "flew, sat on the little head", etc.); head movements (wiggle); leg movements (stomping), as well as voice and voice modulations.

If the repeated and chain reactions appear together, then the imitation reactions - a little later. New in these reactions is that one differentiated movement follows another in a certain order. One movement is associated with another. All this forms the basis for the development of more complex movements - crawling, sitting, and most importantly - for the development of subject-manipulative activity.

The development of motility is described in detail in the literature, so we will only track its general line. So, at the age of 1 month., Being laid on the stomach, the child may slightly lift his chin; to 2 months he tries to lift the head, holds it, tries to raise the chest; 2.5-3 months he holds the head; by 3 months the child reaches for the object, but, as a rule, misses. At 4 months. a baby can sit with support (it will sit down the sooner it takes possession to turn from back to belly), at 4-5 months. begins to roll from back to belly (by the way, this is a prerequisite for crawling). In 5 months the child precisely grasps objects with his hand. By 6 months he can sit in a high chair and grab swinging objects. By 7-9 months. the ability to grab small objects with two fingers appears, and hence there is an interest in exploring holes, holes, grooves, cracks, etc. In 6-7 months he is able to sit without support, and by 8 months. sits down without help, leaning on the handles.

From 9 to 12 months. crawling on all fours is improved, while the torso is kept in a horizontal position, and the head is raised high. From this situation, the child seeks to get items. By 7-9 months. he learns to stand with support and crawl on his stomach - at this time an equilibrium reaction is formed. By 10 months can walk with both hands and with her legs wide apart, and crawl quickly, leaning on her hands and knees; An 11-month-old baby can stand without support, and a one-year-old baby can walk with one handle. At 13 months. the child begins to walk on his own, and by the age of one and a half, he can crawl over steps and climb on low objects.

The time when a child begins to sit, stand, walk, grab, depends not only on the development of his nervous system, but also on how much the baby has the ability to acquire motor skills. All the listed skills can appear late, if you completely deprive the baby of the opportunity to actively move. With special motor skills training, children can master them before. For example, in Africa, children often begin to sit, stand and walk before European or American, as mothers especially encourage the learning of these skills. But skills that are not specifically taught in African and European children appear at the same time. To think that early motor development is the guarantor of equally successful mental development is wrong: the general physical development in the first two years of life does not predetermine the mental development of the child in the future.

But no matter how fast the motor reactions develop, they still lag far behind the development of sensorics.

Sensory development. All the researchers who studied the higher nervous activity of the infant point to the early stages of the formation of conditioned reflexes, which indicates the early readiness of the “sensory instrument of the body” (IM Sechenov). But besides this, some life experience is necessary for mental development. Although many different stimuli act on the nervous system of the infant, only a small part of them, and only gradually, begins to cause sensations. The cognition of the world begins with sensations, but in the infant their appearance and differentiation are hampered by the weak development of the nervous system, especially the cortical part of the analyzer, and also by the predominance of excitation over inhibition (only by the 4th month they are slightly balanced).

To 0.5-1 months. A child can only have short-term auditory and visual concentration: he stops looking at a luminous point, listens for sounds and can distinguish them. It is not possible to establish precisely when babies become sensitive to light or color, sounds and smells. The sensitivity of an infant can only be judged indirectly, primarily by its motor responses. The sensory of the infant develops faster than the motor sphere, although both are closely related.

Vision. During the first 2 months of life, the child develops intensive vision, fixed by eye movements, while differentiated hand movements are still absent.

The act of looking develops like this: in 2-3 weeks. convergence of eyes appears, but on the subject it is still very difficult for the child to stop looking. In 3-5 weeks. there are very short gaze delays on the subject. In 4-5 weeks. the child can follow the subject at a distance of 1-1.5 m, and in 2 months. learns to follow a moving object at a distance of 2-4 m, in 3 months. - at a distance of 4-7 m. In the period from 6 to 10 weeks. the child can trace the object moving in a circle (therefore moving carousels with bright objects or pictures are useful). Further, various functional connections of the eye with the organs of movement and other senses are established. By 4 months. the act of looking is already quite formed.

However, one should not overestimate the importance of early vision development: by the 4th month of life it allows the child just keep track of the moving object, at this age the movements of the object cause eye movement, and there are no movements of the eyes themselves on the subject, therefore the baby cannot examine anything and does not carry out a visual search for objects. These functions are more closely related to motor skills and develop later, on the one hand, due to hand movements, and on the other hand, due to the increasing understanding of speech. We have already talked about the appearance of 4 months. groping movements of the handles. The principal content of this reaction is that the hand moves not on the subject, but on the subject. By 5 months formed by grasping, which is associated with the formation of visual-motor coordination. It represents the first directional action and marks the formation of various manipulations with the subject.

Further development moves towards the improvement of visual-motor coordination. By 7 months. coordination between the visual perception of an object and the movement towards it is established quickly. Moving objects, especially bright, noticeable, easily attract the gaze of the child to themselves and are fixed for a longer time than colorless and motionless.

Sensitivity to color, apparently, develops quite early. It was established experimentally that a 3-month-old baby distinguishes red color. In the second half of the first year of life, it becomes noticeable that the child clearly and steadfastly prefers red to blue or white, although it is able to distinguish between red, yellow and blue-green.

It attracts and permanently holds the attention of infants mainly the movement of objects, black and white contrasts, changes in the size and position of objects in space. Experiments with moving images have shown that it is worthwhile to place the child in a dark room, as he immediately begins to look around and look for subtle shadows and contours.

Certain types of images have been found to be more attractive to babies. So, children under one year old will look more at images of a concentric form, pay more attention to images from curved elements than from straight ones, and are more interested in the transition of a straight line into a curved one. Especially babies are interested in resizing and spatial orientation of individual elements of the image. So, in one of the experiments, the child was first shown a pair of identical pictures (two circles, inside which are “eyes”), and then the same image paired with another (larger “eyes”; vertically positioned “eyes”; three eyes instead of two , eyes shifted up or down, moved out of the circle, square or triangular eyes, etc.). Only on larger images and a vertical position does he focus more on the initial image. If the child was attracted only by an increase in the object, it would be considered just an adaptive response, since in the real world the perception of the object’s size is related to the distance from the observer’s eyes. More surprisingly, babies are so attracted by the transition from horizontally to vertically positioned objects of the pattern and are of little interest in transformations of a different kind.

It is also interesting that, although the difference between the wavelengths of two shades of blue and green and blue is the same, babies are watching with much greater interest the transition of blue to green than from one shade of blue to another.

It was noted that infants are able to distinguish a new phenomenon from the original one: when the same stimulus is repeatedly shown to a child, the extinction reaction of the orienting reaction is observed — the child ceases to be interested in them. But it is only necessary to slightly change the initial stimulus, as the approximate reaction flashes again (for example, if you show a red ball for a long time, and then a red cube or a ball, but of a different color, instead). Most children look at the new stimulus longer. Therefore, babies differentiate between colors and shapes. The "novelty" to which they react may be the most diverse - changes in the color or its hue, sound, shape, movement trajectory or the method of this movement, etc.

However, children do not always look at new objects longer. There are other manifestations of their behavior: for example, babies change their facial expressions, vocalizations decrease or increase, new movements appear, some even change heart rhythms; in newborns, the response to novelty is determined by the intensity of sucking.

Hearing. The timing of the appearance of hearing sensitivity in a child is very difficult to establish. In the first 2-3 days of life, the cavities of his middle and inner ear are filled with amniotic mucus, the Eustachian tube is not filled with air, and the lumen of the tympanic membrane is almost closed by a swollen mucous membrane. The first reactions indicating that the baby senses sounds are flinching of the eyelids, hands, involuntary movements of the facial muscles and torso in response to strong cotton at the very ear, knocking the door, noise from a key falling near the baby’s bed, etc.

On the 10-12th day, the baby reacts to the sounds of the human voice. On the 2nd month the sound of voices, musical sounds (for example, of a violin) can even cause him to slow down his food and motor reflexes: the child freezes on hearing the voice of the mother.

On the 4th month. a baby not only hears sounds, but can also localize them in space: it turns its eyes and head towards sound.

After 4-5 months it produces a differentiation reaction of sounds: the child distinguishes the voices of loved ones. In the second half of the first year of life, this differentiation becomes more subtle and precise: the infant distinguishes the intonations with which an adult addresses him. In 7-9-month-old children, one can observe a distinctly different reaction to cheerful and sad music, to a different pace and rhythm. The most significant acquisition of the end of the 1st year of life is the ability to distinguish the sounds of human speech, primarily such phonemes as “pa-pa”, “ba-ba”, “yes-yes”, “give”. These are prerequisites for the future development of speech.

Not much is known about the auditory sensitivity of children, but, nevertheless, there are a number of interesting observations. We have already said that even very young children can distinguish objects by the sounds they make. M. Wertheimer showed that already newborns look towards the source of the sound, correlating the sound with the presence of something and expecting it to see something. Similarly, babies stretch a pen to touch a sound source in the dark: they hope to grab an item, although they have only auditory information about it.

In the experiments of Aronson and Rosenblum, the existence of even more complex visual-auditory coordination was proved. In their experiments, the child and mother were blocking a soundproof transparent screen. Mother's voice was given to the child through two speakers. With equal removal of the intensity of sound from these symmetrically arranged speakers, the sound seems to come from its visible source. When the volume is shifted to one of the sides, the perceived position of the sound source shifts towards a louder sound and ceases to coincide with the visible position of the mother's mouth. In the latter situation, the three-week-old baby shows signs of sheer anxiety. From this, psychologists have concluded that already at this age the child expects that the voice comes from the mouth, and therefore shows a negative reaction.

In the experiments of T. Bauer children under the age of 5 months. willingly and not without a certain skill, they pull hands and seize a sounding object in complete darkness. Older children almost never make such attempts, and by 7 months. these actions disappear altogether. These reactions are restored not earlier than a year, but with the same success.

Smell, taste, tactile sensitivity. Very little is known about smell, taste and tactile sensation. Studies show that by the end of the 1st month. babies produce a positive reflex to smell. By the end of the 3rd month. children clearly differentiate pleasant and unpleasant smells. Just as early in his mimicry, the child reacts to the sweet, bitter and sour taste (salty - much later).

The sensations of touch in a child are very thin and are found very early. The slightest folds on the diaper and clothes can cause a negative reaction - crying, movements of the whole body.

On the 3rd month sensitivity to temperature discrimination is revealed: for example, the child responds positively to the temperature of the water in the bath at 33 degrees, and negatively to 32 degrees.

In infancy, all the necessary conditions for the activity of the child, beyond sleep, nutrition, cry, are created. As new forms of behavior, he appears playing experimentation, babbling, the first vigorous activity of the senses, the first active reaction to the situation, the first coordination of two simultaneously operating organs, the first social reactions — expressive movements associated with functional pleasure and surprise.

The passivity with which the newborn belonged to the world in infancy gives way to active interest, and this activity makes possible the development of perception, memory, attention, etc. Many authors believe that affective-type motility in infancy is replaced by sensory-motor activity. L.S. Vygotsky writes that by the beginning of this period, a child has the opportunity to go beyond his immediate instincts and instinctive tendencies in his activity. For him, as it were, the outside world appears.

Between the 5th and 6th months, according to the observations of many psychologists, imitation appears, and by 10 months. - the first use of tools and the use of words expressing desire. Proceeding from all this, the entire infancy period is conventionally divided into 3 stages: the period of passivity (up to 2-3 months), the period of receptive interest (up to 5-6 months) and the period of active interest (it starts from 5-6 months. and ends far beyond infancy). From the 10th month One can expect manifestations of the crisis of the 1st year, which serves as a connecting link between infancy and early childhood.

For a child's new activity, only one path to the outside world is open - the path that runs through an adult. If the child is physically separated from the mother at the moment of birth, then he will biologically depend on her until the very end of the infant period, until he learns to walk on his own, and his psychological emancipation from the mother will generally only occur in early childhood. Therefore, the main neoplasm of the infant age is the initial consciousness of the psychic community with the adult, with the mother, prior to the separation of one’s own “I”.

Initially, the need to connect the infant with an adult leads (in the absence of speech) to the emergence of special, nonverbal forms of their communication. The first form of such communication is the emotional reaction of the child to an adult in the “revitalization complex” (the beginning of infancy). It creates the basis for the emergence and development of other forms of communication, in particular for the emergence of imitation sounds and understanding of the speech of surrounding adults.

First, as we remember, the “revitalization complex” is demonstrated in relation to any adult, from 4-5 months. begins differentiation on "their" and "alien". In the future, emotional reactions are even more differentiated - already within “their own” - depending on the nature and frequency of communication with them. Already in the 1st year of life, a selective attitude towards different adults is formed. Positive attitudes towards adults are caused by those actions that are associated with pleasant emotions (caress the child, take it in their arms, talk to it), and negative - with negative (cry, adult irritation).

The prevailing positive reaction is transferred to objects. Therefore, objects in the hands of a “pleasant” adult acquire an attractive character and begin to themselves cause positive reactions in the child. The emotional attraction of objects for babies is secondary, as it occurs through an adult.

In infancy, most of the emotional reactions of a child to an adult can be conventionally called passive communication reactions — they are caused by the activity of the adults themselves, and not the child. In the second half of the year, the first reverse reactions appear; the child begins to make attempts to attract an adult to himself, “flirts” with him, pulls the arms towards the person who has come up, shouts or whimpers if he is not paid attention. The appearance of these first reactions indicates an increasing need for communication with adults by the end of infancy.

From this point on, communication will develop towards bilateral contact, and this needs to be reinforced. The more often, in response to its signals, the child will receive a benevolent response from an adult, the easier it will be to master the way in which the corresponding actions of adults to their needs are triggered. At the same time, in such a contact, the child becomes aware of himself and various actions with objects.

Communication of children of the first years of life was studied in detail by the laboratory of M.I. Lisina. To study the developmental needs of children in communication, it has identified several criteria that make it possible to reliably judge the existence of such a need in a child. It:

attention and interest of the child to an adult: this reveals the child’s focus on the knowledge of the adult and the fact that the adult becomes the object of special activity of children;
emotional manifestations of the child in relation to an adult: they find an adult's assessment of a child;
initiative actions of the child, aimed at expressing oneself, attracting an adult to him;
the child’s reaction to an adult’s attitude toward him, which reveals the children's self-esteem and their perception of the adult’s assessment.

According to M.I. Lisinoy, to 2.5 months. children can state the need for communication. In order for any need to develop, it must be stimulated by motives. The motive of communication is the partner in communication, for the child it is an adult.

M.I. Lisina proposed to distinguish 3 groups of communication motives: cognitive, business, and personal. Cognitive motives arise in the process of satisfying the need for new impressions, for information, at the same time with which the child has reasons to appeal to an adult. Business motives are born in the process of satisfying the need for vigorous activity as a result of the necessary help of adults. Personal motifs are specific to the sphere of interaction between the child and the adult, which constitutes the very activity of communication. If cognitive and business motives play a service role in communication, serving other needs, mediating other, more distant motives, then personal motives get their ultimate satisfaction in communication.

Communication of the child, especially a small one, with an adult proceeds on a form of action. An action is characterized by a goal, towards which it is directed, and a task that it solves. The action consists of even smaller psychological elements - means (operations) of communication. The study of communication between the child and the adult led to the allocation of 3 groups of communication tools:

expressive mimic means
subject-effective means
speech operations.

The analysis showed that the individual lines characterizing different aspects of communication, intertwining, give rise to several regularly changing stages, in which the activity of communication acts in a coherent, qualitatively peculiar form. The form of communication is characterized by 5 parameters:

the time of its occurrence;
the place occupied by this form of communication in the system of the child’s wider life activity;
the main content of the needs satisfied by the child during this form of communication;
leading motives that encourage a child at a certain stage to communicate with other adults;
the main means of communication, through which within this form of communication is the contact of the child with adults.

The form of communication is the activity of communication at a certain stage of its development, taken in an integral set of the listed features and parameters. This scheme we will use in the future, describing the features of communication in the preschool years.

Communication, which is formed in the first half of the child’s life, M.I. Lisin called situational-personal. It appears when the children have not yet captured the grasping movements of a focused character. Interactions with adults unfold at this time against the background of a kind of general vital activity: the baby does not yet have any adaptive types of behavior, all his relations with the outside world are mediated by relationships with close adults who ensure the survival of the child and the satisfaction of all his primary organic needs. Caring for an adult after an infant creates conditions in which a child begins to perceive an adult as a special object, and then “discovers” and the fact that the satisfaction of his needs depends on an adult. This places a need in front of the child and gives him the opportunity to develop an intensive cognitive activity with respect to the adult, which becomes the basis for the emergence of communication activities. In a developed form, situational-personal communication is found in the revitalization complex. Communication of the infant with adults proceeds independently, outside of any other activity and constitutes the leading activity of this age.

Until month The motives of the child’s communication with adults are mostly personal. Business - absorbed by them completely. Cognitive motives occupy a secondary place; their content is determined by the fact that an adult serves as the main object of knowledge for the child, as well as a factor organizing the first research acts. Operations with the help of which communication is carried out belong to the category of expressive-mimic means of communication.

Situational-personal communication is of great importance in the mental development of the child. The benevolence and attention of an adult cause positive experiences that increase the vitality of the child, activate all his functions. For the purposes of communication, children need to learn to perceive the effects of adults, and this stimulates the formation of perceptual actions in the visual, auditory and other analyzers. Learned in the "social sphere", these acquisitions are then used to familiarize themselves with the objective world, which leads to progress in the cognitive development of the child.

With the development of grasping, manipulating objects, situational-personal communication begins to get rid of itself. A child who is able to act with objects takes a new position in the child-adult system. From 6 months up to 2 years, a situational-business type of communication is formed, which proceeds against the background of practical interaction between a child and an adult. We will talk about him in the analysis of early childhood.

If at this age a child is deprived of communication and attention or limited in contacts with adults, then a deep physical and mental retardation, called hospitalism, develops. Its manifestations are: delayed development of movements, especially walking, a sharp lag in mastering speech, emotional impoverishment, meaningless movements of an obsessive nature (swaying of the body, etc.).

It has been revealed that the cause of hospitalism is the dissatisfaction of basic social and psychological needs: in a variety of stimulations, in cognition, in primary social and emotional ties (especially with the mother), in self-actualization. Hospitalism arises not only as a result of isolation or separation of the child, but also in situations of emotional indifference to him, the lack of benevolent attention from close adults.

The development of speech understanding and speaking. In the second half of the year, the child’s understanding of the speech of surrounding adults is intensively developed, therefore at this time it is necessary to create special conditions for such an understanding. Prior to this, speech was already included in child care, was a kind of accompaniment of the actions that the adult carried out in relation to the child. The meaning of this speech is enormous: the child listens to it, understands its general emotional tone, and later - it identifies individual words in it. However, the meaning of this speech is also limited, since for the child it does not clearly relate the words to the objects they denote.

Actually, the communication between the child and the adult, which is formed in the first year of life, does not require the child to be proficient in speech — he only masters it. However, this does not mean that the baby does not encounter speech. Just the opposite: verbal influences constitute a significant part of an adult’s behavior towards a child. Therefore, it is early in infants, even at the stage of pre-speech communication, a special relationship is formed with the sounds of speech due to their inseparable connection with the adult figure.

Of particular interest as prerequisites for the future development of speech are vocalizations. At first they have the form of short, and later singing sounds, in which the child’s state is expressed, ranging from delight, joy, pleasure (crying, squealing) to intense concentration (grunting). The vocalizations of babies are pre-verbal, although some may resemble familiar words. So, the baby can babble "dya-dya", but this sound complex does not differ in fixed sound, does not have object correlation and does not bear nominative load - with its help the child does not call the man at all, and even more so - the brother of one of the parents. Vocalization occurs, as a rule, as an accompaniment to the child's active actions, they serve mainly as voice accompaniment of subject actions. By the end of the 1st year, vocalizations are used to communicate with adults in order to attract them, to keep near them.

In the aggregate, listening to adult speech and vocalizations of M.I. Lisina called voice communication - a special kind of personal and business situational communication. With the development of voice communication, speech hearing is formed and speech articulations are trained. The infant distinguishes verbal speech from all other sounds and reacts more emotionally to it.

The development of speech hearing is on the path of increasing selectivity. The selective attitude to speech sounds is the first step of this development. By the end of the first year of life in children, there is a deepening analysis of the speech sounds themselves: two different parameters are distinguished - timbre and tonal. For speech sounds, the main generators and constants are specific timbres. A European's speech hearing is basically a timbre hearing.

In the second half of the year, the child moves to a more complex interaction with an adult, therefore new means of communication appear. Such a means becomes speech, at first passive (understanding), then active (speaking).

To master the speech, it is necessary to separate the sense-differentiating units of the language from the accompanying sound components. In most languages, including Russian, phone sense is a sense discriminating unit. Mastering speech is possible only on the basis of a sufficiently developed phonemic hearing, which begins to form intensively in early childhood, together with the pitch ear.

N.L. Figurin and MP Denisov tried to describe the stages of the development of speaking:

stage gukanya and guleniya,
stage of babble and babbling,
stage of the emergence of the first pseudoword, word sentences.

Initially, guttural sounds “h”, “k”, “x” appear randomly in vocalizations during gouling, usually without accompaniment of a vowel, less often with “s”: “Yi”, “ky”, “xy”. By the end of the year, these consonants are pronounced distinctly by the infant, which indicates the possibility of differentiated work of individual muscles of the larynx. Following the guttural sounds of melodious sounds appear — the same guiley– grunt, but not short, single, intermittent, but long, singsong. The child is very good at 11-13 months.

While walking (and first without walking), the child blows bubbles of saliva. This reaction indicates the formation of differentiated innervation of the lips. The first consonants appearing in syllabic combinations are the labial consonants “b” and “m”. Based on them by the 4th month. at first, rarely - by chance, then again - into a chain, the syllables “ba”, “ma” appear (more often, “ba”). Further, all appearing syllables will be pronounced repeatedly: “ba-ba-ba-ba”, etc.

By 5 months soft vowels "I" and "and" appear, they can be heard in a separate utterance, but more often in a syllable combination.

Of the hard vowels ("a", "e", "s", "y") "y" appears a little later, and "o" - by the end of the year. Their appearance depends on the establishment of innervation of the muscles of the larynx, lips and tongue.

On the 7-9th month appear "n", "t", "d", "n", dental and nasal ng, and on the 9th month. you can hear “in”, “l”, “c” and very clearly “k” and “ha”. The last sizzling and whistling sounds appear.

From the 5-6th month imitative voice reactions gradually appear. It is easiest for a child to imitate words meaning the names of frequently used objects, animals, and also onomatopoeic words. Often, only the first syllable is pronounced: “ki” = “pussy”, “ba” = “grandmother”. Much less often a child imitates pointless sounds. Repeated naming is fixed as conditioned reflexes: at the sight of a cat, the child says “ki”, at the sight of the mother - “ma”, etc. This is the first naming attempt. The child cannot yet call, but it can call. By 8-9 months. imitations of naming actions (pi-pi, bo-bo, yum-yum) may appear.

In the first year, the child can actively use (after 10 months) from 1-5 to 7-16 words. D. B. Elkonin considered the first words to be one of the evidence of a child’s transition from infancy to early childhood. The first words are remarkable also by the fact that the child, using them, makes the greatest meaning, the most important discovery for his further development: he learns that every thing, in general, everything has its own name. More precisely, from this moment on it opens the connection between the sign and the value, the sign-symbolic function of consciousness begins to develop.

The first words are called pseudowords, because they differ in features:

there are sharp phonetic differences between the words of the child and the words of the adult; the sound composition of the words of the child is different from the sound composition of the words of adults; these are a) words that are not similar to the words of adults (“ika” - “locker”, “adiga” - “fish yes !?”, etc.); b) words-scraps of words of adults, more often - roots (“ka” - “porridge”, “pa” - “dropped”, etc.); c) words that are a distortion of the words of adults, but with the preservation of their phonetic and rhythmic pattern ("ti-ti" - "clock", "ninja" - "do not");
onomatopoeic words (“av-av” - “dog”, “mu-mu” - “cow”);
children's words are characterized by ambiguity, so, "aka" can mean candy, berries, pieces of sugar, mosaic chips; "Yuk" can mean the whole sentence "Ducks swim in the water", etc.

Based on these features, children's speech of this period is called autonomous. The first to describe and appreciate its value was Charles Darwin. From the originality of children's speech, it follows that communication with it should be different from communication with the help of speech in adults. At this time, communication is possible only between the child and those people who understand the meaning of his words (the first feature), are dedicated to the “cipher” of children's speech. L.S. Vygotsky noted that German psychologists have long called the children's language Ammensprache, i.e. in the language of nurses, nannies, as it was believed that it is artificially created by adults for children and is distinguished by the fact that it is understandable only to people raising this child.

Certainly, there are certain speech distortions (the second feature): for example, the child is often told “bo-bo” instead of “painful”, and while pointing to a big house and a big horse, they say “house” and “horse” (when, as witted LS Vygotsky, one would have to say “house” and “horse”). But this is not the main thing. Communication with children at this time is possible only in a specific situation (the third feature), where the first words are used in close connection with actions and when the subject is in front of the eyes.

And finally, the fourth feature of the autonomous language of children is that the possible connections between individual words are quite peculiar: this language is agrammatic, it does not have a substantive way of connecting individual words and meanings into a coherent speech (in adults this is done using syntax and etymology).

Autonomous children's speech is a necessary period in the speech development of every normal child. It can even be used for early psychological diagnostics of the level of speech development. For example, the child's underdevelopment often manifests itself in a change in the period of autonomous speech. For a normal child, autonomous speech is always a bridge over which a child moves from a speechless period to a linguistic period. The beginning and end of autonomous speech marks the beginning and end of the crisis of the first year of life.

The empirical content of the crisis of the first year of life is connected with several points.

The first is the development of walking. At the end of the first - the beginning of the second year of life, it is impossible to say for sure about a child whether he is walking or not walking, there is already walking or not, which is a contradictory dialectical unity. Any child goes through this stage. And even if it seems that the child “did not walk and suddenly went right away,” this means that we are dealing with a latent period of emergence and formation and relatively late detection of walking. But often after such a sudden start of walking, there is a loss of it, indicating that full maturation has not yet occurred. Only in early childhood the child becomes walking, badly, with difficulty, but walking, and for him walking becomes the main form of movement in space.

The main thing in the acquired act of walking, according to DB. Elkonin is not only expanding the child’s space, but also the fact that the child separates himself from the adult. For the first time, a disintegration of a single social situation “We” occurs: now it is not the mother who leads the child, but the child leads the mother wherever she wants. Walking, therefore, is an important primary neoplasm of infancy, marking the rupture of an old developmental situation.

The second point relates to speech, to the appearance of the first word. At the end of the first year of a child’s life, we are confronted with an ambivalent moment, when one cannot say whether he is talking or not. It is really impossible to say whether a child has an autonomous, situational, emotionally colored speech that is understandable only to his relatives, whether he has a speech or not, because he does not have a speech in our sense of the word, but there is no wordless period, as he speaks. Thus, we are again dealing with a transitional education that marks the boundaries of the crisis. Its meaning is the same: where there was unity, it becomes two - an adult and a child (the old situation has broken up and a new content has grown between them - the objective activity).

The third moment of the crisis, according to LS. Vygotsky belongs to the sphere of affects and will. In connection with the crisis, the child has the first acts of protest, opposition, opposition to others. Such reactions are revealed with greater force and are fixed as forms of behavior with improper upbringing. Especially they are detected when a child is denied something, something is forbidden: he screams, throws himself on the floor, refuses to walk (if he is already walking), kicks on the floor, pushes adults away, etc.

It is rather difficult to speak about the development of the infant's emotional sphere. The primary vivid manifestation of emotionality directed at an adult is the “revitalization complex”. But the fact is that this reaction was not originally differentiated: it is addressed to everyone and even to an ugly mask.

The appearance of smile and laughter is usually closely associated with changes in cognitive development. However, the frequency of smiles addressed to others also depends on external circumstances. It has been established that children raised at home smile more often, and the frequency of smiles reaches their maximum earlier in a few weeks than in children raised in orphanages (about 4 months). This pattern is maintained throughout the first year of life.

In infants older than 6 months. can detect emotional attachment to certain people. Usually, though not always, the first object of affection is the mother. Within 1-2 months After the first signs of affection appear, most children begin to show affection for their father, brothers, sisters, and grandparents. Signs of affection: the object of affection can soothe and console the child better and faster than others; the infant is more often than others appeals to him for help and consolation; in the presence of an object of affection, he is less likely to fear. For example, in unfamiliar surroundings, one-year-old children are less likely to show clear signs of fear or intention to cry when the mother is in the room. The child is ready to communicate and play with a stranger, if someone is close to him, but if he is frightened or excited by something, he will immediately turn to the object of affection. To establish the degree of danger of a situation, the child, as a rule, also refers to his object of affection. For example, a child approaching a new object, an unfamiliar toy, will instantly stop and crawl to the mother if her face shows a fright or she utters any meaningless phrase in a frightened voice. But if the mother smiles and says something in a reassuring voice, the baby will crawl back to the toy.

From the first year of life, the child’s face reflects fear, surprise, suffering, pleasure. Initially, they are related to the satisfaction of basic biological needs (for example, in food), but by the end of the year they extend to a wider range of phenomena (for example, to communicate with adults) and to the child’s own activities (for example, reaching the subject and grasping it, standing and squatting in the crib, etc.). Even the classical psychologists noted that the development of emotional life follows this line: first, emotion as the end result of satisfying a need; then the emotion formed in the process of activity; and, finally, anticipatory emotion.

From the very first days in the behavior of the baby there are noticeable differences. Some children scream a lot, cry, others behave calmly; some sleep at certain hours, others sleep and stay awake outside of any schedule; some are mobile, constantly turning and moving, others are able to sit for a long time and lie quiet.

Such differences, in addition to being caused by the environment and behavior of adults, are associated with differences in temperament. To study the temperament of young children is very difficult. Known studies of American psychologists Thomas and Chess (1977) who analyzed the temperaments of babies on the following indicators: activity level, rhythm (regularity of sleep and food) moodiness, alertness, attention span, excitability threshold of reaction, readiness to adapt to new conditions.

When classifying children according to these indicators, the researchers identified 3 groups of children: calm, difficult and inhibited. Calm children (75% of all studied) are cheerful, eat and sleep at the same time, adapt well, they are not easy to upset. Difficult children (about 10%) are capricious, the need for food and sleep is shown irregularly, they are afraid of new people and situations, they are characterized by increased excitability. Inhibited children (about 15%) are relatively inactive and capricious, trying to get rid of the new or react negatively to it, but the more they are mastered in the new situation, the more adequate their reactions become. By age 7, difficult children have more emotional problems than children of other groups. Obviously, the parents of such children sometimes sharply, irritably react to their behavior, thereby deepening the nervousness inherent in children from birth.

Describing the emotional life of the infant as a whole, we note the following. During the first 3-4 months, in addition to the “revitalization complex,” a series of reactions appear expressing various emotional states. One of them is characterized by inhibition of motor activity and a decrease in heart rate in response to an unexpected phenomenon. Psychologists call this state “surprise in response to surprise”: the baby freezes, and then moves back.

Another combination of changes is characterized by increased motor activity, closing the eyes, increasing heart rate and crying. These changes occur in response to pain, cold and hunger. Psychologists call this reaction an “alarming state in response to physical discomfort.”

The third combination includes a decrease in muscle tone and closing of the eyes, observed after feeding, and it is called "relaxation in response to the satisfaction of needs."

The fourth combination includes motor activity, a smile, joyful babble at the sight of a familiar phenomenon or when communicating. Psychologists call this complex response a “revitalization complex” or “arousal in the perception of a familiar phenomenon.”

10-month-old babies have new emotional reactions. One of them - fear when meeting with a stranger or a phenomenon. In this situation, the child has 8 months. one can observe a frightened expression of the face: lips are pursed, eyes are widened, eyebrows are raised. Another emotion, also observed at the age of about 8 months, was referred to by psychologists as “anger caused by disappointment.” It appears in the form of resistance and crying, when a child’s activity is interrupted or an interesting object disappears from his field of view. In the first year of life, babies also react to anger or joy in other people. One-year-old kids, seeing that someone is angry, get upset, and noticing manifestations of tenderness between other people, became tender or found jealousy.

The main, leading type of activity of a child in infancy is emotionally direct communication, the subject of which for a child is an adult. The first need that is formed in a child is the need for another person. Only by developing alongside an adult person can a child become a person himself. "The first thing we have to raise in our children and what develops throughout childhood," writes D. B. Elkonin, "is the need of children for a person, for another person, first for mother, father, then for friend, friend, collective and finally in society. " Special attention should be paid to the development of this need: you need to talk with the child, smile, tell fairy tales to him, without being embarrassed that the child does not understand everything from what the adult tells him. In this sense, M. I. Lisin spoke of the "preemptive influence of an adult": he unleashes a huge arsenal of means on the child, which will only gradually become the individual means of his mental activity. The specific reaction of the smile on the mother’s face is an indication that the social situation of the child’s mental development has already taken shape. This is the social situation of the child’s connectedness to an adult. L. Vygotsky called it a social situation “WE.” The child cannot do anything without an adult. Life and the activity of the child is interwoven with the life and activities of the adult caring for him. In general, this is a situation of comfort, and the central element of this comfort is an adult. The social situation of the inseparable unity of the child and the adult contains a contradiction: the child needs an adult as much as possible and at the same time has no specific means of influencing him.This contradiction is resolved throughout the entire period of infancy.The resolution of this contradiction leads to the destruction of the social situation of development that gave rise to it. the fact of the predominant development of sensorics in a given period, that is, of the sense organs, and not of movements, is also connected, since an adult takes the necessary care and maintenance operations possibility thus formed bodies, which passes the most important information for mental development. The development of perception throughout the first years of life, in fact, the whole school age is one of the most important mental
processes. From the development of perception at this age, all other cognitive processes, primarily thinking, depend in many respects. However, the role of an adult is not limited only to caring for a child, creating favorable conditions for the development of perception. Studies of many psychologists (M. I. Lisin, L. I. Bozhovich, E. Erickson, A. Adler, A. Freud, J. Bowlby, and others) showed that emotional contact is extremely important for a child in the first months of life, attachment and protection that comes from a close adult. Proving that the leading activity in infancy is emotional and personal communication with an adult, Lisina conducted a series of experiments in which she showed that the cognitive development, and not only the development of emotions and speech, is associated with communication with an adult. For most children raised in a family, the social development situation in this period appears as favorable, as adults try to create all conditions for the development of babies.

The social situation of the inseparable unity of the child and the adult contains a contradiction: the child most needs an adult and at the same time has no specific means of influencing him. This contradiction is resolved throughout the entire period of infancy.

The social situation of the general life of the child with the mother leads to the emergence of a new type of activity - the direct emotional communication between the child and the mother. Specific feature this type of activity is that the subject of this activity is another person. But if the subject of activity is another person, then this activity is the essence of communication. From the adult, the child becomes the subject of activity. On the part of the child, the occurrence of the first forms of exposure to an adult can be observed. So, very soon the child’s voice responses acquire the character of an emotionally active call, the whimper turns into a behavioral act aimed at an adult.

Communication during this period should be emotionally positive. Thus, the child creates an emotionally positive character, an emotionally positive tone, which is a sign of physical and mental health.

The social situation of the mental development of a child of infancy - situation of the inseparable unity of the child and the adult, the social situation of comfort.

By nine months, the child is on its feet, begins to walk. The main thing in the act of walking is not only that the space of the child expands, but also that the child separates himself from the adult. For the first time there is a fragmentation of a single social situation "we", now it’s not mother who leads the child, but he leads the mother where she wants. Walking - the first major neoplasm infancy, marking the rupture of an old developmental situation.

Second major neoplasm this age - appearance of the first word. The peculiarity of the first words is that they are indicative gestures. Walking and enrichment of substantive actions require speech that would satisfy communication about subjects. Speech, like all neoplasms of age, is transitional. This is an autonomous, situational, emotionally colored speech, understandable only to loved ones. This speech is specific in its structure, consisting of scraps of words. But whatever that speech is, it represents a new quality that can serve as a criterion for the fact that the old social situation of a child’s development has broken up. Where there was unity, there were two: an adult and a child. Between them has grown a new content - the subject activity.

2. The social situation of development and leading activities

The social situation of development during this period can be described as a situation of connectedness, the inseparable unity of the child and the adult, the situation “WE” (L. Vygotsky). It consists of 2 points.

First, the baby is even biologically a helpless creature. The life of an infant entirely depends on the adult caring for him: food, moving in space, even turning from side to side, is carried out only with the help of an adult. Such mediation allows us to consider the child as a maximum social being - his attitude to reality is initially social.

Secondly, being included in the social space, the child is deprived of the main means of communication - speech. Throughout the organization of life, the child is forced to maximally communicate with an adult, but this communication is peculiar - wordless.

In contradiction between the maximum sociality and the minimum communication possibilities, the foundation for the whole development of a child in infancy is laid. Therefore, the main neoplasm of the infant age is the initial consciousness of the psychic community with the adult, with the mother, prior to the separation of one’s own “I”.

The leading activity of infancy is the emotional-direct communication.

Communication of children of the first years of life was studied in detail by the laboratory of M. I. Lisina. To study the developmental needs of children in communication, it has identified several criteria that make it possible to reliably judge the existence of such a need in a child. It:

1) the attention and interest of the child to an adult: this reveals the child’s orientation towards the knowledge of the adult and the fact that the adult becomes the object of special activity of children;

2) the emotional manifestations of the child in relation to an adult: they find an adult's assessment of a child;

3) initiative actions of a child, aimed at expressing oneself, attracting an adult to him;

4) the child's reaction to the attitude of an adult towards him, in which the self-esteem of the children and their perception of the adult's assessment are found.

According to the data of MI Lisina, by 2.5 months. children can state the need for communication. In order for any need to develop, it must be stimulated by motives. The motive of communication is the partner in communication, for the child it is an adult.

M. I. Lisin proposed to allocate 3 groups of motives for communication: cognitive, business and personal. Cognitive motives arise in the process of satisfying the need for new impressions, for information, at the same time with which the child has reasons to appeal to an adult. Business motives are born in the process of satisfying the need for vigorous activity as a result of the necessary help of adults. Personal motifs are specific to the sphere of interaction between the child and the adult, which constitutes the very activity of communication. If cognitive and business motives play a service role in communication, serving other needs, mediating other, more distant motives, then personal motives get their ultimate satisfaction in communication.

Communication, which is formed in the first half of the life of the child, M. I. Lisin called situational-personal. It appears when the children have not yet mastered the grasping movements of a focused character. Interactions with adults unfold at this time against the background of a kind of general vital activity: the baby does not yet have any adaptive types of behavior, all his relations with the outside world are mediated by relationships with close adults who ensure the survival of the child and the satisfaction of all his primary organic needs. Caring for an adult after an infant creates conditions in which a child begins to perceive an adult as a special object, and then “discovers” and the fact that the satisfaction of his needs depends on an adult. This places a need in front of the child and gives him the opportunity to develop an intensive cognitive activity with respect to the adult, which becomes the basis for the emergence of communication activities. In a developed form, situational-personal communication is found in the revitalization complex. Communication of the infant with adults proceeds independently, outside of any other activity and constitutes the leading activity of this age.

Up to 6 months, the motives of communication between a child and an adult are mostly personal. Business motives are absorbed by them completely. Cognitive motives occupy a secondary place; their content is determined by the fact that an adult serves as the main object of knowledge for the child, as well as a factor organizing the first research acts. Operations with the help of which communication is carried out belong to the category of expressive-mimic means of communication.

With the development of grasping, manipulating objects, situational-personal communication begins to get rid of itself. A child who is able to act with objects takes a new position in the child-adult system. From 6 months to 2 years, a situational-business form of communication is formed, which proceeds against the background of practical interaction between a child and an adult.

Gradually, communication between the child and the adult begins to be increasingly carried out in the process of joint action. An adult shows the child how to act with objects, helps in their implementation. In connection with this, the nature of emotional communication also changes. Under the influence of communication, the general vitality of the child increases, his activity increases, which largely creates the conditions for speech, motor and sensory development.

At this stage, close attention should be paid to the emotional development of the infant, which, on the one hand, depends on communication with close adults, and on the other, is an indicator of well-being or distress in the “child-adult” relationship.

O.V. Bazhenova was identified the sequence, timing and duration of the formation of positive and negative reactions in children of the first year of life, the characteristics of which are presented in the Table.

Sequence, timing and average formation data

positive and negative reactions in children

^ Negative and positive emotions in children	Duration (average) formations
Smiling face	5 to 12 weeks
Smile just on face	7 to 14 weeks
The complex of revival on the talking face	8 to 14.5 weeks
Complex revitalization on a bright subject	12 to 20.5 weeks
Laugh	20 to 30 weeks
Whine	6 to 21.5 weeks
Negative reactions when taking a toy	20 to 39 weeks
Crying (appearance of active intonation characteristics of crying directed to others: beckoning, begging, capricious, reproaching, demanding, forcing)	30 to 60 weeks

In the second half of the first year of life, the selectivity of emotional reactions begins to manifest itself, expressed in the fact that there is a fear of strangers and a fear of separation. Consequently, according to psychologists, at this stage there is an emotional attachment to the mother and close people, and the baby is already able to distinguish between familiar and unfamiliar adults.

The current positive reaction is transferred to objects, therefore objects in the hands of a “pleasant” adult acquire an attractive character and begin to themselves cause positive reactions in the child. The emotional attraction of objects for babies is secondary, as it occurs through an adult.

In infancy, most of the emotional reactions of a child to an adult can be conventionally called passive communication reactions — they are caused by the activity of the adults themselves, and not the child. In the second half of the year, the first back reactions appear: the child begins to make attempts to attract an adult to himself, “flirts” with him, pulls the arms towards the person who has come up, shouts or whimpers if he is not paid attention. The appearance of these first reactions indicates an increasing need for communication with adults by the end of infancy.

The lack of communication in the infancy period leads to the so-called "effect of hospitalism", the delay in the physical and mental development of children, the emergence of various behavioral disorders. It is revealed that the cause of hospitalism is the dissatisfaction of basic social and psychological needs: in a variety of stimulation, in knowledge, in self-actualization. Situations of emotional indifference to him, lack of benevolent attention on the part of his mother and relatives can also be the cause of hospitalism.

Thus, a reliable attachment of the infant to the mother or to another adult caring for him serves as the basis for his further development.

^ 3. Features of sensorimotor development in infancy

The general principle to which the infant’s development is subordinated is as follows: sensory development is ahead of motor development.

The cognition of the world begins with sensations, but in the infant their appearance and differentiation are hampered by the weak development of the nervous system, especially the cortical part of the analyzer, and also by the predominance of arousal over inhibition (only by the 4th month they are slightly balanced).

By 1 month, only short-term auditory and visual concentration is available to the child: he stops looking at a luminous point, listens for sounds and can distinguish them. It is not possible to establish precisely when babies become sensitive to light or color, sounds and smells. The sensitivity of an infant can only be judged indirectly, primarily by its motor responses. The sensory of the infant develops faster than the motor sphere, although both are closely related.

Features of visual development. During the first 2 months of life, the child develops intensive vision, fixed by eye movements, while differentiated hand movements are still absent.

The act of looking develops as follows. In 2-3 weeks convergence of eyes appears, but on the subject it is still very difficult for the child to stop looking. In 3-5 weeks, there are very short delays of gaze on the subject. At 4-5 weeks, the child can follow the object at a distance of 1-1.5 m, and at 2 months he learns to follow the moving object at a distance of 2-4 m, at 3 months - at a distance of 4-7 m. In the period from 6 up to 10 weeks, the child can trace the object moving in a circle, so moving carousels with bright objects or pictures are useful. In the future, functional connections of the eye with the organs of movement and other senses are established. By 4 months, the act of looking is already quite formed. However, one should not overestimate the importance of early vision development: by the 4th month of life it allows the child to only follow the moving object: at this age, the movement of the object causes eye movement, and the movement of the eye itself on the subject does not yet exist, therefore the baby cannot see anything and does not carry out a visual search for objects. These functions are more closely related to motor skills and develop later, on the one hand, due to hand movements, and on the other hand, due to the increasing understanding of speech. By the 4th month, groping movements of the handles appear. The principal content of this reaction is that the hand moves not on the subject, but on the subject. By the 5th month, a grasp is formed, which is associated with the formation of visual-motor coordination. It represents the first directional action and marks the formation of various manipulations with the subject.

Further development is moving towards the improvement of visual-motor coordination. By the 7th month, coordination between the visual perception of an object and movement towards it is established quickly. Moving objects, especially bright, noticeable, easily attract the gaze of the child to themselves and are fixed for a longer time than colorless and motionless.

Features of hearing development. The timing of the appearance of hearing sensitivity in a child is very difficult to establish. According to the latest experimental data, the child hears already in the womb and distinguishes sounds. But in the first 2-3 days of life, the cavities of his middle and inner ear are filled with amniotic mucus, the Eustachian tube is not filled with air, and the lumen of the tympanic membrane is almost closed by a swollen mucous membrane. The first reactions indicating that the baby senses sounds are flinching of the eyelids, hands, involuntary movements of the facial muscles and torso in response to strong cotton at the very ear, knocking the door, noise from a key falling near the baby’s bed, etc.

On the 10-12th day, the baby reacts to the sounds of the human voice. At the 2 nd month, the sound of voices, musical sounds can even cause him to slow down the food and motor reflexes: the child stops, hearing the voice of the mother.

On the 4th month, a baby not only hears sounds, but can also localize them in space: it turns its eyes and head toward the sound.

After 4-5 months, he develops a differentiation reaction of sounds: the child distinguishes the voices of loved ones. In the second half of the first year of life, this differentiation becomes more subtle and precise: the infant distinguishes the intonations with which an adult addresses him. In 7-9-month-old children, one can observe a distinctly different reaction to cheerful and sad music, to a different pace and rhythm. The most significant acquisition of the end of the 1st year of life is the ability to distinguish the sounds of human speech, primarily such phonemes as “pa-pa”, “ba-ba”, “yes-yes”, “give”. These are prerequisites for the future development of speech.

Smell, taste, tactile sensitivity. Very little is known about smell, taste and tactile sensation. Studies show that by the end of the 1st month babies develop a positive reflex to smell. By the end of the 3rd month, children clearly differentiate pleasant and unpleasant odors. Just as early in his mimicry, the child reacts to the sweet, bitter and sour taste (salty - much later).

The sensations of touch in a child are very thin and are found very early. The slightest folds on the diaper and clothes can cause a negative reaction - crying, movements of the whole body.

At the 3rd month, sensitivity to temperature discrimination is detected: for example, the child responds positively to the temperature of water in a bath at 33 degrees, and negatively to 32 degrees.

Thus, in the first half of the child’s life, an extremely intensive development of sensory systems occurs, the advanced development of the motor system.

Monthly dynamics of the formation of motor skills of an “average” child

Month	Behavior
1st	Lying prone, raises chin; keeps your head straight for a few minutes
2nd	Raises his head, lying prone
3rd	Turns from side to back
4th	Lying prone, raises his head and chest; keeps head straight
5th	Turns from side to side
6th	Sits with little support
7th	May roll over from side to belly; makes pacing movements
8th	Vigorously trying to crawl; sitting for a short time
9th	Lying on the floor may roll over; progresses in crawling
10th	Sits with support
11th	Rises to his feet, holding the furniture
12th	Creeps on hands and knees; walks sideways, holding the furniture
13th	Worth self
14th	Walks alone

Psychologically, the most important thing in motor development is the development of the act of grasping, for the emergence of which requires the child's ability to maintain a stable posture of the head and torso, the appearance of the skill of visual control of hand movements, and the holding down and grasping are performed under visual control. The dynamics of the formation of grasping are the following: in the 10-14th week, the feeling of one's hands; on the 13-16th week - feeling the other items; on week 11-17, the reaction of examining one's hands; on week 15-18 - the reaction of holding the seized object; on the 17th-20th week, proper grasping; on week 17-23 - grabbing the legs; at week 18-21 - grabbing objects as they approach; On the 20-24th week - waving a rattle from side to side. Gradually, the baby learns to coordinate the actions of both hands. Six-month-old babies seize and hold a toy, but if they are offered a different one at that moment, they drop the first one and the second one. By seven months, the child learns to shift the object from one hand to another and take the second, but if he is offered a third, he will drop the second. Only by nine months does the child develop an accumulation strategy: now the third and subsequent objects are transferred by the child from hand to hand and placed at a convenient time for preservation.

In the second half of the year, repeated, chain reactions and the reaction of imitation appear.

Repeated reactions are tapping with a hand, an object, tapping an object with an object, rocking while sitting, shaking the handrail of a crib, patting with a foot, pronouncing repeated syllables.

Chain reactions - crawling, landing, getting up, walking.

Imitation is the movement of the hands of a child, imitating the actions of adults ("ladies", "goodbye", "flew, sat on the little head", etc.); head movements (wiggle); leg movements (stomping), as well as voice and voice modulations.

The given time frames are conditional, since the time when a child begins to sit, stand, walk, grab, depends not only on the development of his nervous system, but also on how much the baby has the ability to acquire motor skills. All the listed skills can appear late, if you completely deprive the baby of the opportunity to actively move. With special motor skills training, children can master them before.

^ 4. Features of cognitive development

Speech development in infancy

At this age, the development of memory begins. The development of memory begins with the development of a conditioned reflex. For example: the child began to cry, and at that moment the mother always comes, after a while the crying begins to end when the mother comes.

At the initial periods, the development of involuntary attention is observed, which has the character of an indicative reflex. By two months, he is already able to keep attention on the subject that interests him, and by five he takes it in his mouth, plays and examines.

The beginnings of voluntary attention begin to manifest by one year. L. S. Vygotsky: “Arbitrary attention begins with the index finger.” At this stage, there is a place to be visually - real thinking - a reflection of connections and relationships only in a visual situation and is distinguished by action. The child is capable of solving simple practical problems based on his own experience and the experience of other people.

In parallel with the development of thinking, the development of speech occurs. The following stages of the development of babies' own activity with their own heads are highlighted (see Table).

Features of speech development in infancy

Age	Characteristics of the development of the infant's own voice activity
2-3 months	The period of occurrence of the first spontaneous vocalizations: walking (the child seems to play with vowel sounds, sings (“aaaa”, “oh-oh”)) and grunt (a combination of consonant sounds, like grunting - “khh”). According to scientists, they are laid genetically. Proof of this is that babbling is manifested in deaf children, as well as the fact that up to eight months, children of all nations “babble the same way”, and later begin to pick up the intonations of the language ( ecology). Initially, guttural sounds “h”, “k”, “x” appear randomly in vocalizations during gouling, usually without accompaniment of a vowel, more rarely with “s”: “ps”, “ky”, “xy”. While walking (and first without walking), the child blows bubbles of saliva. This reaction indicates the formation of differentiated innervation of the lips. The first consonants appearing in syllabic combinations are the labial consonants “b” and “m”. On their basis, by the 4th month, first rarely, by chance, then again, into a chain, the syllables “ba”, “ma” appear (more often, “ba”). By 5 months, the soft vowels "I" and "and" appear: they can be heard in a separate pronunciation, but more often in a syllable combination.
6-7 months	The appearance of emotional exclamations, exclamations - short, emotionally saturated sounds ("a", "yy", "ea").
6-8 months	The disappearance of vocalizations in moments of speech communication with adults.
7-8 months	Babble appears: sound combinations, a combination of vowels and consonants (“give-give-give”, “ta-ta-ta”, “ma-ma-ma”).
8-9 months	There is a complicated mite - sound combinations of the native language imitating speech. On the 9th month, you can hear “v”, “l”, “c” and very clearly “k” and “g”; the last sizzling and whistling sounds appear.
10-12 months	The appearance of the first words, and the spontaneous vocalizations are reduced. The first words, as a rule, are based on onomatopoeia, or they are special onomatopoeia, understandable only to a child and close people and used in special situations. The first words are called pseudowords, because they differ in features: 1) there are sharp phonetic differences between the words of the child and the words of the adult; the sound composition of the words of the child is different from the sound composition of the words of adults; these are a) words that are not similar to the words of adults (“ika” - “locker”, “adiga” - “fish oil”, etc.); b) words-scraps of words of adults, more often - roots (“ka” - “porridge”, “pa” - “dropped”, etc.); c) words that are a distortion of the words of adults, but with the preservation of their phonetic and rhythmic pattern ("ti-ti" - "clock", "ninja" - "do not"); d) onomatopoeic words (“av-av” - “dog”, “mu-mu” - “cow”); 2) children's words are characterized by ambiguity, so, “aka” can mean candy, berries, pieces of sugar, mosaic chips; "Yuk" can mean the whole sentence "Ducks swim in the water", etc. 3) communication with children at this time is possible only in a specific situation, where the first words are used in close connection with actions and when the subject is in front of the eyes. 4) The possible connections between individual words are quite peculiar: this language is agrammatic, it does not have a substantive way of connecting individual words and meanings into a coherent speech (in adults this is done using syntax and etymology). Based on these features, children's speech of this period is called autonomous, as well as the "language of nannies."

Consequently, in the second half of the year, the child’s understanding of the speech of surrounding adults is intensively developed, therefore at this time it is necessary to create special conditions for such an understanding. Prior to this, speech was already included in child care, was a kind of accompaniment of the actions that the adult carried out in relation to the child. The meaning of this speech is enormous: the child listens to it, understands its general emotional tone, and later - it identifies individual words in it. However, the meaning of this speech is also limited, since for the child it does not clearly relate the words to the objects they denote.

By the end of the first year of life, the development of the mechanism of “joint attention” (the tendency of the mother and child to look at the same objects) leads to the fact that children begin to understand the meaning of the pointing gesture and can look in the indicated direction if someone uses it . The pointing gesture is one of the most important indicators of the development of targeted communication, since it allows you to isolate an object from your surroundings that is of interest both to yourself and to the communication partner.

The peculiarity of the first words is that they are indicative gestures (LS Vygotsky). The child, using them, makes the greatest in meaning, the most important discovery for his further development: he learns that every thing, in general, everything has a name. More precisely, from this moment on it opens the connection between the sign and the value, the sign-symbolic function of consciousness begins to develop.

By the end of the first year of life, the child understands 10–20 words uttered by adults, and he can actively use from 1–5 to 7–16. The first words of D. B. Elkonin considered one of the evidence of a child's transition from infancy to early childhood, and the beginning and end of autonomous speech mark the beginning and end of the crisis of the first year of life.
^ 5. The crisis of one year

The crisis of one year is expressed as a sharp increase in the independence of the child from adults, the so-called surge of independence occurs. The empirical content of the crisis of the first year of life is connected with several points.

The first is the development of walking. At the end of the first - the beginning of the second year of life, it is impossible to say for sure about a child whether he is walking or not walking, there is already walking or not, which is a contradictory dialectical unity. Any child goes through this stage. And even if it seems that the child “did not walk and suddenly went right away,” this means that we are dealing with a latent period of emergence and formation and relatively late detection of walking. But often after such a sudden start of walking, there is a loss of it, indicating that full maturation has not yet occurred. Only in early childhood the child becomes walking: bad, with difficulty, but walking, and walking becomes the main form of movement in space for him.

The main thing in the acquired act of walking, according to D. B. Elkonin, is not only that the space of the child expands, but also that the child separates himself from the adult. For the first time, a disintegration of a single social situation “We” occurs: now it is not the mother who leads the child, but the child leads the mother wherever she wants. Walking, therefore, is an important primary neoplasm of infancy, marking the rupture of an old developmental situation.

The second point relates to speech, to the appearance of the first word. At the end of the first year of a child’s life, we are confronted with an ambivalent moment, when one cannot say whether he is talking or not. It is really impossible to say whether a child has an autonomous, situational, emotionally colored speech that is understandable only to his relatives, whether he has a speech or not, because he does not have a speech in our sense of the word, but there is no wordless period, as he speaks. Thus, we are again dealing with a transitional education that marks the boundaries of the crisis. Its meaning is the same: where there was unity, it becomes two - an adult and a child (the old situation has broken up and a new content has grown between them - the objective activity).

The third moment of crisis, according to Vygotsky, relates to the sphere of affects and will. In connection with the crisis, the child has the first acts of protest, opposition, opposition to others. Such reactions are revealed with greater force and are fixed as forms of behavior with improper upbringing. Especially they are detected when a child is denied something, something is forbidden: he screams, throws himself on the floor, refuses to walk (if he is already walking), kicks on the floor, pushes adults away, etc.

^ Conclusions and conclusions

1. The neonatal period ends at about the end of the second month of life. The main feature of the newborn is that the baby is separated from the mother physically, but not biologically. As a result, all of its existence at this time occupies, as it were, the middle position between the intrauterine development and the subsequent periods of postnatal childhood.

2. By the time of birth, the child has only systems of hereditarily fixed mechanisms - unconditioned reflexes, facilitating adaptation to new living conditions, but the newborn is the most social being, since its life depends on society (L. Vygotsky). This is the basis for the development of the psyche of the child.

3. The central neoplasm of the newborn is the appearance of the individual mental life of the child. It is characterized by the following features - the appearance of conditioned reflexes on the basis of auditory and visual concentration, the prevalence of undifferentiated experiences, and the lack of self-isolation from the environment.

4. The first specific form of response specifically to a person is called the “revitalization complex”. It includes the smile, vocalization and motor activity of the baby towards an adult.

5. Infancy is a period that lasts until the end of the first year of a child’s life. The basic need for age is the need for security and security. If a child feels safe, he is open to the world, entrust him and master him more boldly; if not, it limits the interaction with the world of a closed situation. The leading activity is the emotional-direct communication with adults.

6. Sensomotor development is subject to the following law: sensory development is ahead of motor development. The most important in sensory development is the formation of visual and auditory concentration. The development of infant motility is subject to a certain pattern: movements are improved from coarse, large, sweeping to smaller and more precise, with the movements of the handles and the upper half of the body, then the legs and the lower part of the body, improved first.

8. In infancy, speech development begins. During the first year of life, speech development goes through several stages: from the stage of walking - gukanya to the period of appearance of autonomous speech. The peculiarity of the first words is that they are indicative gestures (LS Vygotsky).

9. The main neoplasms of infancy are the need for communication, the emotional attitude towards people; the act of grasping as the basis of human actions with objects; walking and the appearance of the first word. They cause the need for the emergence of a new social situation of development - the situation of joint activities with an adult, which means moving to the next stage of development.
Test questions and tasks

Describe the rating scale at birth Apgar?
What are the specifics of the social situation of the development of the newborn?
What is the significance for the understanding of human development of the distinction between instinctive, inherited and innate forms of behavior?
Characterize the central neonatal neoplasm?
Psychological essence of the revitalization complex. Is it possible to have a revival complex earlier? If so, what conditions must be created for its appearance in children?
What is the role of communication in the mental development of the infant?
The selectivity of the emotional reactions of the child, the time of appearance and importance for the mental development of the child?
The act of grabbing, the sequence and time of appearance and importance for the mental development of the child?
Features of speech development in primary school age?
Psychological essence of the crisis of one year?

Independent work
Exercise 1. Prepare a written work (abstract, report, report, article) on one of the topics listed below.

Features of the generic crisis and different practices of its resolution.
Features of the transition from prenatal to postnatal childhood.
Birth injuries and their consequences.
Unconditioned and early conditioned reflexes of the newborn.
Formation of visual and auditory concentration of the infant in the process of developing forms of communication with adults.
The psychological meaning of the “revitalization complex”. The conditions of its occurrence, structure and genesis.
The problem of mental deprivation in the newborn and infancy.
Features of the development of forms of joint activity of the baby and the adult.
Features of self-awareness in infancy.
Educational games for children of infancy.
Features of the ratio of the development of sensory and motility in the period of early and late infancy.
Formation of perception and coordinated work of various analyzers in infancy.
The main patterns of development of sensory processes in infancy.
Features of motor development in infancy.
Stages of development of manipulation of the subject in its infancy.
Features of the development of prerequisites for active speech (gooking, walking, babbling).
The concept of the crisis of one year.

Task 2. Prepare notes on the following references:

one). Vygotsky L.S. The crisis of the first year of life // Collected Works: In 6 m. - M., 1984. - V. 4.

2). Vygotsky L.S. Infant age // Collected Works: In 6 t. - M., 1984. - T.4.

3). Meshcheryakova S.Yu. Psychological analysis of the complex revitalization in infants // Questions of psychology. - 1994. - № 6.

four). M.I. Lisin. Communication with adults in children of the first seven years of life // Problems of general, age and pedagogical psychology. Ed. V. Davydov. - M., 1978.

five). L.I. Bozhovich, L.S. Slavina Transition from infancy to early age // Bozhovich L.I., Slavina L.S. Psychological development of the student and his upbringing. - M., 1979.

6). M. I. Lisin. Stages of the genesis of speech as a means of communication // Communication and speech: The development of speech in children in communication with adults. - M., 1985.

7). Vygotsky L.S. About the nature of egocentric speech // Reader on general psychology. Release III. Subject of cognition / Editor-in-chief V.V. Petukhov, Editors-compilers Yu.B. Dormashev, S.А.Kapustin. - M., 1998.
Task 3. Fill in the table "Features of the mental development of children of infancy", using the textbook Psychology of a Person from Birth to Death / Ed. A.A. Reana. - SPb .: Prime-Euroznak, 2005., according to the following scheme:

Cognitive features	^ Affective sphere	Features of the development of the motivational sphere	Features of the development of self-concept

Task 4. Fill in the table “Features of socialization in the early periods of human ontogenesis. Basic Theories ”using the textbook Psychology of a Person from Birth to Death / Ed. A.A. Reana. - SPb .: Prime-Euroznak, 2005., according to the following scheme:

^ Concept or concept	Main provisions
Socialization
Convergence theory
Behaviorism
Psychoanalysis
Attachment theory
Cultural-historical theory
Theory of R.P. Hobson
Theories of social knowledge

Task 4. Answer the test questions.

1. In infancy, the leading activity is:

a) subject-manipulative

b) direct emotional communication with adults

c) study of the surrounding world

g) exercises in managing your body.
2. In the first half of the child’s life, the development of sensory systems ...

a) is ahead of the development of the motor system

b) lags behind the development of the motor system

c) and development of the motor system go synchronously

d) in each individual case, the development of sensory and motor systems occurs in different ways.
3. Among the major neoplasms of a younger age are allocated ...

a) “revitalization complex”

b) the first social smile

c) the act of grabbing

d) walking

d) the appearance of the first word

Bibliography

Abramova G.S. Age-related psychology. - M., 1997.
Avdeeva N.N., Meshcheryakova S.Yu. You and the baby: at the origins of communication. - M., 1994.
Bauer T.J.R. Mental development of the baby. - M., 1979.
Bauer T. Mental development of the infant. - M., 1985.
Big encyclopedic dictionary. - M., 1991.
Age and pedagogical psychology. - M., 1992.
Age and pedagogical psychology. / Ed. A.V.Petrovsky. -M., 1979.
Age and pedagogical psychology. / Ed. M.V.Gamezo. - M., 1984.
Vygotsky L.S. Collected Works: In 6 t. T.2, 4. - M., 1984.
Child psychology. / Ed. J.L. Kolominsky. - Minsk, 1988.
Zaporozhets A.V. Selected psychological works: In 2 volumes - M., 1986. - T. 1. Psychological development of the child.
Research on age and educational psychology. - M., 1980.
Craig G. Developmental Psychology. - SPb., 1991.
Kushnir N.Ya. Dynamics of crying baby in the first months of life. / Issues Psychology. - 1994 - №3.
Kushnir N.Ya. Crying as an indicator of the mental development of the infant in the first months of life. / Issues psychol. - 1993 - №3.
Lisina M.I. Communication, personality and psyche of the child. - M., 1997.
Lyublinskaya A.A. Child psychology. - M., 1971.
Menchinskaya N.A. The development of the psyche of the child. Mother's diary. - M., 1957.
Meshcheryakova S.Yu. Psychological analysis of the complex revitalization in infants // Questions of psychology. - 1994. - № 6.
The brain and psyche of the baby. - M., 1993.
Mukhamedrahimov R.Zh. Mother and Baby: Psychological Interaction. - SPb., 1999.
Mukhina V.S. Child psychology. - M .: Enlightenment, 1985.
Pavlov I.P. Twenty years of experience. - 4th ed. State Publishing House, 1928.
The development of communication preschoolers with peers / Ed. A.G. Ruza. - M., 1989.
Rybalko E.F. Developmental and differential psychology. - SPb., 1990.
Sergienko E.A. Antipathies in early human ontogenesis. - M., 1992.
White B. The first three years of life. - M., 1982.
Urugtaeva G.A. Preschool psychology. - M., 1996.
Flake - Hobson et al. The World to Comes in: The Development of a Child and its Relations with Others. - M., 1992.
Readings on age and educational psychology. / Ed. I.V. Ilyasova, V.Ya. Laudis - M., 1981.
Elkonin D.B. Child psychology (child development from birth to seven years). - M., 960.

Materials on the topic:

Site Map