Final answer:
Parents assist children in forming words from sounds by speaking directly to them and reinforcing learning with repetition and emphasis on phonetic components. Signing can also support cognitive development. Choices like teaching verbal skills or sign language, especially for deaf children, remarkably impact language acquisition.
Step-by-step explanation:
Parents play a crucial role in helping children turn sounds into words. This complex process involves the child learning to discriminate between different phonemes, the smallest units of sound that distinguish one word from another. Early on, babies can differentiate between all human language sounds, but by about one year of age, they focus on the phonemes present in their environment. Utilizing strategies such as speaking directly to the child, repeating words, and emphasizing phonetic components helps the child to associate sounds with specific meanings or objects. Moreover, some parents teach their children sign language alongside spoken language, which can stimulate different parts of the brain, potentially aiding in cognitive reinforcement and improving recall.
As children grow, parents encourage them to expand their vocabulary beyond the "one word" stage, where single words represent complex ideas or requests. Early vocabularies tend to feature nouns representing objects or events from the child's immediate environment. This helps the child to form associations between sounds and their meanings, hence facilitating the language acquisition process. In instances where a child is diagnosed as deaf, parents must consider educational options that can significantly influence linguistic development, such as enrolling in mainstream schools for verbal and lip-reading education, or in deaf schools to learn ASL and embrace deaf culture.