The Child

The first learning experience of a child is through tactile awareness. In addition to this "hands-on" knowledge, recognition includes smelling, hearing, and tasting in a rich contact with the environment. These senses are quickly augmented and superseded by the iconic- the ability to see, to recognize and understand environmental and emotional forces visually. From nearly our first experience of the world, we organize our needs and pleasures, preferences and fears, with great dependence on what we see. Or what we want to see. But this description is only the tip of the iceberg and in no way measures the power and importance the visual sense exerts on our lives. We accept it without realising that it can be improved just in the basic process of observation or extended into an incomparable tool of human communication. We accept seeing as we experience it- effortlessly.

As Caleb Gattegno comments on the nature of the visual sense in his book, Towards a Visual Culture:

"Sight, even though used by all of us naturally, has not yet produced its civilisation. Sight is swift, comprehensive, simultaneously, analytic and synthetic. It requires so little energy to function, as it does, at the speed of light, that it permits our minds to receive and hold an infinite number of items of information in a fraction of a second."

Infants observing the adults around them interpret other codes before the verbal code. They notice pitch differences very early. They can recognize their mother's pitch from that of another female by about 3 weeks old. By a month they can distinguish between different sounds such as 'p' and 'b'. That is, they develop the paradigmatic structures that are the basis of the full phonological system or the basic alphabet of sounds of their language. But they do not begin to crack the phonological code as a system till they are about 12 months old.