Comments on Jeff Jordan's article on input, noticing, intake and other dubious constructs.

I've been reading Jeff Jordan's article on input, noticing, intake and other dubious constructs. And I hadn't realised before that the difference between input and intake isn't really significant, isn't really enough. I think the word exposure is worth using. It's exposure to language. Then there is input and then there is intake—if there is noticing in between input and intake so be it—but I was also reminded of something that Kunihide Sakai, a Japanese specialist in extensive reading,  talked about regarding 'swells'. 

He said that 'swells' are just the sounds you hear around you, and it's strange because he was talking about extensive reading. But what he was saying was that as babies learn a language, all they're aware of is this sort of washing of sounds around them. That cannot be input; it is exposure. It is a potential stimulus—it isn't a stimulus unless something happens as a result of it. It's sort of background noise, shall we say, with no attempt at interpreting that there is meaning involved in it.

This is a rather complicated way of expressing the ideas, but what I mean is that there is exposure to a raft of noises and sounds. Obviously, babies will focus their attention on particularly strident sounds because these will stand out. They will begin to detect repeated sounds that make them apply their attention to these repeated sounds just because they're interesting—not because they're necessarily attaching meaning to them—but simply because they're repeated sounds in the environment. They gain prominence because they've been identified as the same sound, and these could be words like "baby" or sounds like a clicking of the tongue.

• I think that paying attention to any sounds will be the beginning of some form of learning, which the baby is undertaking from the environment—whether it be spoken language or any other sounds in the environment.

• Should it only be sounds, or is it perhaps also things they see? I think it is appropriate to say that noticing is one of the parts of this learning process. It could be noticing visual stimuli as well as auditory stimuli.

A baby begins to learn about the world around them by paying attention to things that stand out, things that draw their attention for whatever reason. I think this is prior to considering it as language—identifying that some of the noises made by human beings in the environment are attempts to attract the child's attention is perhaps the first realization of intentionality. In this way, they begin to understand that people are trying to achieve something with these sounds they're making.

The first step for a baby must be to experiment with making sounds themselves, with the intention of getting the attention of the people around them. None of this is clearly language—it is just responding to the environment. Language learning and eventually language output is a much slower process. It must depend on beginning to recognize associations between the sounds they hear and physical realities, objects, and things in the world around them.

For example:

• People saying "doggy, doggy, doggy"

• The child, being interested in this hairy animal that's looking at them

• It all has to do with attention and its relation to objects, sounds, and then the intentionality of the person who is saying "doggy, doggy, doggy"

• The child is realizing that "doggy, doggy, doggy" is being said with the intention of drawing their attention to what they later discover is called a dog

That's a rather complex exposition of my thoughts on the matter.

It has nothing to do directly with second language acquisition, but it helped me clarify my own thoughts on exposure, attention, intentionality, input, intake as precursors to L1 language acquisition.