Word by Word
Written By Erin McKean
print
single page
By the time Henry was 2 years old, the important sounds in English had jelled and the rest had dropped away, becoming, in effect, invisible to his brain, which saves its neurons for the contrasts that really matter. His larynx had settled closer to its adult position deep in his throat, giving his tongue the wiggle room it needed. He was also learning to control the flow of air over his vocal cords, use his lips correctly (spread wide for an "eee" sound, and rounded for an "ooooh"), and work with his newly emerging teeth to make the sounds of letters such as d and t.
Babbling "babababa" is pretty good training for learning vowel and consonant sounds. It's an easy sound to make — lips together, then apart — and it's common in English. But it's not essential. Babies who have infections or airway abnormalities that result in a tracheotomy (which interferes with babbling) still learn to talk, although on a delayed schedule. Babbling can happen even when there's no spoken language: Deaf babies babble with their hands.
It can be hard to figure out where the babbling stops and the words begin; it's only natural that some play syllables will sound like real words. (This is why many fathers swear that their kid's first word was "Dada," and why mothers will latch on triumphantly to a "Mama," even if it's hidden deep inside a string of babbling, as in, "babadadababamamaba.") Not only do you want to hear "Dada" or "Mama," you expect to, so that's what you duly record as Baby's First Word.
Whether your child is early or late with his first word doesn't seem to make a lasting difference; researchers have found no correlation between IQ or overall vocabulary growth and the time of a child's first word. "Mama" and "Dada" are usually among the first used by children around the world, in each different language. Other early words are, predictably, the names of familiar, everyday objects (ball, chair); typical foods (juice); instructions or commentary (up, all gone, uh-oh!); body parts (nose, foot); and words for interactions (bye-bye, peek-a-boo). Names are important too: By 4 1/2 months Henry knew that when you said his name he should pay attention. (A typical kid will lose this ability long before the time he starts to play video games.)
First-word stories often take on the trappings of mythology, a sort of prediction as to what kind of person the child will be. But parents who want to hear their future golfer say "bogey" or their bioscientist say "protein" better listen carefully. "Parents are very much cued to hear the child say 'bye' and 'hi' and 'mom' and 'daddy,' " says Betty Hart, research associate at the Life Span Institute at the University of Kansas and coauthor of The Social World of Children Learning to Talk. "If the kid did start out with something really fantastic, like 'literature,' the parent would be unlikely to understand it, and consequently not report it."
Even after Henry started saying identifiable words, those words didn't have the same shape every time. It's perfectly normal for "duck" to occasionally come out as, say, "guck," says Lise Menn, professor emerita of linguistics at the University of Colorado at Boulder. "Sometimes a kid already seems to have an understanding of some way of making the sounds of a word, and he'll say it once. It may not be right, but he'll say it quite confidently. He may keep on slipping around for quite a while before he finally decides 'okay, this is how I'm going to say it.'"
Most children start to speak recognizable words around 12 to 16 months. They may take 5 or 6 months from the date (however shaky) of their first word to get to the point where they are using 50 words. By age 2, some can say anywhere between 100 and 600 words, and by age 6, they may understand about 14,000 words, and say almost as many. So from ages 2 to 6, children are grabbing on to as many as 10 new words a day. Knowing this, I made it a point to introduce silly words like "mugwump" to Henry as a kind of deposit in his word bank.
Once my son was firmly in the word-speaking stage, he was ready for the main event: conversation. For that he needed me and my husband to play an even more active role. "Learning to talk is really done by interaction," says Hart. "You can only learn to talk by talking to someone who is talking to you."
By about age 2, a child is speaking more than 300 times an hour, on average, and being spoken to nearly 350 times an hour. Part of that parental conversational time is spent obliquely correcting and expanding on what children say, as in, he says "elebant" and you say, "Oh, yes, elephant," and go on to say something like, "He's got a very long trunk, hasn't he?" This elaboration is almost inevitable, says Eve V. Clark, professor of linguistics at Stanford University. "Parents can't stop themselves. They treat the child as a real conversation partner."
Studies show that children who engaged in more and more frequent conversation with their parents had larger vocabularies, although they didn't seem to progress faster in other aspects of language development. Since a large vocabulary is — surprise, surprise — fairly important to me, I pushed conversation on Henry like some parents push green vegetables. When I was lost for topics (especially ones that didn't involve cookies and why we weren't eating them right then), I would just narrate what I was doing. By saying, "Now we're clearing the table, now I'm washing the cups, this is my favorite dish soap, doesn't it smell nice?" and so on, I was exposing my child to up to 2,000 words an hour, even if I did sound slightly inane.
The nicest part about conversation is that it doesn't require any special equipment. Despite the vast number of products advertised to aid a child's language development, none are necessary. As Clark puts it, "The only thing you might buy that might help would be books."
Once Henry was really talking, the process of language acquisition was unstoppable. Now 7, he has acquired nearly all the skills he needs to speak fluently — including "I'm not talking to you!" The breadth of his language knowledge is staggering. He knows all sorts of complicated language tricks, such as saying, "Wouldn't it be nice to have pizza for dinner?" instead of "I want pizza!" He calls his old babysitter "Monica" when we meet at Starbucks, but "Ms. Jimenez" when he sees her at school. He's perfected the proper deployment of sarcasm ("No, really, I'd love to wash my hands!") and he can speak in entirely different ways with different groups of people (his parents or his friends, say). I'm taking heart in the certainty that, by puberty, he will know when to say "please" and "thank you."
Of course, no kid is pure textbook, and Henry's entire language acquisition process has been full of happy surprises at every stage. Late last year when his journal came home from school, I flipped it open to find an entry where he had misspelled the word "science." No biggie, "science" is a hard word when you're 20, never mind 6. But then, on the very next line, he had used, and spelled correctly, one of my favorites, the word "discombobulate." Who knew?
Next page: Cultural differences, or trigger words in Papua New Guinea
