Celebrate your child's love of learning

© Wondertime

Babies go from cooing to sentences in two years. How do they do that?

One night when I was eight months pregnant — absurdly pregnant, with a belly that had its own gravitational field — I suddenly sat up in bed and grabbed my husband's arm. "What if the baby doesn't like books?" I wailed.

My husband looked around our bedroom at the wall of bookshelves stacked two deep with books, and the piles of books on the floor, the bedside table, and the dresser, and said, "Fat chance." Then, realizing he had said the word "fat" to a hugely pregnant lady, he invented an errand elsewhere in the apartment.

In truth, I wasn't really worried about the baby's love for books, I was worried about his love for language. I'm a lexicographer — I edit dictionaries for a living — and the thought of a child who wouldn't appreciate the glory of a word like "serendipity" or the fun of "ginormous" just seemed too awful to consider.

Luckily for me, nature is on my side. There's no guarantee that the child of a football fan will know the difference between a wide receiver and a tight end, or that the foodie's offspring will ever eat anything more demanding than mac and cheese, but linguists have assured me that the language lover's kid — and any kid — will almost certainly become absolutely fluent in the parent's language, just as a matter of course. So, having never met a research topic I didn't like, I read what the books (and the articles, and darn near the whole Internet) had to say about the process of language acquisition. I found a few different theories about what's happening "in there" as children learn language. The first group (and the biggest and loudest) holds that children are primed to learn language, any language, just as birds are predisposed to sing. These folks, influenced by Noam Chomsky, often postulate something they call the LAD, or language acquisition device, a function of the brain that people use specifically to learn language. That human languages can be very different from each other doesn't seem to matter. It's as if every child comes with a drum, but whether he uses it to play heavy metal, salsa, or smooth jazz is up to him (or, perhaps, his parents).

An opposite view holds that learning a language is just like learning anything else, a problem solved by general intelligence, and it's simply because children spend so much time learning their language that they get so good, so fast. A group in the middle (I'm in this camp, if any) takes the position that children may not, in fact, be wired for language specifically, but that clearly language is a big part of the very human desire we have to connect with other people. "Kids have special skills for understanding other people," says Michael Tomasello, codirector of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Leipzig, Germany. "It's not just the same way they would learn arithmetic. We are specially prepared to communicate with others, and the structure of language is an outgrowth of that."

One thing most experts do agree on: The observable process by which most children reach certain language milestones happens in a fairly predictable order.

I could see this daily at home. Before language, my son Henry's desires seemed amorphous, requiring trained detective work; afterward they were disturbingly concrete. He changed from an obliging infant to a tiny martinet, all with the advent of his first word, "light." As soon as he could say that one little word, he would use it to demand to be held up to the light switch, which he proceeded to flick up and down furiously like a tiny Frankenstein animating his monster. Watching my son change from a soggy lump to a little rhetorician who could demand, cajole, beg, and, yes, whine was fascinating. Reading gave me lots of background, but nothing beat observing the labor of language acquisition in real time.

The hard work begins before birth. I remember feeling guilty about listening to expletive-laden rap music in my last trimester because I knew that my baby had hearing nearly as good as mine. Despite the gurgling of my stomach and the lub-dub of my heartbeat, sound came through clearly. Whether he knew what Ice Cube was rapping about is another story. Because of this eavesdropping, Henry liked his mother's voice best when he was born, even better than Grandma's (no, I didn't tell her that). And because he had also absorbed the rhythms of English, he preferred not just my own voice but my language. A 1986 study using rigged-up pacifiers with 4-day-old infants found that French babies sucked harder upon hearing tapes of someone speaking French than when they were listening to the same person speaking Russian — and for babies, sucking is a big thumbs-up.

But that didn't mean my infant son could carry on a conversation, in part because he was not yet physically able to speak. One of the reasons newborns don't emerge commenting on the weather is that their vocal tract isn't the right shape to make language sounds. (The very idea of a newborn speaking is so freaky that the eerie talking baby is a staple of horror movies.) Henry just wasn't up to vowels and consonants, much less the voice and mouth movement combination that results in the word "serendipity."

Although they can't yet make all the sounds they will need, babies under 6 months are capable of telling the difference between almost all the important sounds of the world's languages; they have, in effect, perfect pitch for speech. But keeping that perfect pitch is inefficient. Infants must figure out just which sounds they need for speaking the language they're growing up with. That's why Japanese adults have trouble telling the difference between "r" and "l" sounds: That difference doesn't matter in Japanese, so as babies they stopped paying attention to it. If they want to learn English later they have to retrain their brains to hear it and their mouths to produce it.

In fact, sorting out all the sounds of his language — and only his language — was one of Henry's main jobs, and by cooing a high-pitched "who's a good baby?" I was helping. Babies prefer "parentese" (it's almost impossible not to use it when talking to one), and linguists have found this kind of parentspeak to be nearly universal. Speaking parentese emphasizes those important vowels, making them stand out. But it's one thing to hear those sounds; it's another to be able to make them on demand. Henry, like most babies, started his language practice with cooing and gurgling noises at around 3 months, and in part because I was cooing back at him, he managed to pick up the typical sounds of English by about 6 months: The "ba-ba-ba" and "ma-ma-ma" sounds I shot at him he babbled right back.

For all babies, babbling is a kind of oral aerobics. Henry loved figuring out how his mouth worked and what sounds he could make — the louder the better, of course — and he relished his new toy. His babbling was not completely random. Some sounds and rhythms were more likely to show up than others because he was babbling in English. And by about 9 months, he could make speech sounds almost as well as I could (for what that's worth). The more common the sounds are in the language the child is practicing for, the more common those sounds are in his babbling. French babies babble in French, Chinese babies in Chinese — and so consistently that in a 1984 study, French-speaking adults listening to tapes of 6-month-old babies babbling in different languages were able to pick out the French-speaking babies nearly 75 percent of the time.

Next page: Deaf babies babble with their hands

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

In Other Words

Although the basic physical process of becoming a speaker is the same for all languages, there are slight, but interesting, differences across cultures:

• In some cultures children are not considered to have begun talking until they say specific words, not just any word. For the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea, the trigger words are "mother" (no) and "breast" (bo).
• The order in which grammatical constructions are mastered also varies: Italian toddlers grasp their third-person-singular verb forms (as in canta, or "he sings") before English-speaking children, although English speakers master gerunds, such as "singing," faster.
• Sometimes the differences seem the stuff of stereotype: French babies talk about food three times as much as Swedish and American kids, and Swedish children are more interested in words for their homes (hello, IKEA!).
• An exception to the near-universal use of parentese: K'iche' Mayan, in which only well-respected adults — not babies — are spoken to in a high singsong.

Talking 101 (a rough timeline)

Newborn

• communicates with cries, sneezes, coughs
• prefers mother's voice
• prefers native language to other languages
• is sensitive to the rhythm of the language

Before Birth

• can hear (and prefers) mother's voice

By 5 Months

• can laugh
• is exploring the mouth and the sounds it can make
• can hear changes in the rhythm of speech
• can make vowel sounds

5 to 8 Months

• prefers hearing singsong prosody
• vowels start to settle into the pattern of native language
• begins babbling (at about 7 months)

8 to 10 months

• knows where phrases begin and end
• can say the vowels of native language
• does variegated babbling
• prefers words that sound like native language

10 to 12 Months

• babbling sounds like sentences
• begins to understand words in context

12 to 16 Months

• says first words: mostly nouns and names
• begins to understand simple sentences

16 to 20 Months

• understands about 150 words
• can say around 50 words
• uses more verbs and expressions

20 to 24 Months

• vocabulary grows rapidly
• can say around 200 words
• says first sentences (two and three words)

2 to 3 Years

• can use the regular past tense of verbs
• uses question words (first what and where)
• uses negatives other than no ("You not do that!")

3 to 6 Years

• may begin to use actually to disagree politely ("Actually, I'd rather have grapes.")
• may begin to be comfortable with puns, double meanings, and figurative expressions