How babies learn language

Have you ever really thought about how your baby learns to talk?
Because it really is an amazing process. Think about it: she learns to roll a ball or clap her hands by watching you and imitating you. But speech is way more complicated that than that.

If you say the word ‘da-da’ – the first word many babies learn – you’ll see that it involves placing your tongue up against the roof of your mouth just behind your upper front teeth and then moving it down. Your watching baby doesn’t see those complex internal movements of tongue against palate or teeth, though. All she sees is your lips parting as you say the word. And yet still she learns how to say it!



More than mimicry
What’s going on in your baby’s brain is nothing short of incredible. Her brain contains millions of neurons – special nerve cells that send and receive electrical signals out to the body. Scientists have recently discovered that even more specialized neurons, called mirror neurons, may help us mimic the behavior and actions of others.

Some experts theorize that hearing your speech activates the same neurons in her brain that you yourself used to make that sound, enabling her to try to imitate you even though she can’t see exactly how you form sounds. She’ll start experimenting with sound fairly early on and by five months or so you’ll hear her babbling: streaming together the noises she’s been hearing you. As she gets more skilled her babbling will start to take on the intonation of proper speech so although it’ll still sound like nonsense she’ll be able to convey pleasure, surprise and happiness.

The fact that speech is complex means than initially her attempts to say proper words will be awkward but as she becomes more aware of your speech she’ll begin to articulate more smoothly herself… which is how you end up with that tween who’s fluent in backchat!


Helping your baby learn to talk
Just because instinct plays a part in leaning language doesn’t mean that you don’t need to get involved. After all, language is social, it’s communication, it’s give and take – and if your baby has no one to communicate with her, speech will be delayed. So talking to your baby is vital.

Your baby’s acquisition of language is enhanced by what’s called ‘motherese’ – a universal behavior in which we speak to our babies in high-pitched, slow sing-song tones. Because it’s melodic and repetitive, it engages your baby’s attention and may help activate those mirror neurons so she can start to copy you.

You’re also the key to her understanding that the sounds she’s forming aren’t just noise – they have nuance, and can be instructions, questions, suggestions and warnings. You can reinforce this by labeling objects as you refer to them: ‘Here is your ball’, ‘there is the dog’. Reading to her as often as you can helps too because it helps her hear the intonations and emotions that underlie meaningful, and also demonstrates how sentences are structured. Use gestures too: new research suggests that toddlers who use gestures such as pointing often have better vocabularies when they reach school age


Your baby’s language explosion
She’ll likely say her first word any time from 10 to 12 months onwards and by 18 months she’ll have accumulated a vocabulary of 50 words. At every stage of language learning she’ll understand the meaning of more words than she can actually say.

At around three, she’ll start to apply the rules of grammar to speech, and scientists are still scratching their heads over the fact that young children seem to inherently know the ‘rules’ of speech. Think about it: your preschooler doesn’t say ‘Milk cup of I want’ does she? She knows the right order the words need to come in – and it isn’t just because she’s heard you say it, because if that were the case she’d be saying ‘I ran’ instead of ‘I runned’ (learning those tricky irregular verbs comes later!).

Between two and six years or so she’ll learn the meaning of as many as eight new words a day. By the time most children enter elementary school they know around 11,000 words – not bad!

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