How Babies Talk: The Magic and Mystery of Language in the First Three Years of Life

Acknowledgments

It is always the case that in an undertaking of this magnitude, there are many people to thank. First and foremost, we wish to offer special thanks to our colleagues from around the world. Their scientific discoveries made this book possible. Their inspired work paved the way for our understanding of language—the pinnacle of human behavior. Though their names cannot all be mentioned here, they stand with us in having contributed to the exciting story of language development. In that very real sense, this book is theirs, too, although they may not agree with all our interpretations.

Much of the research described in this book could not have been conducted were it not for the research support provided by government agencies, private foundations, and educational institutions. In our own case, our research has been supported by both the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development. In addition, Golinkoff has been supported by a James McKeen Cattell Sabbatical Award and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. Hirsh-Pasek has held a number of grants from the Pew Foundation.

Having children who have mastered language is a great boon. Benj Pasek and Allison Golinkoff offered critical reviews of some of these chapters. With keen eyes and direct, no-nonsense commentary, they helped their scientific mothers learn how to write for a broader audience. Many thanks to our editors, Deborah Brody and Jennifer Moore, who greatly improved our writing, and to our agent, Barbara Lowenstein, who had faith in this book. Thanks also go to Maryanne Bowers and Doris Davidson at the University of Delaware, who helped in preparing the bibliography. George Hollich, He Len Chung, Camille Rocroi, and Michelle McKinney also deserve our thanks. They kept our laboratories running so smoothly that we were able to concentrate on writing this book.

Finally, thanks to all the children and parents from around the world who participated in the research projects described here. Were it not for their participation, we would know much less about children’s amazing ability to learn a human language. The parents, students, and professionals who read this book are benefitting, too, from the willingness of children and parents to allow scientists like ourselves to probe the workings of the developing human mind.

Introduction

Setting the Stage:

The Magic of Language Development in the First Three Years of Life

Communicating through language is the crowning achievement of the human species. Dogs can’t do it. Whales can’t do it. Even our evolutionary cousins, the great apes, can’t do it. Yet within every infant lies the potential to learn a language. Equipped with the power of words, every one of us can talk about a future and resurrect a past. With language we can mentally move through time and space unlike any other species.

Through human language we have transformed our planet and launched spacecraft to Pluto. Through well-chosen words a three-year-old can exclaim that she wants the red cup with the giraffe on it, not the blue cup with the elephant. Language enables us to embrace an idea, to share our feelings, to comment on our world, and to understand each other’s minds. Precisely because language is so pervasive, we fail to realize the remarkable capabilities that we take for granted. Trying to appreciate the complexities of language is somewhat like trying to appreciate the design of your eyeglasses while you are looking through them. With your glasses on, you gain a whole new perspective on the world—but you never stop to consider how your glasses actually work.

In the past several decades, specialists in the field have made enormous progress in understanding the intricacies of learning to talk. When you realize that you can chat on the phone for hours without ever planning what you are going to say or can generate a sentence that is as long as this one by stringing together a limited set of building blocks like nouns and verbs, you begin to see the vastness of the system that young children have to learn. We have no problem turning a sentence like this one into a question. (Do we?) And it is a commonplace assumption that a word like window can be widely applied to such instances as the stained-glass depictions in a church or the window opened on a computer screen. How do we know when to use the word window? What does window really mean? How do children ever learn to use words correctly?

As we begin to scratch the surface, we see that there is a great deal of extraordinary in the ordinary. The achievements of chess grand masters, musical virtuosos, and Olympic athletes hardly match what children accomplish in language learning by the tender age of three or four years. How do children do it? How do they learn to get their tongues in just the right place to pronounce a word? How do they learn those noun and verb building blocks that allow them to construct sentences? How do they learn the difference between I eat to live and I live to eat? These questions lie at the foundation of the mystery of language development.

Where can the answers to these questions be found? A commonsense approach was taken by our grandmothers. How do children learn language, you ask? It’s obvious. Parents teach their children to talk.

Grandma has to be partially right. It is no coincidence that French children learn French and German children learn German. Little two-year-old Harry down the street didn’t just happen on his new word parallelogram; his mother the mathematician taught it to him. Yet parents don’t explicitly teach children language in the ways that they are taught how to play chess, or to play the violin, or to run hurdles. We don’t have grammar classes that teach our toddlers how to arrange their words. We don’t even correct them when they use improper English. Imagine three-year-old Dennis who has come with you to Mr. Wilson’s house next door. As you are standing in Mr. Wilson’s entryway, Dennis proclaims, I goed to the bathroom, while standing atop a freshly made puddle. In situations like these no one thinks of correcting the child’s grammar. You run for the nearest mop! And these moments are not the exceptions, but the rule. In most cases, if our children communicate the message, we are so overjoyed that we let the grammar slide.

These examples are not the only reason to doubt grandma’s theory of language learning. Children all over the world learn language without any explicit instruction. From palaces to pitched tents, all children learn language in roughly the same way and at roughly the same time in development. Children become language experts even though they learn in radically different environments. They learn language when they are born into cultures that value conversation with infants. They also learn in cultures where parents don’t talk to their infants. Though at first glance it seems obvious that we teach language to our children, language learning can’t be explained solely by parental instruction.

So, how do children learn language?

The first to suggest that language was a function of nature was Egyptian King Psammetichus in the fourth century B.C.E. This king wanted to know which of the many peoples of the world were the first inhabitants. He ordered shepherds to raise two infants in isolation and to record their very first word. That word would provide the answer. The king started his experiment relatively certain of the final outcome. If the word was spoken in Egyptian, then surely the Egyptians were the first to inhabit the earth. Their language would be heralded as the original language.

As the king ordered, the shepherds raised the children, saying not a word in their presence. When the children were two years of age the experiment was complete. One of the toddlers said "becos. The shepherds immediately reported this to the king, to his dismay. It was not an Egyptian word, but the Phrygian word for bread." His Egyptians were not the first inhabitants of the known world. Rather, they were second in line to the Phrygians.

King Psammetichus’s experiment was based on the assumption that language is present in each child, just waiting for the moment to burst forth. The king on this point seems aligned with the popular writer Professor Steven Pinker, who recently wrote that just as spiders spin webs, humans learn language. It is in our very nature to learn language. Language is a product of the human mind.

So, is it nature or is it nurture? This question fuels a debate that has lasted for centuries, a debate that affects our roles as parents, teachers, and caregivers. If language is inborn, then we can stand back and watch the miracle unfold. If, on the other hand, we teach language, we must be active partners in our children’s language growth. All of us need to know because children’s language abilities are intimately related to many aspects of intellectual growth.

Those in the field of language development are finally in a position to answer some of these age-old questions. There has been a revolution within the study of language development in recent years. New methods can evaluate the language capabilities of the fetus (yes, the fetus!) and newborn. We can now see up close what newborns bring to the task of language learning (nature). New methods also permit an ever clearer view of the ways in which parents’ teachings affect their children. It turns out that nature and nurture are involved in an intricate dance with each other. Children’s minds are rich with language-learning resources. Even newborns have a proclivity to attend to certain sounds over others. Yet there is much that parents and caregivers can do to enhance children’s language growth. We can now identify the environments that provide fertile ground for language learning.

These revolutionary findings have been widely published in the scientific literature. It is now time to share them with parents and caregivers who watch the miracle of language development every day. We serve as your scientific guides on a tour of language development. We begin with the fetus who is listening in on our conversations and then turn to the newborn who, in his own subtle way, is already taking part in these conversations. We will look at the four- to eight-month-old statistician who cannot say a word, but who accurately analyzes our speech for common sounds and patterns. Then it’s off to the nine- to twelve-month-old who charms us with her points, her demands, and her questions—all without saying a word. Eventually, we work our way up to the knowledgeable three-year-old who talks in full paragraphs, rarely stopping for a breath.

On this journey we will take you to laboratories around the world as we see virtually every facet of early language development, from the fetus’s first detection of speech sounds to the toddler’s mastery of complex grammar. You will discover how infants easily solve language tasks that highly trained professional linguists who have studied language for years have been unable to completely understand. As researchers who have worked at the cutting edge of the field, we know what to look for. As mothers of five children we also know what a special experience it can be to watch as our children grow. Whether in the lab or at home, we continue to marvel at babies’ monumental achievements as they learn language. With the scientists’ tools in hand, parents can join researchers and watch their own children with renewed excitement and respect.

Each chapter of this book contains two broad sections. The first, Language Milestones, explores what babies know about language and when they know it. We also examine the scientific techniques that allow us to uncover babies’ burgeoning language knowledge. The second, Scientific Sleuthing Pays Off, demonstrates how the scientific findings can be used to enhance our everyday interactions with our children. To help you further, we have studded each chapter with inserts called, Try This. Using these sections, you can experience the phenomenon of language development in your own home laboratory. All of these sections will enrich your understanding of your child’s language development. Armed with this knowledge, you can facilitate your child’s language growth.

Language Milestones

In this section is described what children at different ages can do. Using the latest scientific research, we will show the reader the milestones that children reach and the pitfalls they can meet along the road. Also described are the hidden capabilities that cannot be directly observed in children’s daily behavior. In short, we examine what it takes to make language acquisition happen.

Milestones, such as when a child says his first word, are a constant topic of conversation and provide the yardstick for how children are faring compared to their peers. When parents compare two children in the same family or from different families, they invariably wonder if their child is on target or within the normal range. As experts who have tested thousands of children in our laboratories, we can reassure you that language develops at different times.

Consider the following typical scenario: Tommy is 19 months old and has not yet uttered his first word. Samantha, at the same age, is already talking in sentences. Tommy’s mother, Lulu, is getting more and more concerned as each day passes (and especially on the days of play group, when Samantha’s mother is quick to point out that Samantha can say what she wants while Tommy still has to grunt and point). Tommy is prone to tantrums when Lulu can’t figure out what he wants, to the point that she is beginning to dread going to play group. Samantha seems so much more controlled and contained. Is this normal? Is it just a difference between boys and girls? Or is Tommy headed for the psychiatrist’s couch?

Similar cases from the scientific literature show that both Tommy and Samantha are well within the normal range. While boys do lag behind girls by a few months, they soon catch up. Since Tommy is a second child, his mother speaks and reads to him less than she did to her firstborn. This is probably a factor in his slower development as well. Tommy’s mother is experiencing needless anxiety, especially because it is clear that Tommy understands much of what is said to him even though he doesn’t speak.

What is normal varies enormously in the area of language development. Some children speak their first words by 10 months of age, although most don’t until 12 or 13 months. Others don’t talk until they are Tommy’s age (19 months). Almost all children who lag behind catch up.

Why is saying that first word so difficult? To illustrate, let’s witness a scene with 11-month-old David and his mother in Cleveland, Ohio. David is in his high chair eating Cheerios. He’s just finished with his turkey and sweet potatoes, and is wearing his dinner proudly on his face and arms. The floor around him shows the carnage of the battle, since he is learning to feed himself. His mother, Wendy, is thoroughly exhausted from feeding David while trying to cook dinner for herself and her husband, Irving.

Eh eh eh eh eh, David whines repeatedly as he points at the Cheerio he has just thrown on the floor. Wendy knows this is her cue to pick up the Cheerio. I can’t wait until you can talk, she says. David has been making sounds like eh eh and gaga for months now, but no words yet.

Their game is interrupted by the sounds of a car. David bobs up and down expectantly in his high chair. As the door opens and his father appears, David looks up and says, Dada. In unison Wendy and Irving swivel their heads in David’s direction. They smile proudly. There is no mistaking it! This is the first word. As if their son had just delivered the Gettysburg address, David’s parents are now sure that their son is the genius they knew all along he’d be.

We rarely think of why this moment is so magical. After all, babies around the world perform this trick at approximately the same age, just as they all learn to walk. Yet consider what lies behind the making of a first word—even one as deceptively simple as Dada. First, David has to notice the word Dada in the midst of all the speech he hears every day. David has to find where words begin and end in the cascades of speech that tumble over him. The problem David faces is not unlike what happens when an adult travels to a foreign country and doesn’t speak the language. Finding sentences in the streams of speech all around—let alone words—seems hopeless. The words a tourist hears are not punctuated with commas or separated by spaces. People seem to speak so quickly. David, however, solves this problem and finds the word Dada—and many others—by the tender age of 11 months.

Of course, picking out the word Dada is only part of the solution. The second hurdle David faces is figuring out what Dada means. It could refer to Daddy’s hair or to Daddy’s clothes or to the peculiar way Daddy walks. Given how many babies call all males Dada for several months, we can see that this is no mean feat. Finally, David has to figure out just how to arrange his mouth and tongue to utter the word. Using your mouth is like playing a complex instrument. If you miss the mark—even by a little bit—you say an entirely different word. Emily Latella from Saturday Night Live designed an entire skit around words that were near misses when she made editorial pronouncements about problems with the Deaf Penalty, Violins on Television, and the Presidential Erection. Or, consider tongue twisters such as She sells seashells by the seashore. For David, all of language is like a tongue twister! Before David articulates that first word have come a host of accomplishments that paved the way.

Language milestones display the complexity and competency of the human mind. Our grandmothers would never believe what fetuses, infants, and toddlers can do. And why should they? Many language milestones can only be observed through scientific testing. In this book, we go well beyond what our grandmothers can see.

The Source of Our Knowledge: Scientific Sleuthing

The second broad issue concerns how researchers access what is going on in a child’s mind. Scientific sleuthing is required to ask questions of babies who can’t walk, talk, or follow directions. More is known now about how infants behave and think than in the prior fifty years. The reason for this leap in knowledge is twofold: First, there have been stunning theoretical breakthroughs, and second, new methods have been invented for studying babies.

Theoretical breakthroughs. Major advancements in the study of language development can be traced to one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century: Professor Noam Chomsky of MIT. Chomsky was the first to posit that language is a window onto the human mind. He stated that language was an innate property of the human species. His work has given the field a way to talk about the complexity of language and to ask interesting questions. Chomsky appreciated the elegance of language structure, and realized that all languages are equally complex. By virtue of membership in the human species, infants’ brains are prepared to learn language. This language instinct, as Steven Pinker calls it, represents nature’s contribution to language development.

Chomsky also recognized, though, that language learning is influenced by the language babies hear around them. Otherwise, as grandma rightly pointed out, all children would speak the same language. Many scientists have studied how parents talk to their children and how this affects language learning. Both the role of inborn factors—nature—as well as the role of the environment—nurture—are needed for language development.

Methodological breakthroughs. The theoretical breakthroughs influenced the kinds of questions that needed to be asked. If babies come into the world equipped with a language instinct, testing should be able to uncover evidence for it in babies who could not yet talk. This new viewpoint paved the way for the development of methods that investigate the hidden competencies of infants and toddlers. Because of these methodological breakthroughs, much new information about language development has come forth. Consider one of the popular methods that draw on a simple observation:

Babies suck.

This is a fact, not an epithet. Babies spend a lot of their time sucking, to obtain food and just because sucking satisfies a need. Put a bottle in their mouths and babies suck. Put a finger in their mouths and they suck too. Professor Peter Eimas at Brown University has invented a method that uses babies’ sucking as a vehicle to tell what they know. He gives babies a nipple that is hooked up to an amplifier so the patterns of their sucking can be recorded. As the baby happily sucks away, Eimas plays the same sound over and over for the baby and watches what happens. When babies hear something new, they get aroused and show their excitement by sucking harder on the nipple. After they hear the same sound for a while, they, like adults, get a little bored and their sucking rate slows down.

This method has been used to find out if two-day-old babies can tell the difference between their own language and another language. After all, they have been hearing their own language for several months in the womb. Can newborn French babies tell their language apart from, say, Russian?

Imagine baby Jean-Paul, all dressed up in a Christian Dior outfit in his Yves St. Laurent stroller, being brought for a visit to a baby lab in Paris. Jean-Paul is given a brand-new nipple to suck on while he hears someone talking in Russian. He sucks like mad until he gets bored, and then his sucking declines. Then the researchers plays samples of French, said by the same bilingual speaker. With renewed excitement Jean-Paul starts sucking with a passion (vive la France! ). Jean-Paul could tell the difference between French and Russian. Babies around the world can tell the difference between their mother tongue and a foreign language at just two days of age. Great headway in understanding language development has been made with the youngest of babies—even fetuses.

Scientific Sleuthing Pays Off

Okay, you say, it’s interesting to chart the milestones of language development and to learn how scientists find these things out, but what does all of this newfound knowledge have to do with me?

The last section of each chapter takes a broad look at language development during the age period covered by the chapter. Mining the scientific knowledge base, we can make informed decisions about everyday issues. When should we start talking to our children? Does baby talk help or hinder language learning? Equipped with knowledge, parents and professionals (such as speech therapists, pediatricians, and child-care providers) can become more astute participants in children’s language development. They also are equipped to tell if something is wrong. Take a look at some of the advantages when you know what to look for:

On April 6, 1997, the lead story on all the major networks was about the results of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care. This landmark study, in which one of the co-authors of this book participated (Dr. Hirsh-Pasek), probed the effects of early child care on language development and intelligence from birth to three years of age. Since more than 70 percent of American women with children under the age of three are now in the work force, this issue is crucially important to the development of the country’s next generation. The results of this massive study were that above and beyond the effects of children’s home environment, what goes on at a child’s day-care facility is critical for language growth. Children in high-quality day-care environments have more vocabulary and more complex language than their counterparts in lower-quality care.

This is important new information that can change children’s lives. The study’s findings describe not only what is meant by high-quality day-care environments, but also help identify those kinds of day-care environments that enhance or impede children’s language skills. In day care, silence is not golden. Other than at nap time, quiet rooms in which children are seen and not heard is a cause for concern. And rooms kept quiet by depositing children in front of a television are also far from ideal. With specific guidelines from the scientific data in hand, parents will know what to look for when they want to put their children into good day care that will stimulate language growth.

Scientific knowledge can also alert us to potential red flags. On July 23, 1997, ABC News Nightline with Ted Koppel ran a heart-wrenching story. Eastern Europe has become a fertile source for the adoption of white babies. Children in orphanages in these countries have minimal care and are often starved of stimulation. With too many children assigned to each caregiver, the responsible adults can provide only for infants’ most basic physical needs. There is little time to touch, cuddle, or even talk to the babies in their charge.

It is into this setting that American families, having the best of intentions, have gone to adopt young children. What many of these families do not realize, however, is the nightmare of adopting babies who have had so little stimulation in the first year of life. Babies growing up in an environment where no one talks to them or plays with them are left with unseen scars. These children may never have the brain capacity to develop normally. When the desperate parents of these children were interviewed, they said that they never knew about the consequences of early profound deprivation. Recent research points to the effects of language stimulation and to the growth in brain pathways that are so critical to the first three years of life. With knowledge comes the power to make informed decisions—from which day-care center to select to whether to adopt an 18-month-old from a clean but psychologically empty orphanage thousands of miles from home.

Also in each chapter are sections called Try This, which invite you to perform your own observations of language development. Your home becomes your laboratory as you look at your baby in a whole new light, attempting to have him reproduce some of the findings from the scientific literature. The only factor that limits you is the age of your baby—she may have to grow into the next set of mini-experiments.

Nature has exquisitely prepared infants (and even fetuses) with the tools for analyzing the language they hear around them. Yet it is through nurture—or the environments that we provide—that babies are able to bring these innate abilities to bear. As we explore the intricate dance between nature and nurture, we not only learn about the development of language, but also come to understand better what it means to be a member of the human species. What we are about to see is that nature and nurture are already at work even before the baby is born, preparing the baby for a dramatic entrance into the language-speaking world.

Chapter 1

Watch Your Language!

The Fetus Can Hear You: Development

from Before Birth to Three Months of Age

The Fetus

THE FETUS

A game we used to play at the swimming pool approximates what it must be like to live in the womb. One person thinks of a word and then says it as loud as she can while she and her friend are submerged in the pool. Somehow, the friend is supposed to make sense of the noise and to guess what the word is. If you have ever played that game, you know that you can accurately report the number of syllables and the way the syllables are stressed in the word. It is extremely difficult, however, even with a lot of repetitions, to guess the correct word. Researchers believe that’s what the fetus hears too. Apparently, the fetus is already prepared to hear the contours of our voice and the cadences of speech without ever hearing words the way that we do. Surrounded by water and with an inside rhythm section that thumps with each pump of the mother’s heart, the baby hears only distant sounds beyond the uterine wall. The question is, what does the fetus make of the sounds she hears?

The Fetal Environment: Home Sweet Home

Jane, who works for a banking company, is 36 weeks pregnant. She has already discovered that her fetus can respond to sound. (In fact, hearing is only one of the senses that the fetus uses—along with sensitivity to brightness, taste, and tactile stimulation, all in place by the end of pregnancy.) When Jane is finished at work, she relaxes by listening to her stereo. As classical music crests or rock music pounds, she experiences firsthand her fetus’s sensitivity to sound. When her fetus hears loud music, it seems to dance in utero as it is awakened from its repose.

Fetuses begin responding to sounds about six or seven months in utero. There is much to hear inside their cozy quarters. Using a waterproof microphone called a hydrophone, researchers can actually listen in on what must be music to babies’ ears. Most of what they hear is the turbulence of rushing blood as it flows through the mother’s system, a sound that is louder for the fetus than are most everyday conversations. A fetus also hears the constant rhythm of the mother’s heartbeat; a pulse that rises above the background noise to provide a kind of soothing mantra. These sounds offer a consistent low-frequency baseline for the other noises that the fetus hears, those that are louder or of higher pitch. For this reason, Jane notices that her fetus responds only to loud music or to high-pitched sounds from passing ambulances or fire trucks. She also reports reactions to the loud booms of fireworks and the crashes of thunder, but not to birdsongs or other people’s conversations.

Baby, Do You Read Me? Hearing Mother’s Voice and Other Sounds

As researchers gain more knowledge about the internal environment of the womb and fetal reactions, they have come to the unmistakable conclusion that fetuses can hear their mothers. The technique used to discover this is called heart-rate deceleration, and the masterminds behind the project are Professors William Fifer and Chris Moon from