Can Saying the Same Word to a Baby
The Mystery of Babies' First Words
Information technology's virtually impossible to discern when an infant's babbling turns into a fully formed word.
One Friday in 1977, a 1-year-erstwhile named Nathaniel living in Leiden, in the Netherlands, said "mawh," which his English language-speaking parents enthusiastically greeted as his get-go word. It came with a pointing gesture, and all weekend, his parents responded by giving him what he pointed at, considering mawh, they thought, conspicuously meant more. Just when they got habitation from work on Monday, their Dutch-speaking babysitter excitedly told them well-nigh Nathaniel's first word, the Dutch give-and-take for "pretty," mooi, and that whenever he said "mawh," she agreed with him, "Ja, ja, dat is mooi!" Yes, yes, that's pretty.
Later Monday, the infant was silent. Those nine hours with the babysitter, his mother afterward wrote, "either confused or discouraged Nathaniel sufficiently that he stopped using the word completely, and in fact failed to acquire whatsoever replacements for several months."
"A full day of not getting 'more' was enough to cause him to reconsider this whole language affair," his mother, the Harvard education psychologist Catherine Snow, told me. She noted that he was a late talker simply "has fabricated up for it since."
Snowfall related her son's woes with mawh in a 1988 essay about a problem faced by parents and scholars of early on child linguistic communication alike: In that location's no vivid line between baby babbling and start words. Rather, wordlike forms wriggle one past one from the phonological mush like proto–land animals crawling from Cretaceous seas. More might sound like mawh, low-cal might sound like dai, and all done might sound like a-da. As a result, a baby'southward truthful first give-and-take tin be difficult to pin downwards. To grant a wordish form any status, you accept to business relationship for children's control of their tongue, lips, and jaw, but besides what they think words do. They might say something consistently in a certain context even if it doesn't sound like annihilation adults would recognize as a word, and then does that count? What nigh something mimicked? What most a proper noun?
"A lot of kids have this disconcerting all-over-the-placeness with their early vocalizations," says Michael Tomasello, a developmental psychologist at Knuckles University who studies the emergence of language and advice in babies and primates. In that location'due south a gradualness to early words, he says. "Even things that someone would call a word, kids still use them in situations that are a bit baffling."
The messy wordishness of early language makes it less of a definitive milestone than some of kids' other developmental moments, like beginning steps or sexual maturity. Some Western parents may jot down commencement words in baby books. The earliest American baby books, dating to the 1880s, provided spots to write get-go words, says the Rutgers emerita historian Janet Gold. But not every civilization gives them attention. For case, among the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea* (as the linguistic anthropologist Bambi Schieffelin noted in the 1980s), children are non considered to be using language until they say two specific words, those for female parent and breast—even if they're already saying other things. Information technology'south as if the Kaluli deal with the fuzzy vagueness of early on utterances by waiting for specific ones. No culture has rituals or ceremonies to marking a child's commencement words, according to the Utah State anthropologist David Lancy. This makes sense; how can you celebrate what yous can't discern?
Though parents may insist that their children' first words are of import to them, and though they may prize children'southward verbal fluency, get-go words stake as a cultural institution, peculiarly compared with the big linguistic communication milestone at the other end of life. Terminal words appear as Piffling Pursuit clues. Biographies standardly rely on them as motifs. They have been anthologized in multiple languages for centuries, which earned them a subject heading in the Library of Congress nomenclature. But autonomously from a few children's books (such equally Mo Willems'southward Knuffle Bunny and Jimmy Fallon's Dada) and sitcom appearances, first words barely register on the broader cultural landscape. Many people don't know their own start words, probably considering most starting time words are banal and forgettable.
Child-language researchers constitute their solution to the problem of wordishness: Allow parents handle it. Subsequently all, they are experts on their children, who say more in everyday contexts than they ever would for a stranger in a lab. In the 1980s, a squad headed by Elizabeth Bates, a UC San Diego researcher, developed the Communicative Development Inventories, or CDI, a checklist of hundreds of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and pronouns that parents tick off if their children say or understand them. Unlike versions accept been designed for children viii to 36 months old. Parents also note how their children utilize gestures, parts of words, and grammar. The CDI asks: Does your kid tend to say "doggie table" or "doggie on table"? Does your child say "blockses"[instead of "blocks"]? Since it became widely available, around 1990, the CDI has been adapted for several varieties of English, Spanish, Hindi, American and British Sign Languages, and nearly 100 other languages, from Standard arabic to Yiddish. (As a joke, the list of adaptations includes Klingon.)
The CDI immune researchers to start to understand the full range of kids' early vocabularies, how they grow, and how they are tied to other language abilities. An early CDI report, published in 1994, of 2,000 24-month-olds showed that at that historic period, "normal" vocabularies range from fewer than l words to 600 words, with the median at 300 words. Anybody knew there was variability, but that much variability "was big news," says Virginia Marchman, a Stanford research scientist who serves on a nonprofit board overseeing the CDI.
In 2014, a Stanford professor, Michael Frank, approached Marchman. He told her he had a bunch of CDIs from a previous study taking up space in his filing cabinet. She did also. They decided they wanted to build a tool that would make all that information easily searchable and accessible to other researchers and the public. The event is Wordbank, which now consists of more 82,000 CDI reports in 29 languages and dialects. An initial analysis of Wordbank data was published online in January.
If the CDI showed how variable children'due south early on vocabularies are, Wordbank reveals that those vocabularies likewise accept consistent themes. Seeing these themes makes get-go words more interesting as a phenomenon than equally any single case. Infants tend to talk about more or less the same things, no matter what languages they learn. Across 15 languages, they prefer to say and tend to sympathize words about sounds, games and social routines, body parts, and important people in their life. Words learned early on in one language tend to be learned early in other languages. In American English, the x most frequent beginning words, in order, are mommy, daddy, brawl, cheerio, hi, no, dog, infant, woof woof, and banana. In Hebrew, they are mommy, yum yum, grandma, vroom, grandpa, daddy, assistant, this, bye, and machine. In Kiswahili, they are mommy, daddy, auto, true cat, meow, motorcycle, baby, bug, banana, and baa baa.
One reason for this consistency is that such words rank high in a trait researchers call "babiness," which merely means they're words that accept to do with babies, their immediate environs, and important, concrete things. They are frequently words babies hear ofttimes.
Merely another reason for the consistency is that babies tend to learn words that aid them interact with their parents and caregivers. "Kids want to share things; they want to exist part of the social mix," Frank told me. Hi is the first word for a lot of kids. No is also a frequent commencement discussion. (In an earlier written report, Frank found that no was more often a first word for younger siblings than firstborn children.)
Early on words in each language exercise reverberate cultural norms and parenting practices—sounds (like vroom), body parts, and games and social routines are unusually frequent in English, while babies whose families speak Kiswahili and Kigiriama often learn words for places to go and words about outside. Then there are patterns that are difficult to account for, such every bit the high proportion of words for vehicles, clothing, and animals learned by infants speaking northern European languages and Korean.
It likewise appears that 1-year-olds in most languages tend to say and understand more nouns than verbs, and use many fewer function words (such as the, and, and also), even though they hear function words frequently. Ii exceptions are Mandarin and Cantonese, where children say more than verbs, probably because those languages permit speakers to apply a solitary verb (run) to correspond clauses that in other languages require subjects or objects (he runs).
At that place are some interesting demographic differences. According to Wordbank, in 25 of 26 languages, girls nether 3 years erstwhile produce more than words than boys in that age group. There are also gender-related differences in the kinds of words babies tend to say. Boys seem to say words for vehicles and objects associated with stereotypically male activities, such equally sports, earlier than girls; girls seem to learn words for genitals and article of clothing earlier than boys. Also, earlier-born children said and understood more than words than younger siblings, perhaps considering (as child-language researchers suspect but haven't definitively shown) parents address more than speech to firstborn children.
Once kids get older, there are fewer discernible patterns in which words they larn. While early words are quite alike across languages, later learned words begin to differ, likely influenced by kids' environments and interests. Every bit Frank writes in Wordbank, "every bit conquering unfolds, the features that brand languages (and cultures) dissimilar from each other play an always-increasing office in driving acquisition."
Yet the overarching theme of Wordbank is variability, no matter the language. This suggests that no civilisation, no family structure, and no social environment has some special sauce that will turn out speakers or signers of a item type. Everywhere, kids are "taking different routes to language," every bit Frank puts it.
The father of two, Frank finds this liberating. "Parents tend to assume that variations they observe in their kid'southward language are due to specific parenting decisions that they've fabricated. Simply children vary so much that small variations in parenting will usually come out in the wash." Major differences in linguistic communication input volition still be consequential, merely others, like reading i book or ii before a nap, volition barely register.
Even though offset words are and so similar, many American parents yet put the first word on a pedestal, just as first steps are a big deal even though the baby will likely get on to become bipedal similar virtually everyone else. But communication doesn't begin with a fully formed give-and-take—there is so much that comes before.
On their way to learning language, children often brand vocalizations known as "proto-words," which do wordlike piece of work simply sound zilch like adult words. Almost eight years ago, I eagerly tracked my infant son through his structured blathering, naively expecting a crisp adult-similar English word to one day flutter forth. What emerged, at virtually 11 months, was "ka," which came along with a pointing gesture. This was not the arrival of his personhood that I'd anticipated, but what ka lacked in profundity it made up in perplexity.
Peradventure it'due south car, my wife surmised, because he said it while pointing at trucks in a book. Only and so he aimed ka at a bicycle. Backtracking, we wondered whether it might be a label, non for a specific matter, but for a category of vehicles. Later on all, he used ka with a wheelchair, a barbecue grill, and a shopping cart. That hypothesis died when a Ganesha statue on a shelf prompted a ka too.
Such early utterances have a lot of social work to exercise—they're more than nearly enabling an interaction than about referring to something specific. So information technology seems equally if ka was less an deed of naming than the on-switch for a shared feel. Essentially, I think he was saying, "Hither's a absurd thing; nosotros should await at it together." That's when I realized that an earlier sound he used to make, something that sounded like eh, accompanied past a beckoning gesture, was probable a mode of communicating too. I would paraphrase its significant as "Hey you lot, over there; I am over here looking at y'all." It's hard to imagine writing eh in the baby book or throwing a party to celebrate its appearance, but I insist on calling it his first word.
The truth is that by the fourth dimension he said his starting time adult-sounding word, "wheel" (pronounced "whee-oh"), we had already communicated so much with each other via smiles, eye gaze, waving, and pointing that words felt superfluous. I realized that earlier every starting time word is a proto-word; before every proto-give-and-take, a gesture; before a gesture, what?
When I interviewed Mike Frank via Skype, he was sitting on a couch in his home while his newborn son slept in a bassinet nearby, and he was in the process of telling me how, before he had kids, he too focused on discrete emergence of things like commencement words—so the infant squawked.
"Hey dude," Frank cooed, "you okay there?"
The baby was silent, but this was its own kind of communication. He was fine; Frank and I resumed our conversation.
*This article originally misstated the isle where the Kaluli alive equally Samoa.
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2019/04/babies-first-words-babbling-or-actual-language/588289/
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