Look Who's Talking!

Language learning is a wonderful process that should be enjoyed by both you and your child—here’s how

All babies are born with the astonishing capability to learn complex languages quickly. And now new research shows that this process begins earlier than experts first thought.

“Language learning begins in the womb,” says Dr Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, a noted infant language researcher and co-author of How Babies Talk: The Magic and Mystery of Language in the First Three Years of Life. “A baby is eavesdropping on each conversation her mother has, once hearing is in place at 7 months.”

That’s just the beginning. Recently there have been several other amazing discoveries. For one, newborns already comprehend speech patterns. At 4½ months, infants recognise the sound patterns of their own name and can distinguish it from other names with the same number of syllables and the same inflection. At 6 months, babies not only know the words “Mommy” and “Daddy” but can also relate them to their own parents. And 18-month-olds understand the basics of syntax, the structure of language.

And, in perhaps the most intriguing discovery of all, researchers have found that 8-montholds use ‘statistics’ to recognise words: learning that “pretty baby” is two words, and not “pret” + “tyba” + “by”. To prove this, researchers invented languages that have similar statistics to English e.g. with the word “pretty”, “pre” is followed by “ty” 80% of the time, while “ty” is rarely followed by “ba”. When the researchers flashed a light while playing an invented word or a non-word, the invented words kept the baby’s attention while the non-words didn’t. “It takes them about two minutes to learn this stuff,” says Dr Jenny Saffran, associate professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

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