The house is quiet. The baby has gone down for her nap.
Finally, you’ve got a chance to catch up on the chores. But what’s
that you hear over the baby monitor? Is that your little girl
talking? She’s only eight months old! You always knew she was
remarkable.
You hurry to her room and quietly open the door. There she is,
lying in her crib, happily chattering away. “Bababababa.
Dadadadada,” she burbles, catching sight of you. “Eeeee!”
All right, so they’re not her first words. What are they?
Sometime around seven to eight months of age infants start to
babble. These consonant-vowel combinations, like “ba,” often
include facial expressions, such as smiles or frowns. Babbling is
your infant’s way of playing with sounds and language. (Gopnik,
Meltzoff, & Kuhl, 1999)
Repeat after me.
Think about your own attempts to imitate another language. If you
hear a Spanish-speaker say gracias you may pick up the rolling “r”
sound, but do you know immediately how to make the sound yourself? It
takes a bit of practice to get your tongue in the right position. Think
of a baby trying to learn how to speak for the first time.
How does an infant learn how to make the sounds he hears? Perhaps by
babbling and copying the grown-ups around him.
Scientists think babies’ babbling aren’t simply random sounds strung
together in an unbearably cute fashion. But rather, babies are learning
how to move their lips, tongues, mouths and jaws to make the sounds they
hear you make. (Gopnik et al., 1999)
Babies have a powerful ability to learn the language (or languages) they
hear and adults are very well-suited to help babies learn. The special
way we speak to babies, such as getting up close, drawing out our vowel
sounds and pitching our voices high, seems to be just what infants want
and need when it comes to sorting out the sounds of speech. (Gopnik et
al., 1999)
They’re sounds and
they’re exciting.
Be careful what you say because babies love to imitate the sounds they
hear adults make. This is why babies around the world seem to babble
using the sounds of their families’ language. In one research study,
three- to five-month-old babies watched and listened to films of an
adult making vowel sounds. With a total of only 15 minutes of exposure
(over three days, five minutes at a time), even some of the youngest
babies tried to imitate the adult speech, making similar if not perfect
copies of the sounds they heard. (Kuhl & Meltzoff, 1996)
Even at these very young ages, babies may be developing what scientists
call a “mouth-to-sound map,” figuring out that different sounds are made
by moving their lips, tongues, mouths and jaws in different ways.
And babies aren’t just using their listening skills to figure out
language. They also seem to use something similar to lip reading.
Scientists have discovered that babies would rather look at the face of
a person who is saying the vowel sound the babies are hearing than see a
face and sound that don’t match. (Kuhl & Meltzoff, 1982).
What babies who are learning about speech need is someone to talk to.
And that someone is you!
By the time an infant is six months old, the average American baby has
heard hundreds of thousands of examples of the vowel sound “ee,” as in
“daddy,” “mommy” and “baby.” Researchers think that from these thousands
of examples, babies develop a type of sound map in their brains that
helps them hear the “ee” sound clearly.
In a way, babies create perfect examples of speech sounds in their
heads, with a type of target area around each sound. With their sound
map for “ee,” for example, babies learn to pick out the “ee” distinctly
from the other sounds they hear. Sounds close to the “ee” sound may be
in the “target area” around the perfect example, and the baby still
hears them as an “ee.”
These perfect examples of speech sounds, called “prototypes,” have a
profound effect on how babies hear speech and how they babble. They help
“tune” the child’s brain for the language around him, so that he can
hear the different sounds of speech clearly. Even when adults don’t
speak clearly, babies seem to compare the mumbled sounds in grown-ups’
speech against the prototypes in their brains and figure out what
they’re saying.
By the time they’re six months old, babies who hear the sounds of their
culture’s language have developed a set of speech sound prototypes they
can use as building blocks when they begin to put together their own
words, usually sometime around 12 months. (Kuhl, Williams, Lacerda,
Stevens, & Lindblom, 1992)
Helpful Parenting Tips
There’s nothing quite as endearing as a happily
babbling baby. Knowing that these sounds may be helping your baby put
together the building blocks of speech is an added bonus. But to get to
babbling, and from there to meaningful speech, your baby needs a good
teacher.
Talk to your little one early, and talk to him often. Get up close so he can see how your lips move. Babies are wonderful copycats.
Use “parentese.” Draw out your vowels and change the tone of your voice.
Don’t be afraid to repeat yourself, over and over again. Favorite songs, nursery rhymes, and the words to favorite books give children lots of practice hearing the sounds of the language.
When she babbles, don’t be embarrassed to babble right back. Babies learn early to take turns with you in making sounds. Think of these as conversations!
Enjoy these early conversations with your baby. At
first, you may not be able to understand his brand of babble, but the
words will come soon enough. In the meantime, get up close, and let your
baby see and hear how it’s done.
References:
Gopnik, A., Meltzoff,
A. N., & Kuhl, P. K. (1999). The scientist in the crib: What early
learning tells us about the mind. New York: Perennial.
Kuhl, P. K., &
Meltzoff, A. N. (1982). The bimodal perception of speech in infancy.
Science, 218, 1138-1141.
Kuhl, P. K., &
Meltzoff, A. N. (1996). Infant vocalizations in response to speech:
Vocal imitation and developmental change. Journal of the Acoustical
Society of America, 100(4), 2425-2438.
Kuhl, P. K.,
Williams, K. A., Lacerda, F., Stevens, K. N., & Lindbloom, B.
(1992). Linguistic experience alters phonetic perception in infants
by 6 months of age. Science, 255, 606-608.
