INTERVIEW GUEST: DR. ELIZABETH BATES, Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science and Director of the Center for Research in Language at the University of California, San Diego.
Program Host, Bobbi Conner:
Q. How do babies learn about language?
Dr. Elizabeth Bates:
A. Well, the baby spends much of the first year of life cracking the code, just trying to figure out which packages of sounds are the ones that are really going to be used systematically in his or her language. There are about 7,000 depending on how you count speech sounds that natural languages around the world use, but no single language uses more than 40 or 50 of these. Now, the newborn baby can hear all of these sounds, the problem that she faces is to try to figure out across the course of the first year, which ones of these contrasts are really being used systematically, and to really convey meaning in the language. And that takes a while to figure that out. Much of that first year is spent listening, watching, ..listening… watching, and working back and forth to try to figure out what the boundaries are in this sound system and how it maps on to the world. So long before the child starts producing language, the really hard job that she faces is trying to figure out how to understand it. You've got to do that first.
Q. When do babies typically say their first words?
A. The range is enormous for perfectly healthy normal babies that can go from first words at eight months to first words at fifteen, sixteen, seventeen months in babies who are going to turn out just fine. So, nobody should be sitting there with an alarm clock going off at twelve months of age and panicking. There's a lot of variations in when the children first try to take a stab at turning all that sound they've been listening to into a motor product of their own. Some babies are kind of wait and see babies…I want to get this right. Some babies are Hey, let's go for it, let's just get out there and practice and take a stab and not worry about the fine print. You know, so babies vary a lot in when they start to say their first words.
Q. What can parents do to encourage their child's language development?
A. Well, it turns out that the things parents can do to encourage language develop are just so easy, low cost, regular, normal stuff that's absolutely the best techniques. Narrating the world to your child. Carry your child around on your hip and as you're putting the laundry into the washing machine, just talk with him and to him about what's happening. Look at this… hey look, soap. Mommy puts the soap in, look. Right? So as long as the child's interested, as long as the child's looking back and forth and listening, that is the premier learning situation. Just narrating the world while the child's interested in it.
Q. After toddlers learn their first words, how does language development progress?
A. Well children take some remarkably different pathways. On average, the first 50 words take a very long time to acquire. That's not every case, but on average, I sometimes tell my students it's like driving toward Colorado across Kansas. The map says that the elevation's going up but it sure doesn't feel like it. It seems really flat. Then around 16 to 18 months you hit Denver. And all of a sudden you begin to get this very rapid increase.. the slope of learning goes up..up. Just like hitting the mountains. And the child, after 16, 17, 18 months, they learn more words in one week than he learned in the previous 6 months. We know that there's a lot of growth in the brain in the second year of life and probably this explosion and available brain resources have something to do with this explosion in language. But, in fact, it's not just that because we know even from experiments with artificial brains, with computers learning language, that there is what we call critical mass affect, you get a certain amount of learning under your belt and it's as if all the words you now know provide context for each other, and make it easier to zero in on new ones.
Q. When do toddlers begin to combine words to form short two word sentences?
A. Well the sentences typically start, and again this is on average and there's huge variation in perfectly healthy children, but on average children start to put words together into sentences between about 18 and 20 months of age. So right smack in the middle of that second year, uh, it is interesting how long that one word stage is in some cases. And it's not clear what the child is waiting for. I mean sometimes children late in one-word stage will build up what sounds like a sentence with separate words. Like "daddy..car…garage". Right? What he really meant to say is Daddy's putting the car in the garage. And then, all of a sudden as if he suddenly has a suitcase that can hold two things instead of one, you'll hear "daddy..car", "car..garage".
Q. Should parents correct toddler, when he or she mispronounces words?
A. The best thing you can do as a parent is to continue to provide the child with good, clean language models. Correcting children's pronunciation or grammar is pretty much notoriously unsuccessful. Don't say that, say this… That doesn't work very well. It's better if the child says "Oh look, I make that" to say "I see, that's right, you made
it. It's really nice". Rather than to say "No, don't say make, say made". These mistakes are good things. These initial mistakes are a sign that the child is trying to come up with a theory of how this works and is trying out some hypotheses, and you don't want to discourage that. That's very important. Those mistakes like stooded up and go and mouses, the children make, are not a sign of trouble, they are a signs of progress.
Q. Is it important to read-aloud to babies and toddlers to encourage language development?
A. It's one of the few things that we've found that is a very, very good predictor of facilitating language development. Reading to babies is a great idea. Besides, the kind of narrating world I was telling you about, with the baby on your hip which I think is the number one thing to do, reading is another really important strategy for helping your child's language grow. You can not start too early. There's no such thing as too early. I was sitting next to a mother on an airplane and she had her 4 ½ month old child on her lap and they were looking at books together. Now, the child does not understand the language being addressed to him at that point, that doesn't matter, he understands that this is exciting. He is getting excited about being in a situation that is going to lead to language development. It's like offering him a ladder. It extends the child's range of what he's prepared to understand. But above all, it's creating a context of excitement over language, of joy, pleasure in language. It's a social context in which the child can enjoy your company and learn language at the same time and that's just golden, that's about the best thing you can do.
This interview was excerpted from The Parent's Journal Public Radio Program.
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