Human infants are helpless for a relatively long period compared with other mammals. But infants are equipped with the wherewithal to succeed in life: a large brain, hard-wired for specific types of learning. One of the most important of these is language.

If you’ve ever tried studying college French and then stammered your way through your first meal in Paris, you’ll feel conflicting emotions of envy and awe in the presence of a French toddler requesting his pain au chocolat with worldly ease. Although most adults would feel smugly confident in their ability to best a toddler at mental or physical challenges, young children have the upper hand when it comes to language learning.

The ease with which children learn their first language seems at odds with their cognitive abilities. Evolutionary psychologists tell us that human infants enter the world with brains adapted to receiving and processing certain types of information. Children arrive uniquely equipped to receive language in these early years.

There are some six thousand languages spoken in the world, and no matter which one a child is born into, a case-based language like Russian or an African language that requires palatal clicks, virtually all young children will be speaking by age three and fluent by age four or five.

As remarkable as this seems, researchers now know that children process language much earlier than their first attempts at speech. As early as two months, infants recognize and show a preference for their native language over foreign languages, probably due to the fact that the infant has been listening to his mother’s voice many months prior to birth.

The sweet gurgling sounds of early infancy that parents love are not meaningless baby babble but the infant’s early experiments with language. How do we know? Studies of babbling in five-month-old infants show that rather than being random, the sounds have speech-like rhythms and are broken into little groupings. It reflects the infant’s early attempts at imitating and joining the world of words in which she’s immersed.

Language is controlled by the left side of the brain. This is reflected in the fact that when we speak we open up the right side of the mouth slightly more than the left. Infants engaged in babble also open up the right side of the mouth a little more than the left, a sign that it’s controlled by the language center on the opposite side of the brain.

Interestingly, babbling can take a non-verbal form. Children born to deaf parents who learn to sign as their first language babble by moving their fingers in distinct rhythmic patterns, very different from random finger and hand movements.

If babies make their own language efforts by babbling, they’re also good listeners. They learn early to recognize words as discrete units of meaning in longer strings of words. By four and a half months, many babies will recognize their own name.

By the time they celebrate their first birthday they understand that words have symbolic value, standing for things in their environment. Many have already mastered a number of words at this time. By 18 months a toddler’s verbal skills explode, as many children add new words to their vocabulary at the rate of one every two hours. Some children wait longer to begin talking and soon catch up.

But toddlers aren’t just learning words, they’re learning grammar and context. Research shows that children learn vocabulary and grammar simultaneously, giving them the power not to imitate but to construct their own utterances, “Me go boom fall down.”

 

The Role of Baby Talk

Overhearing a parent talking to a baby usually brings a smile to the face of the observer. Adults lose their normal tone and assume a high-pitched voice, enunciating words slowly and putting the emphasis on the first syllable. Sometimes called “parentese,” parents in every culture use this exaggerated high-pitched baby speech when talking to their infants. Child experts believe it serves a function, getting the baby’s attention, differentiating and emphasizing specific words.

The first three years of life are a time of enormous physical, motor and intellectual development for children. It’s during these years that the brain lays down pathways that will facilitate learning later in life. Providing a rich and varied environment that encourages play and interaction with parents and caretakers encourages this intellectual growth.

Language offers a fun and infinitely expanding world for your child. There are countless things parents can do to enrich this world and to promote bonding.