Babies and Communication

We seem to be “built” to speak and understand language.  The specialized areas of the brain, such as Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas, suggest that genetics provides us with, at very least, the neurological foundations for language.

Linguistics is, of course, a whole separate subject matter, but it does overlap with psychology quite a bit, especially in regards to language development in infants and children.  The ability young children have of learning a language -- or even two or three languages simultaneously -- is one of the indications that there is something special about our brains at that age.

It all begins in infancy.  From birth until around 6 months, babies make a great deal of noise.  They squeal, squeak, growl, yell, and give us raspberries.  And they coo.  Cooing is basically the production of what will later become vowels (a, e, i, o, and u).

From 6 months to about 10 months, they produce somewhat more complicated sounds called babbling.  First, they practice their vowels more precisely, starting with the round, back vowels (oo, oh, ah...) and working their way to the unrounded front vowels (ee, eh, ay...).  The first consonants are h, m, and b, which can be combined with the vowels to make syllables.  Soon, they add p, t, d, n, w, f, v, and y.  A little while later, they add k, g, and ng.

Then they start adding s and z.  It takes a little longer for babies to get sh, ch, j, and the infamous th sounds.  The very last sounds are l and r.  This is why you hear them pronouncing works as oddly as they sometimes do.  Fis does fine for fish, soozies for shoes, Wobbut for Robert, Cawa for Carla, and so on.  But keep in mind that they can perceive far more than they can pronounce -- something appropriately called the fis phenomenon.  They will not be able to say certain words, but they won’t put up with you mispronouncing them!  One of my daughters, for example, used the syllable yã (with a nasal a) to mean shoe, sock and even chair -- but understood the difference quite well.

Mothers (and fathers) play a huge part in forming the child’s language.  Even if we are “preprogrammed” in some way to speak language, we need to learn a specific language from the people around us.  Mothers typically adjust their speech to fit the child’s level.  This is called motherese.  It is found in practically every culture on the planet, and it has certain common characteristics:  The “sentences” are very short, there is a lot of repetition and redundancy,  there is a sing-song quality to it, and it contains many special “baby words.”  It also is embedded in the context of the immediate surroundings, with constant reference to things nearby and activities that are going on here-and-now.

Motherese often involves a subtle shaping called a protoconversation. ..

Source: http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/langdev.html

“The baby in order to imitate you has to figure out how to shape their lips to make that particular sound they’re hearing,’’ explains developmental psychologist David Lewkowicz of Florida Atlantic University, who led the study being published Monday. “It’s an incredibly complex process.’’
Apparently it doesn’t take them too long to absorb the movements that match basic sounds. By their first birthdays, babies start shifting back to look you in the eye again — unless they hear the unfamiliar sounds of a foreign language. Then, they stick with lip-reading a bit longer.
“It’s a pretty intriguing finding,’’ says University of Iowa psychology professor Bob McMurray, who also studies speech development. The babies “know what they need to know about, and they’re able to deploy their attention to what’s important at that point in development.’’
The new research appears in this week’s issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It offers more evidence that quality face-time with your tot is very important for speech development — more than, say, turning on the latest baby DVD.

Source

. Infant language researchers believe that babies are born with a genetic aptitude for language. Studies have shown that mere hours after birth, a newborn can distinguish his mother's voice from that of another woman. At around four months of age, a baby smiles and recognizes his name. Babies only eight to nine months old can remember words from a story or a simple piece of music they have heard previously. By the time they say their first words around one year of age, children can understand hundreds more words; and once the language spigot is opened, the flow continues.

Yet, communication takes place long before a child speaks his first word. Mothers have learned to distinguish a "hunger" cry from an "I'm lonely, please pick me up" wail. A baby responds to his mother's voice with eye contact, coos, and gurgles, waving arms and legs, subtle body language, then not-so-subtle smiles and cries. A scolding or encouraging tone has come to mean everything, even before the words make sense.

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"Babies have a different way of listening to the world," says Dr. Lynne Werner, PhD, a University of Washington professor of speech and hearing science. "Adults usually hear in a narrow band of sound, while babies seem to use a different approach. They don't have the selective attention of adults and they don't pay attention all the time. Instead, they always seem to be listening broadband or to all frequencies simultaneously."

This means that babies respond to unexpected sounds, often startling violently at sudden noises. It also makes the noise level that our society is accustomed to difficult for babies. Says Dr. Werner, "If you are talking to a baby or reading her a story, background noise can be a problem. Turn off the television or radio."

Source

Christakis argues that regardless of what is playing on the screen — whether it's baby-friendly content or shows geared toward adults — television by nature is a passive medium that hampers rich social interaction. Even when parents and children interacted actively while watching TV together, the net effect of having it turned on, for a few minutes or hours, was a drop in vocalizations. On average, the study found, when the TV is switched on, youngsters spend more time in silence and solitude than they do in active social interaction. "At minimum, the findings should give parents pause," says Christakis, noting that in 30% of American households, the television is on most of the day, regardless of whether anyone is watching.
That's especially true when it comes to DVDs and videos marketed to enhance infant development; many claim to work by encouraging parents and babies to engage and interact with each other as they watch. But the new study shows the opposite effect: whatever the programming, the ultimate outcome of television noise is to inhibit verbal exchanges. In earlier work, Christakis also documented that baby DVDs and videos may even contribute to a drop in language acquisition in infants.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1902209,00.html#ixzz1nFxcA1fF

Led by Frederick Zimmerman and Dr. Dimitri Christakis, both at the University of Washington, the research team found that with every hour per day spent watching baby DVDs and videos, infants learned six to eight fewer new vocabulary words than babies who never watched the videos. These products had the strongest detrimental effect on babies 8 to 16 months old, the age at which language skills are starting to form. "The more videos they watched, the fewer words they knew," says Christakis. "These babies scored about 10% lower on language skills than infants who had not watched these videos." (See the top 10 children's books of 2008.)
It's not the first blow to baby videos, and likely won't be the last. Mounting evidence suggests that passive screen sucking not only doesn't help children learn, but could also set back their development. Last spring, Christakis and his colleagues found that by three months, 40% of babies are regular viewers of DVDs, videos or television; by the time they are two years old, almost 90% are spending two to three hours each day in front of a screen. Three studies have shown that watching television, even if it includes educational programming such as Sesame Street, delays language development. "Babies require face-to-face interaction to learn," says Dr. Vic Strasburger, professor of pediatrics at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine and a spokesperson for the American Academy of Pediatrics. "They don't get that interaction from watching TV or videos. In fact, the watching probably interferes with the crucial wiring being laid down in their brains during early development." Previous studies have shown,

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1650352,00.html#ixzz1nFyoMoYB

Some researchers theorize that children are born with an innate biological “device” for understanding the principles and organization common to all languages. According to this theory, the brain’s “language module” gets programmed to follow the specific grammar of the language a child is exposed to early in life. Yet the language rules and grammar children use in their speech often exceed the input to which they are exposed. What accounts for this discrepancy?
That is where the theory of universal grammar comes in. This theory posits that all languages have the same basic structural foundation. While children are not genetically “hard-wired” to speak a particular language like Dutch or Japanese, universal grammar lets them learn the rules and patterns of these languages—including those they were never explicitly taught. Some linguists believe that universal grammar and its interaction with the rest of the brain is the design mechanism that allows children to become fluent in any language during the first few years of life. In fact, childhood may be a critical period for the acquisition of language capabilities. Some scientists claim that if a person does not acquire any language before the teen-aged years, they will never do so in a functional sense. Children may also have a heightened ability, compared to adults, to learn second languages--especially in natural settings. Adults, however, may have some advantages in the conscious study of a second language in a classroom setting.
Emphasis on Experience and Usage
Not all linguists believe that the innate capacities are most important in language learning. Some researchers place greater emphasis on the influence of usage and experience in language acquisition. They argue that adults play an important role in language acquisition by speaking to children—often in a slow, grammatical and repetitious way. In turn, children discern patterns in the language and experiment with speech gradually—uttering single words at first and eventually stringing them together to construct abstract expressions....

Read more: http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/linguistics/learn.jsp

 It fascinates and delights me that nearly all mothers in all cultures across all of time that we know of have spoken to their babies in the way scientists say is the very best way for those babies to learn speech. We change tone and pitch, lean in close, smile, repeat sounds our babies make, emphasize and repeat sounds we want them to make, focus first on the sounds that will be easiest for them to make- and we do this all without any training at all.

Unfortunately, in our culture at least, some of us have had this natural response trained out of us. Hence, the baby Einstein Videos which did the opposite of what they were meant to do and could never accomplish the task busy, modern parents purchased them to complete- make our kids smart.

The best 'enrichment' program you can give your baby is you, one on one, cooing, singing, tweaking your baby's nose and smothering her with kisses, speaking (or signing) up close, personal, warm, and amazingly interactive.

One of the saddest things we've heard over this last year of the Striderling's medical issues and developmental delays has come from his occupational and physical therapists. They are delighted and surprised when they learn that the Striderling's parents will get down on the floor and play with him without being urged.

"A large part of our job," said one of them, "Is mainly teaching parents to play with their babies. They don't know how anymore."