How Babies Learn to Talk

Living in a polyglot family, one of the aspects that more than others trigger my curiosity is understanding the mechanisms through which people, and especially newborns, learn a new language.

According to common sense, babies are less intelligent than adults, as intelligence is thought to be something that naturally grows with age. When making such considerations, though, we must be careful not to confuse intelligence with the amount of real life experience: one of the most widely accepted definitions of intelligence is, more or less: 'the ability of solving new problems'. Learning to speak your first language should be therefore considered a totally different thing from learning a second (or a third), as it's much more challenging -- for starters, you can't learn it on textbooks, as you have yet to learn any of the languages a textbook could be written in.

How does a baby learn its first language, then?

The process of language learning starts well before the first babbles: there's no doubt on the fact that babies in the womb move in response to noises. Even before they're born, they can listen to their mother's conversations. They won't recognize the words, obviously (acoustics is likely bad in there), but they likely recognize their mother's speech patterns and tone of voice, which will help them identify her after the partum.

With the melody imprinted, one of the very first problems the baby faces is finding out the units building sentences: where does one word end and the next start? Research shows that, by 4-5 months of age, babies are at a good point in developing the ability of distinguishing words as part of the sentence structure.

Its own name -- and other frequently occurring words, like "mommy" -- will act as an anchor in the mass of sounds, much like what happens in your mind when people talk an unknown language. Research tells us that at 6 months of age babies can recognize a word they hear after one they are familiar with, which help babies find words in the speech stream.

Then, one of the most challenging steps. How do they manage to know what words actually mean? A study from United States researchers featured on BBC News suggests this happens mainly through social interaction and by association/repetition, much like the way birds learn to sing. If the baby sees a dog and the mother points to it saying 'hey, it's a dog!', it may not be clear what the mother is referring to the first time, maybe even because just a week ago another little dog passed by and she referred to it as 'doggie'. Through repetition and contextual learning, though, the baby will eventually associate the sound 'dog' (or 'dog'-something) to a barking creature with four legs and a tail. By age 12 months, babies seem to interpret words as labeling objects -- and the whole object as opposed to its parts or features.

Next, they have to learn how to put words together to build sensible sentences. This process is also mostly based on social interaction as the more a baby is surrounded by talking people and stimuli, the more 'data' and information is gathering to crack our language code. They know more about their language than they can say -- just as you could understand more in a foreign language than you could speak. So while their first spoken words appear around 12 months of age, they may already understand hundreds of words. By age 18 months, they can usually understand easy 5-6 word sentences. Once this level is reached, things will get easier from there.

In a 2006 article published on NeuroReport, it is said that a new technology called M.E.G., tracking brain electromagnetic activity, managed to discover that by 12 months, millions of nerve cells in the brain's two language centers are successfully connected and communicating: first hearing the sound, then producing it.

So, babies are sleeping most of the time and can't be left alone for half an hour, but the next time you see one and think it's not as nearly as smart as you, think again, and careful about what you say!

For further information:
http://www.cofc.edu/linguist/archives/2005/05/how_do_babies_l.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/2956722.stm
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5578636