Module 3

Children listening

It seems that children begin to prepare themselves for language acquisition at a very early stage. Even before they are born, they can distinguish their mothers' voices from those of other people, and they even react in ways which suggest recognition to pieces of poetry which have been read to them several times. At birth, they show they prefer their mother's voice to those of other people - if the mother speaks 'motherese'.

At first, the infant masters none of the sound system that will later appear. But at six months old, it begins to babble. For a long time, linguists refused to admit that a baby's babbling was connected to linguistic development - it was seen as including the whole range of possible vocalizations without restriction. However, recent work suggests that very quickly indeed, the baby narrows the range of sounds down to those of the mother tongue. At the same time, it will show a preference for listening to the same sounds ; almost from the start, the baby becomes French, Italian or Japanese. (For a full, if rather outdated, discussion of babbling, see the first chapter of Alan Cruttenden's 'Language in Infancy and Childhood')

Babies listen and mimic the sounds of the language spoken by those around them. But the sounds by themselves do not mean anything. How does the infant come to understand that language is referential? How does it begin to assign meanings to utterances? Even if the human child is born - as Chomsky and Pinker believe - with a built-in Universal Grammar, the question of meaning remains open, for although language may be fully and correctly structured without bearing any sense whatsoever - (Chomsky offers the phrase 'Colourless green ideas sleep furiously' as an example of this) - it is difficult to see why anyone would want to spend much time speaking if reference were not at the centre of language.

Babies do not only listen ; they watch, they feel, they interact with people and the world. Blind babies, for example, are slower at entering language than are those who are not blind ; they lack the visual cues that help normal babies enter the world of meaning. (Happily, they catch up later, when both they and their entourage have learned to use the other sense channels - for some idea of what parents need to do to help their blind children enter into contact with the world, see this).

We have seen that parents - and in particular mothers - speak in a special way to babies in many cultures. (Deacon suggests that this is a trace of the languages which existed among our ancestors ; not having the flexible vocal apparatus of homo sapiens sapiens, they would have been unable to articulate as quickly and as accurately as we are, and must have spoken more slowly and used intonation and accentuation even more than we do - and see MacNeilage and Davis, who believe that early babbling is a window into the very first human language - "The first words of human ancestors were like the first words of modern infants. Infants show us a picture of what speech may have been like at its simplest," said Davis in an interview. So it may be that both mothers and babies are returning to an early, ancestral form of language). Babies at one stage appear to be reproducing the intonations of 'motherese', but they do not seem to mimic the vocal forms. Nevertheless, it may be that the way that mothers speak to their babies - or the way that adults speak when around babies - is structured and modulated in such a way as to gain the infant's attention, to offer clear and grammatically well-formed utterances.

Now go on to look at their first words