Baby Talk
It's a mystery just how children acquire language. Does the process begin in the womb? And which comes first, language or thought? NOVA explores the fascinating world of baby talk and reveals the latest theories on this remarkable achievement.
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00:00You know, I can't remember the first time I began talking.
00:15I don't know what I'd do if I couldn't talk.
00:17I like to talk about school sometimes.
00:21I like to talk about movies I see.
00:25I like talking.
00:27When you say, how do children learn language, it's too simplistic to think that the child
00:33is either memorizing Great Honks and simply spewing them back, or analyzing everything
00:40she or he hears and producing productive language in that sense.
00:48How do children learn to talk?
00:50The unfolding of our linguistic ability from infancy through childhood is a profound, though
00:56little-understood accomplishment.
00:59Tonight on NOVA, we explore the process of language acquisition, and it all begins with
01:35This is Natalie.
01:38She's 16 months old, and already well on her way through one of the most amazing odysseys
01:42we human beings ever take, the journey from baby talk to adult speech.
01:53By the time Natalie is three years old, just 20 months from now, she'll be using language
01:58routinely.
02:01She will have a vocabulary of nearly 3,000 words, know how to put words together into
02:06sentences, and be able to use words to get things done.
02:23The process of language acquisition is still an enigma, and the details of how children
02:28actually learn language are mostly unknown.
02:33But one of the recent accomplishments of research into language acquisition has been a description
02:38of the stages children typically pass through as they develop mastery over their native
02:43tongue.
02:44First, infants make sounds.
02:50Words turn into single words.
02:57Next, children start putting two and three words together, forming simple sentences.
03:16And finally, as they get older, the utterances grow longer and more complex.
03:34By kindergarten, they have added substantially to their repertoire.
03:38They can make statements, ask questions, and express complex ideas in ways that sound very
03:43much like adult speech.
03:54Although it happens naturally and almost universally, learning to use language is actually a task
04:00of great difficulty.
04:06Historically, it was believed language was learned exclusively through imitation.
04:14The children heard adults talk, started to imitate the sounds, then the words, and finally
04:20the sentences adults produced.
04:26But in 1957, the imitation theory was challenged by a then relatively unknown linguist, Noam
04:32Chomsky.
04:33One of the faculties of the human mind is the faculty of language learning.
04:37I would think we must agree with Descartes that this is probably, no doubt, I think,
04:41a species-specific characteristic, a unique property of the human mind.
04:46And in trying to determine what the faculty of language might be, we look at the very
04:54difficult empirical problem of explaining how it is that a young child with very limited
05:00information available to him acquires a system of language, a knowledge of language, that
05:07enables him to produce and understand this vast number of new sentences.
05:15Chomsky posed many interesting questions.
05:18How is it that as soon as young children start talking in sentences, they follow grammatical
05:22rules?
05:23If two-year-olds were solely dependent on imitation for learning word order, how could
05:29they create such an infinite variety of sentences?
05:34How could they answer new questions with a proper word order?
05:37And where do you go to school?
05:39And I go in art school.
05:42And what do you do in art school?
05:44I paint.
05:46Chomsky argued that language was an extremely complex and distinct body of knowledge, and
05:51that all children are born with a capacity to grasp the rules of grammar.
05:55Dog, funny dog, dog.
05:59Chomsky concluded that human beings have evolved with a unique capacity to learn language.
06:05He called this capacity the language acquisition device, and claimed it is located somewhere
06:10in the brain.
06:12And he believes it is this device that gives children the ability to both grasp and use
06:16the rules of their native language.
06:20Published in 1964, aspects of the theory of syntax was controversial.
06:26Today, Chomsky's theory is recognized as a major conceptual breakthrough.
06:29We have to be grateful to Chomsky for having introduced the idea that shook us out of a
06:34kind of dogmatic slumber in which we were caught with St. Augustine's model of imitation
06:40learning.
06:41But what was curious about the tremendous breakthrough of rethinking it is that when
06:45he proposed a language acquisition device, he did it, first of all, without any evidence,
06:52proposing it as an hypothesis that there were too few instances for the child to come up
06:58with so complicated a set of ideas as are contained in grammar.
07:02And to get away from all of the empiricist dogma that had gone before, he proposed that
07:07the language acquisition device could simply take and have as take as its input whatever
07:12was going in language, even degenerate input, semi-grammatical sentences.
07:16And this miraculous device, knowing the deep structure of the language, could then somehow
07:20bring it out and pick up what, in effect, were the rules of the language.
07:27Even though Chomsky's language acquisition device has never actually been found, few
07:32investigators argue with the premise that language learning has a biological component.
07:36Today, the debate centers around the interplay between this biological capacity and the environment.
07:42I think the people at MIT, or the Chomskyians, tend to believe that the language acquisition
07:49device simply springs into activation if one is exposed to language.
07:54And the rest of us have begun to think that you need something beyond exposure, you need
07:59interaction to acquire language.
08:01We always have an interaction between the environment and the innate capacity.
08:05So the arguments between nativism and empiricism are really posed as polar opposites,
08:11when the issue is not so much, is it innate or is it environmental, but the issue is,
08:16how do these interact?
08:17What kinds of innate capacities does the child need in order to make use of what the world provides?
08:22If we pose the question this way, a lot of the heat of it is dissipated, and then the
08:28question becomes the hard scientific work of trying to specify just what built-in processes
08:33are necessary to account for this particular developmental history.
08:37Chomsky revolutionized the study of linguistics.
08:42Since the early 60s, a new discipline has emerged, known as developmental psycholinguistics,
08:47a field devoted to exploring the many dimensions of children's language learning and language use.
08:56One of the major questions psycholinguists are trying to answer is,
09:00when does language actually begin?
09:03Linguist David Crystal.
09:06One of the first things one wants to know about in language acquisition is,
09:09when does language development actually start?
09:12And you can only decide this if you first of all have studied the pre-linguistic vocalizations of children,
09:18their early crying and cooing and babbling.
09:23In fact, when you listen to recordings of children at around about 10 or 11 months of age,
09:28often you can't tell what word they're saying exactly,
09:31but what you can tell is that it's very definitely an English-sounding sentence,
09:34or a French-sounding sentence, because of the intonation.
09:38And you can hear this if you take as an example the version of a child saying a little phrase,
09:43all gone, which is often used after a meal in, I imagine, every language.
09:48And if you listen to this here, you'll see immediately the way in which the child begins to
09:53almost sing the intonation before he actually practices the word.
09:59A gun.
10:01What?
10:02A gun.
10:03A gun.
10:04I don't know that.
10:08Did you hear the way in which he sang the mmm, mmm, and then said a gun,
10:13obviously aware at that point that there are two aspects of the development of language.
10:18Now, it doesn't take long for a child to build on this basis
10:21and start to use all kinds of intonation patterns to represent all kinds of different meanings,
10:27especially meanings such as surprise or questioning or delight.
10:31And you'll hear this on the word dada in this example.
10:36Dada.
10:37Dada.
10:38Dada.
10:39What?
10:40Dada.
10:41Yes.
10:42Dada.
10:43Yes, that's right.
10:44Dada.
10:45Dada.
10:46Dada.
10:49Dada.
10:50Dada.
10:51Dada.
10:52Those last two examples are quite interesting.
10:55This was in his cot, and he heard his daddy on the stairs outside.
10:58As he heard the noise, he said, dada, questioning.
11:02And then as daddy came into the room, you don't hear it on that tape, he said, dada, pointing.
11:08And then he said, dada, commanding.
11:11Now, what you've got there is a kind of question, a kind of statement, and a kind of command.
11:16But, of course, he hasn't got the grammar of statements, questions, and commands.
11:19He's only got intonation and gesture to do it.
11:21But it's a pretty efficient communication system nonetheless.
11:25But long before intonation and gesture, there is the baby's cry.
11:40In Boston, Massachusetts, infant cry analysis is going on at the Brigham and Women's Hospital
11:45under the direction of research psychologist Dr. Barry Lester.
11:49Crying.
11:51Her cry is good and lusty.
11:53When she initially started crying, there was a period where she held her breath for a long time,
11:57which is how a painful kind of cry usually starts.
12:00But her cry has a good melody form, and it's a nice...
12:05Barry Lester has been analyzing the cries of newborn babies for the past 14 years.
12:10Crying is the baby's first effective form of communication.
12:14Yeah, she's not out of control.
12:16Dr. Lester records the baby's behavior on videotape
12:20and uses a computer to plot heart rate, respiratory rate, and the acoustic signal of the cry.
12:26He has learned that different sounding cries have different physiological patterns.
12:31Lester believes that the way a mother responds to these different kinds of cries
12:35has an impact on early language development.
12:38But is there any real connection between crying and speech?
12:43We look at adult speech.
12:44Adult speech has what are called prosodic qualities to it,
12:48meaning intonation and voice patterns and pitch patterns.
12:51It also has grammar and syntax.
12:53I mean, those are the two components of adult speech.
12:55Well, crying has only the prosodic components.
12:59Crying is changes in pitch and intonation and melody patterns.
13:06It will be three or four months before this baby's vocal cords and larynx
13:10will be developed enough to make sophisticated speech sounds.
13:13But nonetheless, researchers believe that early sounds like cries, coos, and gurgles
13:18could provide clues to the child's later language development.
13:25Understanding the connections between these early sounds and language
13:28is the interest of Children's Hospital psychiatrist, Dr. Peter Wolfe.
13:32This, quote, discovery of new sounds is done primarily when the baby is by itself
13:40and particularly in the transition from being alert and quiet
13:44to beginning to cry, there is this fussy period
13:48and it's there that we find the discovery of new kinds of sounds.
13:57And they then become a part of non-cry vocalizations when the baby's perfectly alert
14:04and there I think you see the beginning of experimental manipulations of sounds
14:09while they're perfectly content.
14:12And it is the discovery of different patterns of sound production
14:17that may be the linkage between crying and language.
14:22That does not mean that cry patterns are directly built into the language system.
14:30But it is the transition from cry to fussy to the discovery of new sounds
14:37that may be, at least at the physiological level,
14:40the tie with learning how to speak the language.
14:50Producing new sounds and watching their effects on adults
14:53is the beginning of communication, a conversation at its onset.
15:00At the University of Surrey in England, mothers and their breastfeeding infants
15:05were asked to participate in an ongoing communication study.
15:09The babies were observed to interact with their mothers through little noises and gestures.
15:14Project director Dr. Harry McGurk.
15:17The baby sucks, pauses, sucks, pauses, sucks, pauses
15:20and all infants show that structure to the sucking.
15:22Some have long sucks, some have short sucking bursts, but they all show that structure.
15:27Now what's interesting is that in the feeding situation
15:29the mother seems to adopt a strategy when she's feeding
15:33that integrates very finely with that on-off pattern of the baby.
15:36That is to say, when the baby's sucking, the mother tends to be relatively passive
15:39and when the infant pauses, she then becomes active and talks to the baby
15:43and strokes its cheek, stops, and the baby starts sucking again.
15:47Now, with respect to language acquisition,
15:50the baby is being integrated into a communicative network
15:54that has turn-taking characteristics to it.
15:57The baby's turn, the mother's turn, the baby's turn, the mother's turn.
16:02That's the important aspect, of course, of linguistic communication, conversation.
16:06While Dr. McGurk believes that the baby is primarily taking its cues from the mother,
16:11another researcher, Dr. Colwyn Trevarthan,
16:14believes that it's not the mother, but the baby who initiates and directs the interaction.
16:20The behavior of the baby is exceedingly complex.
16:23It is inconceivable that that patterning has been learned or trained.
16:27People have talked about that interaction, the turn-taking as if it's proto-conversation.
16:31Many of those I see as a reflection of the natural characteristics of the baby's motivations.
16:36Can you bring your hands together for mummy?
16:39What did you do to mummy?
16:41The real difference between this and any learning theory
16:43is the idea that there is an inborn capacity to communicate as a human being.
16:49And with many, many features that are embryonic elements of speech and gesture and language communication.
16:59Come on, my sweet.
17:03The smile itself is a kind of behavior that can't have any effect on the world
17:06except through someone else perceiving it.
17:09It does express feeling.
17:11So babies are expressing the same kinds of feelings
17:14as the mother who reflects the affection and smiles back at the baby.
17:18But it's important to realize that it's only part of a whole complex of body behavior of the mother.
17:24Yes.
17:25Isaac, would you say something?
17:27What would you say to mummy?
17:29The quality of her voice, the gentleness and softness of it expresses the same feelings.
17:33In fact, you can actually hear a smile in the voice
17:36because it changes the physical quality of the sound.
17:39I know, it's terrible, isn't it?
17:41Why, you dribbly boy.
17:43Yes.
17:45Such a smiley dribbly boy.
17:47Yeah.
17:48No, you just want to say yeah.
17:50One of the first tasks facing the young infant
17:52is to recognize that the stream of speech it hears
17:55actually consists of separate units,
17:57words and the sounds that make up words.
18:03This experiment at Brown University
18:05was designed to test how well young babies respond to changes in the speech signal.
18:10Elizabeth is four weeks old.
18:12She's fed the sound da every time she sucks.
18:16When her rate of sucking slows,
18:18the sound changes to ta.
18:21When her rate of sucking then increases,
18:23she's interested again.
18:25Project designer, Peter Imus.
18:27These infants, very young infants,
18:29are extremely sensitive to the information that's in the speech signal,
18:32that is to the acoustic parameters that are there.
18:35And the second thing it tells us, I believe,
18:37is that they have some very nice abilities to categorize speech,
18:41that is to sort sounds into the kinds of categories
18:44that in a few months will come to have linguistic significance.
18:47Da, da, da, da.
18:50What it tells us is that there's a strong biological component
18:54to the processing of speech and to the perception of speech.
18:57That is, our inheritance helps us understand speech,
19:00helps us to perceive speech.
19:02You get a start on the system.
19:04You know what categories are going to be important.
19:07You know how to sort the sounds into these categories.
19:10Only a few short years separate the cries of the baby
19:14from a truly communicative language system.
19:17The task of learning our native tongue
19:19is one which we accomplish essentially
19:21in the first five years of life.
19:23Wow!
19:25Wow.
19:27Pizza, pizza, pizza, pieces.
19:30Pieces?
19:32We discover how to distinguish sounds,
19:34figure out the rules of grammar
19:36and understand what sounds are.
19:39But what is language?
19:41Every language is a system of communication
19:43based on a specific set of rules.
19:45The sets of rules that psycholinguists study
19:47include syntax, semantics and pragmatics.
19:51Syntax refers to the grammatical rules
19:53that order the words in a sentence.
19:55For example, the rules that make statements
19:57different from questions.
19:59This is a robot book.
20:01The statement, this is a robot book,
20:03is a set of rules that make statements
20:05different from questions.
20:07The statement, this is a robot book,
20:09shows the child knows proper word order.
20:11He understands syntax.
20:13Semantics refers to the rules
20:15that govern the links between words
20:17and what they mean.
20:19Two-year-old Jacob knows
20:21what Silly Putty can do.
20:27He knows that Silly Putty stretches.
20:29He has learned to link an abstract symbol,
20:31the word stretches,
20:33to its meaning as it relates
20:36to a concrete object, Silly Putty.
20:38This is an example of a small child
20:40grasping a part of the semantic system.
20:42Pragmatics refers to the rules
20:44that govern how to use words
20:46in socially appropriate ways.
20:48A baby like Natalie is very effective
20:50at getting what she wants
20:52even though she hasn't yet learned
20:54the adult rules for appropriate language use.
20:56What's this?
20:58Okay.
21:00That's right.
21:02Being able to make a request
21:04using the word please
21:06is evidence that three-year-old Nikki
21:08understands something about pragmatics.
21:10Syntax, semantics,
21:12and pragmatics.
21:14Research is just beginning to explore
21:16the dynamics of their interrelationship.
21:18So the child, interestingly enough,
21:20isn't just learning syntax.
21:22He isn't just learning to mean
21:24how to get things done with things in the world.
21:26But he's learning all three of them
21:28simultaneously. Each one of them
21:30is an enormous accomplishment.
21:32And that psycholinguist
21:34or linguist who looks at
21:36only one of these at a time,
21:38looks at the syntactic side,
21:40the semantic side, or just the pragmatic side,
21:42all in isolation, is bound
21:44to develop
21:46a theory which has one
21:48great big ear and no ear on the other side
21:50and no nose or mouth.
21:53You've got to keep these three things in balance
21:55and it's punishingly difficult to do so.
21:57The rules of language are complex.
21:59I'm a monkey snake.
22:07The awareness of how complicated language is
22:09has stimulated new ideas
22:11about how it is acquired.
22:13A bad snake.
22:15Many researchers today feel
22:17that an innate language acquisition device
22:19as proposed by Chomsky
22:21is sufficient to explain how all these rule systems
22:23syntax, semantics, and pragmatics
22:25are learned simultaneously.
22:29Here's the duck.
22:39Little chickens.
22:42An ant here for me
22:44and a little chicken chicken.
22:48Currently
22:50attention is being drawn to the roles
22:52of parents and caregivers as guides
22:54helping children make their way
22:56through the verbal environment.
22:58A school of thought
23:00known as the Social Interactionists
23:02looks at the parent-child relationship
23:04and its impact on language learning.
23:06E-I-E-I-O
23:10At Boston University
23:12research is being conducted which focuses
23:14on the social functions of language
23:16for both parents and children.
23:18Child language researcher Jean Berko Gleason.
23:20We begin to look at things
23:22like the kinds of attention
23:24that very small infants pay to language.
23:26We begin to look at things like
23:28early evidence that the child
23:30is being communicative
23:32and then the ways in which
23:34the mother or the caretaker
23:36because it isn't always a mother
23:38the ways in which the caretaker
23:40and the child negotiate the meaning
23:42of the actions around them.
23:44In other words, the ways in which parents
23:46ascribe intentionality
23:48to their children's early utterances
23:50and the ways in which parents
23:52help the child to map
23:54intentionality into
23:56linguistic form.
24:00For example, a child's unstructured play
24:03can be turned into a game.
24:05Natalie's caregiver uses her interest
24:07in beads to draw her into
24:09a social situation.
24:13The game is a vehicle to expose
24:15the child to socially appropriate words.
24:29There is a real social use
24:31of language and it comes way before
24:33those first words.
24:37I certainly see parents playing
24:39thank you games with children.
24:41Handing things to babies and saying
24:43ah back and forth.
24:45I think parents are doing it partly
24:47to show other people that they have
24:49a socialized child.
24:51It is commonly believed that
24:53the first words children learn
24:55are nouns like ball and cookie
24:57but recent research has shown
25:00that first words are not those so called naming words
25:02but expressions useful
25:04for social interaction.
25:10Can you say bye bye?
25:12Those of us who tend to be
25:14rather interactionist are stressing
25:16these days the fact that language
25:18is not only referential.
25:20The child doesn't use language
25:22just to name things, to say mommy,
25:24juice, kitty, table.
25:26The child also has social purposes
25:28in acquiring language and I think
25:30it's nice to note that the social
25:32and interactive uses of language
25:34and today the referential use
25:36of language.
25:38And the social use of language
25:40doesn't even require real words.
25:42Long strings of babbling can be
25:44an effective way for a child to start
25:46a conversation.
25:48When you say
25:50how do children learn language
25:52it's too simplistic
25:54to think that the child is
25:56either memorizing great hunks
25:58and simply spewing them back
26:00or analyzing everything
26:02she or he hears and producing
26:04productive language
26:06in that sense.
26:12They also probably
26:14in the early years
26:16only learn rather globally
26:18the meaning of expressions like
26:20it's time for bed now, it's time for your bath now.
26:22What does that mean to an infant?
26:25When you hold up a towel in your hand
26:27look at the bathroom and say
26:29it's time for your bath now.
26:31Does that mean that the two year old
26:33or the one year old, the toddler
26:35knows what it's time for your bath
26:37and now all mean
26:39and can use those words productively?
26:41Certainly not.
26:43The child has acquired in terms of understanding
26:45that very global kind of notion
26:47and I think it's true in both comprehension
26:49that is I think children first begin
26:51to associate routinized phrases
26:53with the everyday activities in their life
26:55and then later may produce
26:57some rather routinized phrases
26:59as well without being able to analyze them.
27:01What's this?
27:03Get out.
27:05Get out.
27:07Very likely
27:09Jacob does not understand the individual
27:11words get and out.
27:13He has heard the expression get out
27:15and can use it even though he may not know
27:17exactly what it means.
27:20Another researcher
27:22whose work focuses on the importance
27:24of social context
27:26is Harvard University's Catherine Snow.
27:28Now it's quite clear if you look at a six month old
27:30that many of the things that the six month old does
27:32which are not intentional
27:34like burping or coughing
27:36are treated as intentional and communicative acts
27:38by mothers. Mothers say things like
27:40oh excuse you or
27:42goodness goodness. They interpret these things
27:44as if they're attempts at communication.
27:46We in fact
27:48pull intentionality
27:50out of the pre-intentional child
27:52such that we push the child
27:54into intentionality and
27:56very much blur the distinction
27:58between the pre-communicative
28:00and the truly communicative child.
28:06Dr. Snow believes
28:08that caregivers right from the start
28:10address the issue of communication
28:12as a way of communicating
28:14Parents right from the start
28:16address the infant as if they were both
28:18participants in a conversation.
28:20By asking the baby questions
28:22and commenting on his sounds
28:24the caregivers show they believe
28:26the baby can communicate
28:28and by acting as if they were
28:30in a real conversation
28:32the adults demonstrate for the baby
28:34the rules of conversational turn taking.
28:36What is it?
28:38What is what?
28:40Beth. Beth's a henry
28:43As the child gets
28:45older the caregiver's help continues
28:47but takes on a different form.
28:49Recently I've been looking at settings
28:51that recur frequently for the same child
28:53routinized settings
28:55things like getting up in the morning or
28:57having snack or having a bath
28:59going to bed at night or reading the same book
29:01over and over again. Situations
29:03for which you can describe
29:05regularities and recurrences
29:07and predict what's going to happen
29:09at a particular time. What happens?
29:11While Herbert was waiting
29:13he got distracted by the sweet smell
29:15of hay on a passing truck
29:17Henry had forgotten to feed him
29:19so Henry
29:21was too hungry to resist
29:23No Henry!
29:25Herbert I'm sorry
29:27The richest data about this comes from
29:29children reading books with their parents
29:31where
29:33they go back to the same book
29:35in fact children themselves
29:37insist on going back to the same book
29:40often to the distress
29:42of the parent
29:44It's quite clear if you look at
29:46successive sessions of book reading
29:48between one mother-child pair
29:50that the things
29:52that the mother
29:54does to the child
29:56is not the same
29:58as the things
30:00that the mother
30:02does to the child
30:04so
30:06it's not