We are all familiar with baby babbles - those adorable little sounds that infants make, seemingly wanting to have long conversations with their parents. Babbling starts very early in a baby's life, generally from four to six months. It is now widely seen as a baby's mechanism to familiarize itself with the phoneme set of the languages spoken around it. The baby also practices the process of sound production this way, by imitating the sounds it hears and learning the way its mouth works. Some theories even suggest that babies first learn the prosodic features of language and then use these intonations, pauses and tempo to form a skeleton of syntax and meaning in their heads.Linguistically, babbles are distinguished from other stages of infant sound production. A sequence of sounds qualifies as a babble if:
- The sounds are composed of a proper subset of all human-utterable phonemes, corresponding to the target language - As babies familiarize themselves with the language they hear, they begin to restrict their productions to only sounds within the language they will eventually learn. The baby seems to get more interested in exploring the target language rather than the wide range of sounds it initially experiments with.
- The sounds are composed of phonological constructs found in the target language - Most languages have distinct Consonant-Vowel (CV) clusters, like 'baba' and 'gaga', and the child reproduces such patterns.
- The sounds are not produced with any communicative intent - It's purely practice and experimentation for the little one.
The acquisition of language in normal children is very well studied. A plethora of theories contradict and compete with each other for acceptance. However, studies of the acquisition of language in special children i.e. those with visual/hearing/mental/genetic impairments, although celebrated, are perhaps not as rich as they should be. For example, we don't know if children exposed to sign language in their early years go through the same stages of acquisition as does a normal child. Do sign-exposed children babble, for instance? We're now finding out that perhaps they do!
Dr. Laura Ann-Petitto, Director of the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory for Language & Child Development at Darthmouth College has studied hearing-impaired and normal babies exposed to sign-language during infancy, and has shown that these babies babble just like normal kids - only using their hands instead of their mouths! They babble signs instead of sounds, and all the aforementioned features of babbling are present even in their case. The hand movements restrict themselves to the personal space for signing: a rectanglar space in front of a person roughly centred at the chest. The same space is exclusively used by adult sign-language users. Further, the patterns of cheremes (primitive units of signs equivalent to phonemes for verbal languages) follow that of the sign language the child is exposed to. Finally, the productions are repetetive and periodic just like verbal babbling, and seem to lack communicative intent. As can be expected, sign-exposed babies gain better control of their hands at an earlier age, and learn to produce more articulate gestures than normal babies do, while the latter gain better control over their vocal tract.
What does this fascinating discovery imply to the world of Child Language Acquisition (CLA)? Firstly, it promotes the existence of a genetically 'open' program for language, that emphasizes that the mechanisms of language are very general, and the modality eventually adopted for learning can be decided online, be it sign-language or verbal language. It is not pre-programmed. Further, it also supports the Universal Grammar notion of CLA, which postulates that all humans are innately gifted with a universal general grammar which is instantiated to the particular target language that the human is exposed to during acquisition. The theory arose out of the failure to explain the phenomenally easy and near-perfect pickup of a language by a child inspite of not being presented with negative examples and explicit correction by parents or the environment.
Of course, the lovely pictures presented above are of babies babbling with their hands. One can't help becoming a baby himself while looking at the beautiful infants, staring at them with pure amazement!
6 comments:
A very informative post.
BTW, how is that a baby associates a meaning to every word spoken around it? It understands it's name is understandable, but how do other things make sense to it?
How does it understand different languages? I mean, I have seen babies whose parents talk both in English and Hindi, and the baby can understand both. Like yes or no or darling make equal sense to it as haan or na or any other Hindi word do?
I always wondered how it all fits in?
I had studied about babbling while doing developmental psychology. However, the babbling through signs bit was enlightening for sure!
And universal grammar? Haha, somehow made me think of the 'language of the world' or some crap like that in the Alchemist.
I have this nephew whose one set (couldnt find a better word) of grandparents speak tamil and the other Kannada. And even at a very young age, he'd switch between languages depending on whom he was talking to!
@keshav - Well there are many theories to explain the same. They contrast on whether the child learns word-concept mappings first, or that it learns syntax and learns semantics from that.
@searchinformrmojorisin - Please don't refer to Coelho and spoil the post :P
@vinaya and keshav - Yes, you are referring to bilingual learners, and their case is most fascinating. Does the learning of the two languages complement each other, or do the conflicts in syntax confuse them? Again, there is no lack of theories, and India is a very significant from this point of view, since virtually all of us are bilingual learners.
How about if my next post answers these very questions? How about that?
Oh, and I still can't get over the baby staring at his own hands with such curiosity and fascination! :)
Well arjun karande, do not tell me what to say and what not to say. Defeats the purpose doesnt it? I'd rather abstain from leaving comments in the future.
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