“Babies are just remarkably prepared to learn about the world around them, and specifically prepared to learn about language”.

Gervain & Werker, 2013

From the first days of life, newborns prefer to focus their attention on their carers’ speech rather than on other surrounding sounds. Studies also show that they can recognize their mother’s voice this early. That is, they can tell it apart from other similar voices.

Speech, whether it be from the mother or another person, has a very important function for newborns as it calms them down. Carers’ speech conveys basic information about the melodic and rhythmic properties of their native language. This is commonly known as the ‘phonetic pattern’ of a language

Picking up on these patterns in one’s native language is a starting point in the long-term process of language acquisition. Newborns learn from being regularly exposed to their carer’s speech. This is particularly important in face-to-face interaction between carer and their baby.

Newborns learn to identify and discriminate their mother tongue during their first months of life

A few weeks after their birth, by around two months, newborns have already developed basic knowledge about the way their mother tongue sounds (including rhythm, intonation, sound patterns etc.) and this enables them to discriminate between typologically-distant languages, i.e., languages that sound very different from each other. For instance, we know that while they may not differentiate between Catalan and Spanish (which sound fairly similar to a young baby), they can differentiate, for example, Spanish from English as these languages are quite different in terms of rhythm and intonation.

It takes babies more time to learn to distinguish typologically-close languages, like Catalan and Spanish, or Dutch and English. They start to be able to do this between the fourth and fifth month of life by picking up on subtle linguistic features related to the rhythm, intonation or even the sound frequency and distribution that characterizes their native languages.

Newborns also pay attention to the speakers’ face in order to identify their mother tongue

In addition to auditory information, infants pay attention to visual information when learning language. Studies of four-month-olds show that they use visual information to discriminate among languages, focusing mainly on lip rounding movements, changes and degree of openness of the mouth, as well as position and movement of the speaker’s tongue.

So, before they are even six months old, infants show surprise, by smiling or frowning at the adult’s face if carers’ use a completely different language that has a very distant rhythm and intonation to their usual language. This may indicate that they have already learnt to identify the carer’s language.

This knowledge about the sound patterns of their mother tongue is a first step that will enable them to acquire the sounds and their combinations to make syllables and words in the future.

“Newborns prefer their mother’s voice over other voices and perceive the emotional content of messages conveyed via intonation contours in maternal speech”.

 Mampe, Friederici, Christophe & Wermke, 2009

Perception of speech sounds

From birth, newborns gradually acquire specific knowledge about what their native language sounds like by listening to the language around them.

Around 6 months, when infants have had the chance to acquire more language experience, changes start to occur in the way speech sounds are perceived.

At this stage, infants gradually improve the way they perceive the existing differences between speech sounds, and they find out which combinations or sequences of sounds are more frequent.

These changes are difficult to detect at home, but have been studied in controlled conditions like those of a research laboratory.

From six months, infants start “tuning in” to the sounds of their native language

Whereas a new-born can perceive all the speech sounds of the entire world’s languages (about 600 consonants and 200 vowels), at around 6 months of age, infants start to lose the ability to tell apart many sounds that are not used contrastively in their native language (that is, sounds where a change from one to the other doesn’t mark a change in meaning in that language). This phenomenon has been called perceptual narrowing or perceptual reorganization. So, for example, a child exposed to English loses the ability to tell the difference between different types of ‘t’ sound (e.g., a dental /t/ and a retroflex /t/), whereas a child exposed to Hindi or Urdu would retain this ability as the differences in sounds are used to mark differences in meaning in those languages.

Perceptive reorganization is a gradual phenomenon that allows us to discover and learn words.

These changes in sound perception occur gradually. Changes affecting vowel sounds seem to happen first (around 6 months), with changes to consonant coming a bit later (around 10-12 months). It is easy to understand why perceptive changes affect vowels first: vowels are longer, more audible and stable than consonants, which are short and change in fluent discourse.

Infants don’t just discover the sounds of their language, they also learn about the sequences in which these sounds can occur and how frequently they are used in adults’ speech. Existing studies demonstrate that nine-month-old infants show a preference for words made of possible sound combinations in their mother tongue, like “find” in English, as opposed to impossible or infrequent combinations like “fnid”.

This demonstrates that regular exposure to language allows infants to develop rich knowledge of the phonetic features of language. This knowledge will be crucial for language acquisition, as it helps infants to discover and learn their first words.

Being able to differentiate contrastive sounds is a good beginning for language learning

Changes in sound perception that take place from 6-12 months, are a good indicator of an infants’ language learning progress. They are the result of having heard lots of language and they are linked children’s discovery of their first words. We could say that, during this period, babies are becoming “experts” in their native language.

Yet, this “perceptual reorganization” comes at a cost. At that same time as babies are ‘tuning in’ to their native language, they are also ‘tuning out’ languages that they don’t hear regularly. So, when we study a second language as adults, the learning we did as babies makes it difficult for us to hear differences in foreign languages. For examples, Japanese adults, show difficulties in producing and hearing the difference between “l” and “r” sounds , because their language does not use these sounds contrastively (to changes the meaning of words). Consequently, adults learning a second language may speak with a foreign accent and it can be very difficult for them to achieve native-like pronunciation.

“Children’s early linguistic skills are built on this already existing platform of prelinguistic communication”. Tomasello, Carpenter & Liszkowski, 2007

First communicative interactions

Infants communicate with their caregivers from the word go. They love to make eye contact, to hear ‘motherese’ and to engage in exquisitely timed ‘dyadic’ exchanges where they coo or smile and their caregiver responds. From the very beginning, adults pick up on this. They treat their infant’s gaze, gestures, smiles or babbling as communicative signs, and respond in kind. These contingent responses  in turn promote an increase in smiles, babbling and gaze.

First smiles appear at around two months

Human beings are born with motor, perceptive, cognitive and social skills that enable communication. For instance, as newborns, we prefer to listen to human voices rather than to other environmental sounds. We also prefer to look at human faces and display an innate capacity for social imitation.

Nevertheless, during the first two months of life, newborns are not very active social partners. They have only rudimentary means of communication, expressing themselves by crying or producing vegetative sounds, whimpers and some facial gestures. These are mainly comfort-oriented or related to the need for hunger relief. Although they may show interest in social stimuli (faces, etc.), newborns need time to develop their own communicative skills. Towards the sixth or eighth week of life, babies often produce their first smiles and, with them, comes the ability to exchange emotions and interact face to face with adults for longer periods.

Sharing emotions in interaction with caregivers

Between the third and sixth month of age, infants gradually increase their expressiveness and start to structure their communicative behaviour, displaying turn-taking in face to face interaction. By participating in these exchanges, infants gradually widen their repertoire of communicative acts, for example, by using hand movements, by improving gaze coordination, by vocalizing and gesticulating, and by clearly showing a smile that denotes pleasure and comfort.

In these first interactions, infants share emotions with their caregiver. With time, the ability to regulate interaction develops, so that infants become able to make the external world the topic of conversation with others. For example, they might extend a hand towards something they want. In doing so, infants become able to engage in joint attention (where the infant and caregiver both attend to the same external thing and are mutually aware they are doing so).

“Joint attention does not just mean two people looking at he same thing at the same time. Nor it is just one person looking on while another engages with an object , nor is it the child alternating her attention between two phenomena (person and object) of equal interest”. 

Tomasello, 1995

First communicative interactions

Between 6 and 12 months, babies begin to coordinate attention with their parents to objects or events in their environment. For example, they might look at a toy, and then look to their parent and then back to the toy, suggesting that they enjoy knowing that their parent is looking at the same thing as them. This important phenomenon, where the baby and caregiver both attend to the same thing and are mutually aware they are doing so, is called “joint attention”. It usually occurs in playful situations with caregivers, for example, reading a book, building a tower, finding hidden objects together or pretending to eat and drink.

Joint attention becomes possible when babies are able to integrate two kinds of behavior that previously existed separately: first, social interaction with others; and secondly, action directed towards objects or events. This becomes possible when precursor skills develop like the ability to tell where someone is looking. Over the 9-12 month period babies become increasingly able to follow their caregiver’s attention in this way and to initiate new joint attentional episodes by vocalizing and gesturing towards objects.

The discovery of objects in the environment is the first step for the development of joint attention

During the first months of life, communicative interactions between infants and their caregivers is typically face to face without the involvement of objects in the environment. There comes a time, however, when objects begin to occupy a place within these communicative exchanges. Interaction becomes “triadic” or “three-way”, i.e., involving the baby, adult and some external object or event.
For these joint attentional situations to occur, the baby first needs to be interested in objects.

Around the sixth and seventh months of life, babies also begin to sit up alone, making it easy to manipulate objects and look back and forth to their caregiver. A little later, at about eight months, they are often able to crawl and therefore interact with their environment from different viewpoints.

As these changes occur, the role of adults is also very important. Caregivers can make comments like, “What’s that you have in your hands?” Or “does that make a noise?” Talking to babies as they explore objects in their environment facilitates joint attention.

Joint attention is essential for learning language

Several investigators have shown that being in joint attention helps babies to learn language. For example, we know that babies’ ability to engage in joint attention at twelve months predicts how quickly they will later learn words.

For there to be joint attention, both partners must be aware of what is in the focus of attention and actively participate in the interaction. In addition, babies come to realize that adults want to share attention with them and convey information about their surroundings. Through these interactions, babies discover that others are intentional agents.

]]> https://beforefirstwords.upf.edu/precursors-of-language/joint-attention/feed/ 0 https://beforefirstwords.upf.edu/precursors-of-language/word-identification/ https://beforefirstwords.upf.edu/precursors-of-language/word-identification/#comments Sat, 07 Feb 2015 19:56:31 +0000 https://abansprimeresparaules.upf.edu/?post_type=precursors&p=318 “The development of speech perception is basically about learning to identify words, rather than strings of phonemes”.

Jusczyk, 2000

Word identification

When adults speak, the words they produce run into each other. It’s not easy to tell where one word ends and the other begins. The easiest way to imagine what this is like is to think of how hard reading would be if there were no spaces between the words. Itwouldbeverydifficult! So, one of the major tasks children face when learning language is figuring out how to chop up the continuous stream of speech they hear into words. This process, called “speech segmentation”, begins around 6 or 7 months. Gradually, babies discover possible words including common ones like their own name and, eventually, rarer ones that might be made up of long sequences of syllables. This ability to segment speech and identify possible word forms is essential for starting to build up a vocabulary.

Of the many factors that affect how children discover words, one very important is the way adults talk to them. For example, when talking to young children, adults spontaneously tend to exaggerate their intonation, speak more slowly and repeat what they say. These repetitions (“Look at the ball! You see the ball? Where did the ball go?!”.) in which the same word appears multiple times in several short sentences help identification. Children’s songs, with simple, repetitive lyrics, also help, especially when a key word is located at the ends of sentences. By adapting the way they talk, adults naturally help children to identify which units of speech are words in their language.

Understanding words and being able to associate them with meanings is the basic process of vocabulary building.

As well as becoming able to segment speech, children must develop a second skill, that of establishing a connection between the word forms and their functions, i.e, their meanings. This associative ability can be observed as early as six months, although it is initially rudimentary and restricted to a small number of words. Recent studies using eye-tracking technology have shown, for example, that 6- to 9-month-olds show some recognition of words for foods or body parts, and the terms “Daddy” or “Mummy”, but there is no evidence yet that they understand words that are used to talk about actions, or to describe what something is like (e.g., verbs or adjectives). It is only after a few more months that infants start to understand a broader range of words.

 In sum, little by little children build up a receptive vocabulary, i.e., a set of words that they understand (but cannot yet produce). Both speech segmentation and word-meaning association are two key processes for vocabulary building.

Werker & Yeung, 2005

Word comprehension

Before they start talking, around twelve months of age, babies are able to understand quite a lot. The words and phrases they can comprehend are referred to as their “receptive vocabulary “.

Babies begin to build this receptive vocabulary from as early as six months. Word comprehension begins slowly. Often one of the first forms a baby will recognize is their own name, or words for members of the family -“mummy” or “daddy”. Also common are names for favorite toys, body parts, routine objects (e.g., “bottle”), and expressions used in social routines or games, such as “hello” or “peepo!”.

By 12 months, some children will have as many as 50 different words in their receptive vocabulary (although this varies a great deal). To check whether a child knows a word, you can see if they respond appropriately when you use it. If you ask a question, do they answer or act in response to what you say, based only on the words you’ve used?

Learning to understand words prepares babies to be able to produce them.

Children generally learn to understand words during what are called ‘joint attentional episodes’. Starting to comprehend words marks the beginning of vocabulary development, and sets the stage for word production (marking the start of a productive vocabulary). Critically, caregivers tend to realize when their babies have started to understand words, and change the way they talk to them accordingly, which in turn helps further developments.

Babies’ receptive vocabulary steadily grows with age, and can accelerate from about 13-14 months. However, it is important to recognize that each child will learn in their own good time and learning rates vary greatly. Generally, babies who understand a lot of words (i.e., have a large receptive vocabulary) also start to produce their first words early, although there are exceptions to this pattern.

Oller, Buder, Ramsdell, Warlaumont, Chorna & Bakeman, 2013

First sounds

During the first weeks of life, infants express their feelings of hunger or discomfort by groans and cries. Around the second month of life, they begin to produce their first laughs, linked to the expression of positive emotions. In this early period, the sounds infants produce bear very little resemblance to adult speech. They are mainly involuntary, vegetative sounds accompanying breathing, swallowing, coughing, sneezing or wind, and are not related to language development.

Between the second and third months, a new type of sound gradually starts to appear, often called “proto –sounds”. Even though babies do not have accurate control over their production, these sounds are interesting because of their relation to speech development. They are close to adult vowels like “a”, “o” or “u”, and are formed in the back of the mouth as the tongue meets the soft palate, resulting in a something that sounds like “gggaaaa ” or “ggguuuu “. A little later, by the fourth or fifth month, children seem to explore the possibilities of phonation and often emit long vowel sounds, playing with intensity and intonation changes. They can produce squeals, treble or bass screams and vibrations of the lips or tongue.

By the end of this period, between the 5 and 6 months, babies are already very close to being able to produce what adults would identify as a syllable. However, since the duration and articulation of these vocalizations is not yet well controlled, we do not yet refer to these sounds as babble. Babies produce these quasi-syllabic sounds while exploring the movements of their lips and tongue, sometimes during face-to-face exchanges with caregivers.

Language and emotion go together from birth.

Babies can easily imitate adult facial expressions that express emotions. They also express these emotions with sound from early on. Negative emotions, such as fear or discomfort, are associated with crying. Positive emotions are associated with laughter. At this age, babies are also able to mimic some facial movements, such as tongue protrusion or mouth opening.

With the emergence of proto-sounds, babies begin the journey that will lead to the production of canonical babbling in the second half of their first year. These early sounds represent the pillars on which more complex structures can be built. They allow babies to express different emotional states. Intentional control of vocalization, which is just beginning to emerge now, is another essential feature of communication, and the basis for further language development.

 It has been suggested that the melodies of newborn’s first cries already display features characteristic of the intonation pattern of the language of their environment. For example, the cries of French and German babies have been studied and they appear to differ in intonation in ways that are unique to each of these two languages.

When babies start making the transition to producing syllables, this stimulates interaction with their caregivers.

Babies can produce proto-vocalizations alone, however practice is all the better when it takes place in playful interaction with adults. Here, babies vocalize and adults spontaneously recognize the most speech-like sounds as signals for social interaction. They naturally respond to these sounds and encourage speech like vocalizations in doing so.

 In this way, an increasingly complex two-way exchange between adults and babies serves to motivate and strengthen early communication skills. As babies’ vocalizations start to become more speech-like, varied and frequent, the early sounds of the phonation period start to disappear.

 As well as interacting with adults, there are other factors that influence the development of speech. As the vocal cavity grows, and the placement of the tongue in relation to it changes, more adult like sounds can be produced. Also, changes in the neuromuscular limits on the movements of the tongue (which was adapted at birth for sucking and swallowing) start to allow babies to produce the fine articulatory movements that are needed for speech.

Goldstein & Schwade, 2008

Early babbling

Around six to seven months of age, babies begin to babble. They are now able to produce vowels and combine them with a consonant, generating syllables (e.g., [da]). This is an important milestone in speech development, and one that marks a departure from the imprecise vocalisations of the first months of life. Now, with better articulatory control, babies can produce syllables combining a vowel with a nasal consonant ([m, n]) or a stop ([p , t, k , b, d, g ]). They can produce single syllables with precise timing, but often produce reduplicated babble, making forms like [dada] , [guhguh] or [baba] and even longer chains, like [dadadadada] .

Babies across the world produce very similar first syllables.

This type of early, syllablic babble that combines a consonant and a vowel is called “canonical babbling” and is characteristic of the period between 7 and 10 months. When it first appears in this period, it usually has no communicative function. That is, infants do not appear to use it to refer to events or objects in the environment. However, at the same time as these vocal developments are taking place, parallel developments can be seen in babies arm movements, which they also now start to make repeatedly and rhythmically. So two types of rhythmic movements (of arms and oral articulators) are developing simultaneousy, and it is possible both phenomena are connected.

The emergence of babble has been studied in babies all over the world and findings suggest that, at first, they produce similar sounds regardless of which language(s) they have been hearing. This picture changes within a few months, however, and, around 10 months, babies’ babble audibly reflects the language they have been exposed to.

Hearing adult speech is fundamental to the development of babbling.

Although babies’ early babble does not reflect the characteristics of the specific language they have been raised with, the point at which babies begin to babble is the same point at which, when listening to speech sounds, they begin to distinguish the sounds and words of their native language.

This synchrony in developments suggests that the onset of babbling is closely related to speech perception. Scientific studies indicate that when children can produce a canonical syllable, e.g., [da], they also prefer to hear words that contain that same syllable, e.g., [daddy].

In any case, as a prerequisite to start babbling, babies need, from the first weeks of life, to hear adults talking around them and directly to them. This way, they learn to associate the sounds they hear with the movements of the articulators.

The age at which babies start to produce syllabic babble is a good predictor of when they will start to produce their first words. This suggests that an active stage of babbling is essential as a first step in learning to talk.

Vihman, DePaolis & Keren-Portnoy, 2009

Communicative babbling

Communicative babbling occurs when babies intend something by the sounds they produce. They may use canonical babble (e.g., [baba], or more variegated forms, combining several consonants in sequences like [bagaga], [cota] or [tapitapi], or a mixture of the two.

You might wonder how we can tell if a baby intends to mean something by the sounds they produce or is simply engaging in motoric exploration. Context is important to distinguishing between the two: communicative babbling normally occurs in episodes of joint attention. Here, when a baby is intending to communicate, they typically co-ordinate vocalizations with looks between their caregiver and the thing they want to talk about. They might also combine babble with pointing gestures.

As infants become more practiced, communicative babbling of this type increasingly reflects the specific prosodic and phonological characteristics of the language children are acquiring.

Babies typically use pointing gestures together with babbling when they begin to communicate intentionally.

Babies begin to babble intentionally between 9 and 10 months. Around this time, they learn that speech and gestures are produced in order, for example, to ask for things or to comment on things.

Other fundamental developments also take place in this period. In particular, communicative gestures tend to emerge around 11 months, when babies begin to point to things in their surrondings.

In addition, babies start to gain insight into the fact that different forms of vocalization are used to convey different meanings.

Swingley, 2009

First words

Around their first birthdays (as early as ten months), children begin to produce sounds that adults recognize as being words in their language. More often than not, these first words are not fully adult like. They might have entire syllables missing (for example, [nana] for “banana”) or a target sound might be replaced with another (for example, [guk] for “duck”). First, then, babies attempt to imitate parts of words using the sounds they already have in their repertoire, until they gradually become able to imitate words correctly first time.

Babies’ first words usually appear alongside babbling but differ in that they consistently use the same form (a sound at least somewhat like the adult form) for the same function (i.e., the same meaning) and appear to produce it with communicative intent.

These first words often refer to people, toys, food or other aspects of their everyday world. They can serve many functions, for example, a word may be used as a request (an imperative), or to inform someone of something (a declarative). Early words can also be what are called ‘performatives’, words whose function is part of social routine, as in ” hello”, “goodbye” or “peepo”.

Before producing their first words, babies need to have some important prerequisite skills in place.

Each child will follow their own developmental timescale when learning words. They might start to produce them very early, around tenth months, or much later, around 18 months. Whenever they start, within about 6 months of practice, they are a likely to have built up a productive vocabulary of 50 words. Importantly, babies can understand many more words than they can produce. That is, their receptive vocabulary is always greater than its productive vocabulary.

Before they can build a productive vocabulary, children need to acquire a number of important prerequisite skills. These include to: understanding intentions, babbling, pointing gaze following and being able to engage in joint attention with others.

In addition, the ability to produce words follows developments in word comprehension, such as speech segmentation and learning to associate word forms and their meanings.