Learning to Speak: Developmental Milestone

      

What to Expect The First Year sorts of books have their place, but I prefer psychology textbooks for more complete advice about human behavior.  Curiosity led me, this morning, to insight on speech development and the stages we go though to achieve full mastery of our language.  It turns out, logically, that language development is a series of small steps rather than sudden leaps in understanding.  We might think our kids, when they’re ready, suddenly and unexpectedly start speaking.  We say “Wow!  Johnny just started speaking up a storm.  Something must have clicked inside his head!”  What we’re witnessing is a significant step forward, no doubt, but it’s one of many steps that coalesce into that impressive first word or phrase.  For the curious among us, here are the milestones according to one of my old textbooks (which I keep because I’m weird) Psychology: second edition:           

Crying and Cooing            

We all know about crying.  It’s the mighty hammer that comes standard in all kids out of the box.  At first it’s an uncontrolled impulse, but after some refinement it transforms into deliberate manipulation.  Cooing comes after crying (by about 12 weeks).  Like crying, babies don’t learn how to coo, they simply do it.  Psychologists think it’s associated with feelings of pleasure and positive excitement — the opposite of crying.  These cries and coos, while unlearned, nevertheless take on meanings.  Parents know what each of them mean, from the poop feeling to the wanting food feeling.  Still, cooing and crying are not language as the sounds don’t represent things or events, just emotion.   It should be noted that recently (after the publication of the book I’m looking at) scientists discovered that kids do cry in the tones of their native languages.            

Babbling            

Babbling is a baby’s first foray into human speech.  This is when they first start using phonemes.  The trills in Spanish for instance, or the ch sound in German.  Interestingly, even deaf children babble despite the fact that they don’t pick up external cues.  Equally fascinating is that when kids start babbling they use many phonemes from many languages that aren’t native to theirs.  But, by 9 to 10 months, the foreign sounds drop off.  At one point in our lives we could all make the Spanish rr sound!  I need that ability back, please.            

The Holophrase            

Ding Ding! This is the stage parents wait for.  A holophrase is a single word used to express complex meanings (Greek holos, meaning “whole,” and phrazein, meaning “to speak.”).  A holophrase means more than the word being used.  So dada might mean “Dad, go get me my bottle.” or eat might mean “feed me now before I cry.” By 18 months kids have dozens of words they can use as holophrases.            

The Duo            

At about 2 kids start using two words to make up simple fragmented sentences – duos.  Duos are what psychiatrists call telegraphic speech.  Only the most essential words are used while the rest are only implied.  For example “mama go” could mean “mama is going.”  Duos usually consist of an open class word and a pivot word.  The pivot word is the small one, like go, and they stand for phrases, like is going.  The open class word stands for some concrete concept, like daddy.  Daddy doesn’t stand for anything except daddy.            

The interesting aspect of duos is that, while simple, they nevertheless utilize proper syntax.  When a kid says “mama go” he means “mama is going.”  He didn’t reverse the order to say “go mama.”  If he says “go mama” then he means he wants mama to go away, not that she left.  Duos therefore are a concrete step towards making complete sentences.

More Complex Language            

The big culmination in kids’ vocabularies takes place between age two and three.  That’s when they go from about 250 to 1000 words.  It’s also when sentence structure becomes more complex and kids start to utilize and understand rules of grammar, and they start using plurals and the past tense.  To prove that preschool kids actually understand what they are saying and are not simply mimicking their parents, Berko (1958) did an experiment using pictures of fictitious animals.  Ninety-two percent of the tested kids got it right.  Here it is:            

After the third year kids start using pronouns like it and she and propositions like in, before or on.  Prepositions represent relationships between objects.  The use of them, therefore, means that kids are grasping relationships between people, objects and time.  It seems simple, right? But the use of those relationship words mark a developmental milestone for kids.  For example, Suzy might know her Aunt Ashley as her aunt, but she won’t understand until a certain stage that Ashley is her aunt because she is also my sister.  Pronouns and propositions are the first steps in developing that understanding.            

Language development is a huge topic of conversation, but it seems that what most parents want to know is when their kids should be doing what and if they are behind.  I wouldn’t want my kid slipping behind either so I can see how that’s an important thing to know.  It also helps to know why kids do what they do.  Then, as educators, we can understand what they’re going through and perhaps help.  It has been shown, by the way, that talking like a baby to your baby, baby talk, is not harmful to the development of speech.  The reason is that when parents speak baby talk to their kids they keep proper syntax; the language itself keeps its shape thereby doing no harm.  In other words it’s okay to talk like a baby to your baby.  You might sound dumb, but your kid will probably be entertained by the sing song pitch and silly faces you make while speaking to him.  No harm, all fun.  

Berko, J. The Child’s Learning of English Morphology. Word, 1958, 14.