How do Babies Learn to Talk? Part 1: Sounds and Stages

In a departure from our usual family travel/outdoors/festival posts our latest article is about speech.  More specifically, it’s about how children and babies acquire speech.  The reason for this is that, as a parent, I often hear (or overhear, being the nosy sort) conversations about those celebrated first words or worries about rates of language development, and whether children are falling behind other babies and toddlers.  We seem utterly obsessed with baby talk. In fact, we’re so obsessed that we parents have developed a sub-language of our own – motherese – for the way we go all gooey and squealy when we talk to the little apples of our eye.  But more of that technical talk later.

Away from being a dad to my two crazy critters, I’m an English teacher in a large secondary school.  I have to confess that, since having children, teaching Child Language Acquisition to my 6th form A level English Language classes has become one of my favourite parts of the week.  Of course, I also have to confess that prior to having children discussing baby ‘gobbledoogook’ was one of my worst nightmares.  How times change hey!  And anyway, talking about their language development sure beats talking about the texture, structure and colouration of their poo I suppose!

One of the easiest ways to begin to understand how your baby develops speech is to understand the stages that they are expected to go through.  The first of these is pre-verbal, i.e. before they can actually form words and talk.  This will be made up of progressively more sophisticated sounds, and patterns of sounds, which we, as parents, are able to attach an ever increasing variety of meanings and emotions to.  Basically, they are able to help us understand what they want and how they feel before they are able to formally verbalise it.  Pretty amazing hey!

 

Stage	Features	Approx. age (months)
Vegetative	Sounds of discomfort or reflexive actions. Examples of this could be crying, coughing, burping or sucking.  The control of sounds even starts at this early stage as they often have more than one cry noise to suit more than one need.  Come on, how many have said ‘oh that’s windy cry’?	0-4
Cooing	Comfort sounds and vocal play using open mouthed sounds. Grunts and sighs become vowel-like ‘coos’ Laughter starts Hard consonants and vowels produced.  These are among the easiest sounds for an infantile vocal system to produce.  Because of this, during the next stage (babbling) you’ll see why babies often say ‘dada’ (hard ‘d’ sound) before ‘mama’, which has a more difficult ‘m’ sound to produce.  But let’s keep that one to ourselves hey dads! Pitch (squeals and growls) and loudness (yells) are practised.	4-7
Babbling	Repeated patterns of consonant and vowel sounds. Sounds linking to own language.  They’ll begin to make sounds that sound familiar to our own adult language. Some of these sounds will be reduplicated sounds (‘ba-ba’) while others will be non-reduplicated (variegated) such as ‘agu’.	6-12
Proto-words	Word-like vocalisations.  These do not match actual words but, impressively, they are used consistently for the same meaning.  For example, using ‘mmm’ to mean ‘give me that’, with accompanying gestures such as pointing, supporting the verbal message.	9-12

 

Following on from this pre-verbal stage is the verbal stage.  This stage, as its name suggests, is characterised by actual words and how babies and toddlers are able to string them together to begin to form grammatical constructions.

 

Stage	Features	Approx. age (months)
Holophrastic/one-word	One-word utterances.  Following their use of proto-words they’ll now start to use single words in isolation that are real words.  These will, more often than not, be nouns as we, as parents, begin to point to and name things around them.	12-18
Two-word	Two-word combinations	18-24
Telegraphic	Three or more words combined	24-36
Post-telegraphic	More grammatically complex combinations that resemble adult speech.	36+

 

Producing sound is crucial for any child’s language development. From an early age they will use their vocal cords to get the attention needed to ensure their survival and emotional needs. That is why they cry when they are hungry and when they want a cuddle.  The ‘cooing’ and ‘babbling’ stages mark the beginnings of prosodic features.  Prosodic features are features of sound such as pitch and tone (of voice) that we are able to control in order to add meaning to the sounds or words we use. This means that whoever is listening to us has a better idea of what we are on about.  Think about how you tell your kids off when they’re about to create World War 3 in your living room.  You use a serious tone of voice so that they know you’re about to lose the plot with them if they don’t stop it right now!   Crucially, early developments allow your child to increase the variety of sounds that they can produce (phonemic expansion) and then reduce the sounds to only those they need for their own language (phonemic contraction), showing that children have, at this stage, the potential to learn any language in the world from birth.

So how are sounds produced?

Sounds are produced by air from the lungs passing across vocal cords.  So, when we consider consonant sounds we have to also understand what they are affected by:

• The manner of articulation (how the airstream is controlled).  Is it a short, sharp sound like a ‘p’, which requires less control of your vocal cords, or is it a more complex sound like an ‘s’ or ‘l’, which takes longer to produce as it requires you to have more control over its sound?

• The place of articulation (where it occurs).  To make sounds we can use our lips, tongue, teeth and the roof of our mouth, or a combination these.  Again, some of these are far easier than others for little mouths so sounds that require a combination of these things will often be among the last to develop in young children.

Sounding letters out loud helps you hear how and where they are produced.  Try saying the letter ‘p’ which is a plosive sound.  We purse our lips and block the airflow for a very brief period of time.  These are among the easiest sounds to say.  Now say ‘l’ (L) out loud.  This is known as a lateral sound so we produce this by placing our tongue on the ridge of our teeth, which allows air to move down the side of the mouth.  This, for a baby and toddler, is a pretty difficult task so will generally take much longer to master.

As a result of these difficulties that your little critters will come across when learning to talk, it is not hard to see why they make so many mistakes along the way.  These mistakes are a necessary part of the learning curve.  So, to finish part one of this guide, see how many of these mistakes you can spot in your little critters:

 

Term	Explanation	Examples
Deletion	leaving out the final consonant in words.	Go(g), cu(p)
Substitution	Substituting one sound for another (especially replacing the ‘harder’ sounds that develop later, with easier sounds)	‘pip’ for ‘ship’
Assimilation	Changing one consonant or vowel for another (as in the early plosive sounds ‘d’ and ‘b’.  In the example, you can see that it’s simply  easier for a baby to produce two different sounds (‘g’ and ‘o’) than it is to produce three different sounds (‘d’, ‘o’ and ‘g’).	‘gog’ for ‘dog’
Reduplication	Repeating a whole syllable	Dada, mama
Consonant cluster reduction	Consonant clusters lots of consonants placed together) can be difficult to articulate, so children reduce them to smaller units.	‘pider’ for ‘spider’
Addition	Adding extra vowel sounds to the end of words, creating a CVCV pattern.	doggie
Deletion of unstressed syllables	Leaving out the opening syllable in polysyllabic words (a complex word with lots of syllables).  Again, this just makes it a more manageable proposition for little mouths.	‘nana’ for ‘banana’

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