Baby Sign language
Babies Can Learn Words as Early as 10 Months
A two-year-old can quickly link an object--whether a flashy rattle or a boring latch--to a word. Even a one-year-old can follow a parent's gaze to an object and match it with a word being spoken. But although anecdotal evidence seems to show that babies younger than one year can learn words, it remains unclear whether they are in fact mastering language. Now a new study reveals that 10-month-old infants can link words and objects, but only if the object is already interesting to them.
Psychologist Kathy Hirsh-Pasek of Temple University and her colleagues tested 44 infants for the ability to learn words. The infants averaged an understanding of nearly 14 words already, according to their mothers. But the researchers paired four novel objects--a blue sparkle wand and a white cabinet latch, a pink party clacker and a beige bottle opener--with four nonsensical words--modi, glorp, dawnoo and blicket--to test their ability to associate new words with new objects.
Sitting on their mothers' laps, the infants were exposed to the objects. First, they were allowed to play with an interesting and boring object pair followed by seeing the two objects placed on a rotating board. This was done to assess which object was more interesting to the babies and, as expected, they preferred the brightly-colored, noisy ones.
Then the researchers placed the two objects on a table in front of the infant. If the baby was in one group, the experiment leader pointed to the interesting object and labeled it with one of the nonsense words. If the baby was a member of the other group, the researcher pointed to the boring object and labeled it with the same nonsense word. Regardless of the researchers' efforts, the infants looked at the object they found interesting.
But subsequent tests showed that the babies were also learning to associate it with the nonsense word. For example, when exposed to a new nonsense word, the babies would look away from the interesting object and search for a new one. Then the researchers returned to the original word and, surprisingly, 80 percent of the infants returned to looking at the original object.
This marks the first time such young infants have been shown experimentally to associate a word--even a made-up one--with an object, but, in contrast with their older peers, only one that they found interesting. "Ten-month-olds simply 'glue' a label onto the most interesting object they see," notes Shannon Pruden, a doctoral student and lead author of the study to appear in the journal Child Development. "Perhaps this is why children learn words faster when parents look at and name objects the infants already find interesting."
This inability to link social cues, words and objects may also explain why early word learning is so slow but accelerates rapidly around the age of 18 months. "The 18-month-old is a social sophisticate who can tap into the speaker's mind and the vast mental dictionary that the adult has to offer," adds Hirsh-Pasek. "At 10 months, they just cannot take the speaker's perspective into consideration."
BABY SIGN LANGUAGE
Babies exposed to sign language babble with their hands
Baby sign language works by teaching basic concepts like eat, milk, bathroom, all done and more. Learn Signs
Their vocal cords aren't developed yet, edit, but they know what they want to say, and they know what they need. Parents can teach their infants starting at about six months associating things and actions, with signs.
Experts say the best way to teach your kids sign language is to have all the key people in their life use the language - like grandparents and babysitters. The benefits last long after the babies, are no longer babies.
Sign |
Description |
Think of |
Milk |
open and close one or both fists | milking a cow |
Eat |
bring "and" hand to mouth and tap lips | bringing food to mouth |
Drink |
bring "c" hand to mouth in a short arc | bringing cup to mouth |
More |
tap both "and" hands together | bringing something together with something else |
Fan |
twirl index finger in a circle | rotating fan blades |
Dog |
1. Pat thigh 2. Pat thigh, snap fingers |
traditionally calling a dog |
Cat |
Trace "whiskers" on one or both sides of your mouth | cat whiskers |
Daddy |
tap "5" hand to your temple a few times | the temple area signifies male signs |
Mommy |
tap "5" hand to your chin a few times | the chin area signifies female signs |
Babies are watching your language
ALTHOUGH they can only babble, babies seem to have a keen eye for speech: they can distinguish between different languages simply by reading your lips.
Whitney Weikum and colleagues from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, showed babies videos of talking adults, with the sound turned off. Babies soon got bored of the silent clips, but they watched with renewed interest when speakers switched from English to French (Science, vol 316, p 1159).
This ability lasted only until the age of about 8 months - unless the babies came from bilingual households, when it continued. This suggests that visual cues may help babies avoid mixing up different languages, says Weikum. "It supports the idea that infants come prepared to learn multiple languages and are thus equipped to discriminate them auditorily and visually," she says.
Although there is no direct evidence that visual cues help children to learn a language, "it does suggest that in language learning, the brain may not be tied to speech per se", says Laura-Ann Petitto, a language development researcher at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. She previously showed that deaf babies use visual cues to learn sign language, but "never did we dream that young hearing babies acquiring spoken languages also use visual cues in this stunning way".
