It is more fun to talk with someone who doesn’t use long, difficult words but rather short, easy words like ‘What about lunch?’.
A. A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner, 1926.54
your baby has been listening attentively from before birth. She is born knowing her mother’s voice and the shout of each sibling; able to recognise often-read stories and her mother’s language against those of other cultures. Researchers have found that when a newborn baby is interested in what she can hear her heart rate slows — as does that of an adult who is concentrating. At birth, baby responds to the sound of her mother’s voice by looking for the source of the sound, and so finds her mother’s face. That gentle connection, a face to go with the voice and the smell and the comfort and love, grows in richness and significance for the baby in the early weeks of infancy. Eventually it becomes the heart of learning how to talk and how to think.
One of the strongest findings for securely attached children is that their language skills and IQs as a group (although there are always children with genetically based difficulties) are a great deal better than those of insecurely attached children. It’s no accident.
A secure attachment means that a baby starts on the pathway to communication earlier. This is because her more subtle signals are recognised more quickly by the more sensitive parent. Empowered by this, baby begins to experiment with more and varied speech sounds. Her parents respond by making those sounds right back at her. All she is getting is ‘go’ signals.
Let’s look at the same baby, but with a preoccupied parent. Sometimes a cry brings Mum and Dad running, but sometimes baby is left to cry. There’s no clear pattern of response for baby to build on. Puzzlingly, crying sometimes works as a communication, but sometimes it doesn’t. Her more subtle signals, like waves of her little hands and soft gurgling noises, are only sometimes heeded. The mix of ‘stop’ and ‘go’ signals keep this baby hesitating a long time before she steps onto the pathway of building language.
One of the great misconceptions people have about responsive and sensitive parenting is that it will result in a more dependent child. ‘You’ll be training her to run to you for everything,’ is one of the criticisms parents hear. Of course, what studies show is that securely attached children are both more resilient and more competent than insecurely attached peers. And this is due partly to their more advanced language and thinking skills. Siblings who can negotiate with each other are far less likely to be requiring frequent interventions from their parents. Children who know and can express clearly what they want experience less frustration and far more self-efficacy.
So first of all you do indeed respond to just about everything: every whimper (if you are quick enough baby won’t need to cry and experience the cascade of anti-learning stress hormones), every coo, every indication of interest. You talk and you sing and you watch for a response, except when baby is feeding. All mothers say very little then. If baby can’t talk back because her mouth is full, it seems that we don’t feel the urge to speak to her. After all, this is a relationship where normal social rules still apply. There are, however, some key differences to a social interaction with an infant.
First of all, you have a new voice. It is time to change a nappy, and you talk baby through the process in the special new voice that arrived with your baby, the slowed down, high-pitched, very modulated voice. Babies love motherese; until they don’t and then it just fades from a parent’s speech. Secondly, you are talking to someone who doesn’t know the language. The regular routines of bathing and feeding and changing nappies offer a chance to show that words have specific meanings. Interestingly, in the well-known disposable versus cloth nappy environmental impact debate, far less attention has been paid to one clear failing of disposable nappies. Babies in disposable nappies are changed far less often, and with that, many opportunities for language and interaction are lost.55 If you stick to the same words more or less each time (but don’t anguish over them being exact) you are giving baby words to peg to the routine.
Also in the interests of learning the language, babies need lots of language directed right at them to ‘crunch out’ basic rules, and they’ve done this by nine months of age. They learn nothing if the language is on the television or on the radio or directed to someone else. They need to watch your lips as you slowly speak straight to them; not in an unceasing stream, but in response to their indications of interest.
If you are feeling concerned that you didn’t sufficiently respond in your baby’s early life, please don’t despair. It is what is happening now that counts most. Studies have shown that secure attachment can be created later in a child’s life also, with concomitant improvements to their competency in language. In fact, outcomes for toddlers who were treated insensitively as babies but are now sensitively responded to are better than for toddlers who were sensitively responded to as babies but are now treated insensitively. What is happening now counts for a great deal.56)
So there you are with your little baby. You talk and then wait attentively for a response. You sing, and see if she is interested in more singing. Perhaps from having listened to the give and take of conversation in the womb, your baby knows that space you have made is for her to take a turn. Perhaps it is something she learns in the first month simply because you keep offering it to her. (The research is not yet clear on this.) Whatever the reason, in the second month of life baby starts to talk back to you.
Your repertoire of imitation and surprise games will immediately grow to include more ‘goo, gurgle and giggle’ sounds. From around two to three months of age, babies enjoy ‘echo’ games: they make a sound, you make a related sound back, they make another.
Baby (invitingly): ‘Aaaah!’
You (sounding impressed): ‘Ah-ga!’
Baby (trickily reversing the sounds): ‘Ga-ah!’
You (acknowledging this as a hit): ‘Ooh! Aaaa-gaaaa’ (on a deep intonation).
Baby giggles and so do you.
A surprise game such as this is effectively a science experiment conducted by your baby. She is working towards understanding ‘me’ and ‘not me’. Like all the best science experiments, these ones have just one variable.
In a copying game, the actions are the same and the one variable is the person performing the action. ‘I do it, then you do it. You do it, then I do it. If it’s the same thing, but we aren’t doing it at the same time, we are obviously different.’
In a surprise game, baby learns that she isn’t in charge of exactly when that surprise comes. The variable is time. ‘You surprised me! The thing you did isn’t quite the thing that I expected you to do. If you can surprise me then we aren’t the same thing.’
Both games lead to a baby knowing ‘we aren’t the same’. This is the first step towards theory of mind: appreciating that other people are things with minds and with different knowledge and intention to yours. This in turn becomes the basis for thinking skills.
Baby is learning about emotions too. When you reflect back to baby your recognition of her emotion — that she has a sore tummy and you are sorry about that — she catches not only her feeling returned by you but also your empathy. Something the same, and a little bit more. She sees that emotions can be shared, but that you are adding something to the exchange. She begins to appreciate that you can see what she feels, but you feel something a little different. Slowly and steadily, through the rich emotional games played with you, babies piece together that your perspective and your emotions are not the same as their own. Amazingly, basic empathy and the beginnings of theory of mind (the ability to predict what someone knows) are things babies have nailed by six months of age.35
Speech pathologists have been saying ‘follow your child’s lead’ for years now. They have always believed that a baby can actively shape the language experiences provided by adults if given the chance. Oddly enough, that’s something that language researchers are only just beginning to look at; and not so surprisingly, they are finding plenty of evidence for this proposal.
By their coos, their gaze and their movements babies charm the sensitive, responsive parent into providing more of the interaction they most enjoy. Perhaps the strongest evidence for this commonsensical idea that babies need to be ‘active agents’ for good language development comes if you couple two findings together. Firstly, that babies learn language fastest when talking is coupled with lots of eye contact and social interaction.57 And secondly, that better language development goes with secure attachment.58 Both pieces of evidence support the notion that when babies are sensitively and predictably responded to they can ‘shape’ the learning experience and so get loads more out of it.
Early and late talkers
Just as early walking doesn’t mean that a child does or does not have a gift for movement, early talking doesn’t necessarily tell you much about a child’s eventual language skills either. The vast quantity of research shows that how well a child acquires language cannot be predicted by studying the child alone. The most reliable indicator of language skills is how responsive a parent is to their child’s attempts to communicate.59
And there are other, linked indicators. For example, the best predictor for a large vocabulary at three and a half is not ‘early words’, but the quantity of items that a baby gestured to. Complexity of sentences at three and a half was not predicted by early speech either, but by how well a child linked together both gesture and speech. The key here is you.
If you are consistent in observing and responding to your baby, when baby points, you will supply the desired word. The reward of your interest and attention means that your baby will point more, you’ll provide more words, and so it goes on. Toddlers string together words and gestures to make sentences — if you are paying good attention you’ll put it all together verbally for them, which will encourage them to continue trying to sequence ideas and emotions. For example, my friend Chandra’s two-year-old son Lachlan pointed at the clothes line, opened and shut one hand and said ‘sock’. She promptly put it together for him — “you were looking at the clothesline and you saw a butterfly on Daddy’s sock”.
So if your gesturing or ‘signing’ baby doesn’t say a word for months, as in the case of the well-known ‘late talkers’ who suddenly catch-up, she is still learning. (Investing in a ‘baby signing’ book or classes can also be a good idea.) This research into the importance of gesture also suggests a solution to the great conundrum of which late talkers will suddenly catch up and which won’t.
About 14 per cent of children are ‘late bloomers’ with language. Imagine a toddler is approaching two years, and, while it is apparent she understands everything that is said to her, she still isn’t saying a word. She approaches three, and has a vocabulary similar to that of an 18 month old. At this point the ‘late talker’ group splits roughly in half and the children develop in one of two ways. Either at four or five years they’ve caught right up and may have even overtaken some of their peers, or they are still delayed. At the moment there is no way of predicting which group a child will fall into. This new research might mean that speech pathologists will be able to add gesture and parental responsiveness and know which child is going to have difficulty talking.
The puzzle of helping your baby to good language development is unlocked when you start thinking of her as an active participant rather than a passive recipient of your knowledge. I will never forget my anxiety over whether or not to use different words to describe something with a six-month-old Tim. Should I say ‘cat’ every time, or was it permissible to sometimes say ‘puss’ or ‘pussy-cat’? Was it important that the sofa always be ‘the sofa’ or could it also be called the ‘lounge’ or the ‘settee’? It was quite paralysing. It was when I realised that I simply had to be guided by him that I finally relaxed. When I began to think about him as ‘shaping me into the teacher he wanted’ I realised that if your baby seems interested in a range of words, then you’ll use them. If your baby looks lost, you will find yourself stopping.
To begin with, you need to give your baby as much material to work with as you can. Talk, sing, talk while always pausing for her comment or approval. If she makes a noise, seize the moment and make it back. ‘Un! Did you say “un”? Was that because you like Mum to pick you up?’ Note especially your new voice: modulated, higher than usual, with the words spaced widely and drawn out. Do not resist the urge to talk this way. Your babytalk gives your baby the best chance to learn, particularly if she watches you as you speak. Each slowed down, well-spaced word is shown in production so baby can see the shape of each sound as it emerges from your mouth. When baby no longer needs you to speak like this, you will just naturally stop. Remember, baby is ‘shaping’ you into the language teacher she needs you to be.
Develop a patter for routines like nappy changes. Say mostly the same thing each time, which will give baby a head start in pegging words to events. ‘Off with the stinky nappy, freshen up the little bum …’ Use blank verse, rhyming verse, and sing a little. You will soon find that a baby can be the most rewarding audience in the world.