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Baby talk: Theorists challenge view that we're born to chat
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Austin American-Statesman (TX)-June 2, 1996
Author/Byline: Robert S. Boyd, KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWS SERVICEEdition: FinalSection: InsightPage: D1
WASHINGTON -- With a series of random sighs, grunts and gurgles, a newborn baby sets to work on one of life's mysterious tasks -- learning a language.
A few weeks later come happy hums, trills and coos. After about six months, syllables like ba-ba, ma-ma and da-da make their debut.
``She said `Daddy,''' her proud father exclaims, a trifle prematurely. ``She's talking!''
Watching young children master their native tongue is a universal human experience. But scientists still don't fully understand the almost magical process by which infants pick up the unique sounds of English (or Russian or Chinese), and toddlers stuff 10 to 20 new words in their little heads every day.
It's the subject of a raging debate among linguists, neuroscientists and child psychologists, with new research on the brain challenging the dominant theory of language that has prevailed for 30 years.
Speech starts slowly -- a newborn's tongue and throat are designed for nursing, not chatting. But language skills gain speed after one year and virtually explode during the child's third year.
Before he can tie his shoes, the average pre-schooler knows 14,000
words and utters thousands of well-formed sentences he never heard before. Even his mistakes are logical: ``I saw two mans.'' ``We goed to school.''
``A 3-year-old is a grammatical genius,'' says Steven Pinker, a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of a best-selling book, ``The Language Instinct.''
Until the mid-1960s, most people believed that tots soaked up language, like parrots, by imitating their parents and older children. If they misspoke, they were corrected.
Then an MIT linguist and philosopher, Noam Chomsky, wrote a series of influential books arguing that mimicry and instruction can't explain the complex grammatical structures that pour from the lips of very young children.
Instead of imitation, Chomsky and his followers contend that the ability to speak and understand language is built into the human brain. It's an instinct, they say, inherited in our genes, like chewing or walking.
``We're designed to walk -- we're not taught to walk,'' says Chomsky. ``The same is true for language.''
Children around the world grow up speaking some 5,000 languages, but underlying them all, Chomsky and Pinker assert, is a ``Universal Grammar,'' a set of principles shared by every tongue. Each language applies the principles differently, but they all have things like nouns, verbs, moods and tenses.
Pinker says this universal grammar is ``hard-wired'' into the brain like an operating system in a computer that can handle many different software programs.
``The brain must contain a recipe or program that can build an unlimited set of sentences out of a finite list of words,'' he says. ``Language acquisition cannot be explained as a kind of imitation.''
For example, according to Pinker, if a toddler says, ``She be's in the kindergarten,'' she is unconsciously applying her understanding of a rule of English grammar (adding an ``s'' to a verb) to create a sentence that her mother never taught her.
``People know how to talk in more or less the sense that spiders know how to spin webs,'' Pinker says.
Chomksy's view of language, a virtual cult in academic circles, is
under attack from experts in child development and from the new science of neurobiology.
Naomi Baron, a linguistics professor at American University in Washington, D.C., denies that young children ``discover'' language automatically and effortlessly. Instead, she says they struggle all day, every day for many years to communicate with others.
``By the time they begin using recognizable words, children have been barraged with language by parents and other caretakers, including television, for thousands of hours,'' Baron says. ``If anyone spent that much time and effort learning a second language, he would speak it well.''
According to Baron, ``learning emerges out of the language duet between adult and child that begins in the early months of life. ... The very act of talking to in --fants as if they understand us is the single most important thing we do to help children'' learn to speak, she writes in her recent book, ``Growing Up With Language.''
Early speech phases
Experts on all sides of this debate agree that children go through several distinct, sometimes overlapping, phases of language development.
First come the rudimentary vocalizations of the early weeks, as the newborn tries out her complicated speech apparatus.
At this stage, her larynx, or voice box, is located high in her throat, just behind her mouth, to help her breathe while sucking milk. This makes it impossible to pronounce many of the consonants adults use.
The first true language-like sounds appear between two and four months of age. Babies often start with k's and g's, because they are easy to produce at the rear of the mouth while lying on their back. Parents hear ``coos'' and ``goos.''
Between four and eight months, babies start babbling meaningless syllables as they struggle to gain control of their tongue and lips. Most common are p's, b's, t's, d's, m's or n's followed by a vowel, and often repeated.
An infant's first spoken word, such as ``dada,'' may be accidental
rather than intentional, Baron says.
``Duh,'' for example, might mean ``Daddy,'' ``doggy,'' ``duck'' or nothing at all.
Between six months and a year, Baron says, children ``crack the language code'' and begin to associate sounds with meanings. ``Most children understand some words between six months and a year,'' she says.
The pace picks up
The spoken vocabulary grows slowly at first, perhaps one or two words a month, according to Carolyn Mervis, a child language expert at Emory University in Atlanta. But after a toddler has learned about 50 words, around 18 months of age, he starts acquiring new ones at a rapid pace that will continue at least through adolescence.
``Preliterate children must be lexical vacuum cleaners, inhaling a new word every two waking hours, day in, day out,'' Pinker says.
At first, babies produce only single words in isolation, or mixed in with gibberish. But soon they start putting two words together: ``all dry,'' ``more milk,'' ``see doggy.''
``Children's two-word combinations are so similar in meaning the world over that they read as translations of one another,'' says Pinker.
Between age 2 and 3, children start gluing together longer sentences of three and more words.
Early, bare-bones sentences resemble telegrams, Pinker notes. They lack unstressed words like ``the'' or ``of,'' as well as grammatical endings like -ed, -ing, and -s. But by the age of 31/2, children use the s-ending in verbs correctly 90 percent of the time, he says.
``Between the late twos and mid- threes, children's language blooms into fluent grammatical conversation so rapidly that it overwhelms the researchers who study it,'' Pinker says.
Exactly how this linguistic flowering occurs is still a mystery, but recent discoveries of how the brain works are beginning to shed light on the problem.
Building brain circuitry
Electronic images of the brain show that intellectual activity is carried out by a vast network of nerve cells, called neurons, in the cerebral cortex, the thin, wrinkled layer of gray matter inside the skull.
At birth, the cortex is packed with more than 100 billion neurons, each connected to thousands of others. Altogether, the brain has at least 100 trillion connections, far more than the fastest supercomputer.
These neural links are strengthened when used -- weakened or discarded when unused. When a set of sounds is repeatedly associated with an object, say a dog or a chair, those connections are hardened and stored in a child's memory.
``Words are encoded in the form of networks of neurons,'' said Richard Restak, a neurologist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. ``With repetition, the patterns are strengthened and the information more firmly encoded. The brain alters itself on the basis
of experience.''
For example, Restak notes that the area of the cortex assigned to the right index finger is larger than normal in a blind person who uses that finger to read books printed in braille.
The brain becomes less elastic over time. Speech experts say children have a ``critical window'' for learning a language, which closes around puberty. Adults have a harder time picking up a second
language than youngsters.
Mark Seidenberg, a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California, says, ``Neural networks develop in the course of acquiring a language and are shaped by their role in language use. ... Language is neither instinct nor miracle, but a neurocomputational mechanism.''
(from box) ENHANCING CHILDREN'S LANGUAGE SKILLS
Here are some suggestions from Naomi Baron, an expert on child language at American University in Washington, D.C., on how to help a child learn to speak and understand language well.
* Be an active conversational partner. Speak slowly, clearly, simply and correctly. Be a good role model.
* Talk as if your baby understands what you are saying.
* Listen to what she says. Repeat, rephrase and expand her sentences to make them more complete and grammatical.
* Ask questions. Encourage answers other than yes or no.
* Introduce new topics to talk about.
* Use humor and rhymes.
* Avoid excessive use of pacifiers. A child can't vocalize freely with a plug in his mouth.
* It's all right if two languages are spoken in your house. It doesn't seem to slow their learning, and may actually enhance their intellectual ability.
* Don't worry if he seems slow to start speaking. Children vary, but almost all late starters catch up eventually. Albert Einstein said he didn't start talking until he was 3 years old. But if a child doesn't produce recognizable words by 15-18 months, or putting words together in sentences by age 3, there may be a problem. Check with a doctor or speech therapist.
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