#3. 6-12 months. Language starting to land!

June 6, 2017 Liz Donnelly

eardrops language series title image the second six months

“ba-ba-ba-ba-da-da-da-ba-da-mm-mum-mm” tell us a story baby!

Number three in the eardrops language series considers language development during the second half of baby’s first year. This is another period of truly impressive learning. Just like in the newborn days, babies are working hard during these months building the foundations of language, and it is all happening in parallel with many amazing physical accomplishments.

The number of words an infant hears during their first twelve months has a direct effect on how quickly they learn language later in the preschool years. So keep talking as often as you can with your baby because these early experiences with language are crucial to activate the brain, firing those neurons up. Babies contribute to their learning by consciously observing, exploring, experimenting, and seeking information as best they can.

This first year can be so intense and it is helpful to have a basic understanding of how your little one is working on their language. This is broad general development information, so don’t stress if your baby is doing or not doing these things - every personality is different and each baby creates their own individual journey to language.

In amongst all the clever things they are doing (like crawling and learning to eat solids), babies reach two significant and exciting milestones in their language development between six and twelve months.

They start to deliberately try and communicate with caregivers
They start to pair sounds with meaning

Communicating on purpose

About now, babies start to experience success when they try and communicate. Maybe they wave towards a toy and their caregiver passes it to them, maybe they create a sound that caregiver understands the meaning of, maybe they lift their arms wanting to be picked up and hey presto they get picked up. Whatever the event, the fact that they did an action with an intended meaning that was understood by someone else is huge! Each time this happens - when they communicate what they want successfully, babies are motivated to try and communicate even more.

Because they have developed the ability to focus on an object alongside a caregiver and understand that both are referring to that object (‘joint attention’) the framework is now in place for baby to initiate ‘conversations’ about toys and objects they can hear, see, and touch. The baby's growing knowledge during these months that an object or person still exists even if it’s out of sight (called ‘object permanence’) is also an important developmental step. Try hiding a toy under a blanket and see if your baby looks for it. Hours of fun!

Infant Directed Speech (IDS - that simple, repetitive, high pitched style of talking we automatically do with babies, as defined in our newborn communication discussion) really helps children learn language, and it subtly changes once babies get to 6 months old. Without really being aware of it, caregivers start providing more information, describing objects and toys very clearly using short sentences that only include one or two ideas ("here's kitty"). They also introduce slightly harder concepts ("pat the cat"), and use more sounds within sentences ("you pat the cat").

Babies of 9 months whose carers speak in short IDS sentences to them have bigger vocabularies at 18 months than those who haven't been exposed to this style of speaking.

Imitation

It is really important during these months that babies are given lots of chances to observe what's going on. One of the main ways they learn is by imitating their caregivers. They’ve been imitating facial expressions since day one but now, after they get to 6 months, they will start to imitate hand movements too. The more that caregivers talk with baby the more they will try and imitate them and they love it when people imitate them back (this helps them deepen their understanding of conversations and how we have to take turns). More on imitation here.

Gestures

Building on the wonderful smiling, head turning and gazing they’ve been doing for months, babies now learn more complex gestures like waving, nodding, shaking their head to say ‘no’, stretching arms up and pointing. When babies start making these gestures they are showing caregivers that they are thinking strategically – they are developing the ability to plan and co-ordinate their actions to achieve a goal. Your baby might touch you to get your attention, then look, reach or point to something then look back at you – silently asking you to get it for them. They might also make a sound and point at something but usually the vocalisation is only added after a couple of months of quiet gesturing. (Because they are so vital in the language journey we take a more detailed look at gestures here.)

Sounds

Babies have been making sounds to communicate their needs for months already but now their sounds develop and become more complex. It is so cute when they start to ‘babble’ in lovely long streams of gibberish like ‘bibibibibi’ ‘mamamama’ ‘bidibidibidi’. Early babbling sounds the same regardless of the language being spoken in the home, but over time these sounds become more tuned to the native language (these early sounds tend to be consonants - 'p, b, t, d, k, g, m, n, s, h, w, and j'). By the way, babbling is not unique to humans – young songbirds, sac-winged bats, and pygmy marmosets babble too. Fact!

The sounds that babies make change when they start to think more strategically (alongside the more complex gestures). They will start to make short sounds with a low pitch, which incidentally are the same sounds they make when they’re thinking and exploring. These 'thinking' sounds are different from higher pitched ‘feeling’, ‘emotional’ sounds.

here's a cute baby babbling video

Sounds and meaning

The second major milestone during this time is that infants start to pair a sound with what that sound means. At about 7 months old babies recognise their first few words and can pick them out of the conversational ‘stream’. Between 9 and 13 months children start to have an understanding of some words and phrases (in particular ‘No’ and their name). Babies might come up with what seems their own word for something. When they do this they are displaying that they are making the link between a sound and a meaning – evidence they are making that huge step towards symbolic thinking.

Some babies might know 20 words by about 8 months and respond to simple requests like ‘wave bye bye’ (which shows they understand what it means). Since 9 month olds can follow pointing and glancing, caregivers can help infants at this stage by focussing on a toy or book alongside the baby, explaining it, and talking about it. Babies will be engaged for longer if their caregivers work with them like this.

The 8-10 month period sees a huge burst of activity in the language areas of the brain. Technically what’s happening is that babies start to listen for stress patterns on words, whether the first part is said slow or fast, high or low. They listen harder to find familiar sequences in a stream of chat. They also listen for word boundaries – starting to recognise that words start and end with patterns. They listen for different sounds within the words. They listen for syllables that are often repeated. They listen for pauses, pitch changes, vowel lengths, and specific words – searching for the breaks within the word. A truly complex set of tasks that lead to some major achievements for babies.

And then at around 12 months your child will start to use words alongside their gestures! This is when experts tick that box labelled ‘language’. High fives mama and papa! But until then enjoy every conversation with your little babbling one – they really are magic!

These are broad brushstroke about how a child walks the path to language. As Robert E Owens Jr. says in his renowned book on Language Development “There is no single way in which children learn to communicate”. That's the fun of it.

This is the third post in our language series. Next up see why primary caregivers are vital in a child's journey to language or head to our toddler language overview.

Ngā manaakitanga (with best wishes), Liz xx

Next up:

#4. The importance of primary caregivers

#5. The importance of gestures

#6 Toddler language 12-24 months

Dr Newbury's research

Information for the Eardrops blog language series was guided and overseen by Dr Jayne Newbury, Researcher in Child Language (University of Canterbury), with the comprehensive information in Language Development: An Introduction by Robert E. Owens, Jr. (2015). This post was written by Liz Donnelly, creator of Eardrops, audio stories that help develop listening skills and improve everyday language in young children.

#2. Communication from the newborn baby

May 29, 2017 Liz Donnelly

communication from the newborn - eardrops language series

Waah Waah! Pause. Waah Waah! Pause. What's that you say baby? Its language!

Starting with listening and kicking from within the womb, to gazing at their parents at only minutes old, babies communicate with the adults around them well before they say their first words. Number two in the eardrops language series is a whistle stop tour of the first six months. This first year can be so intense and it is helpful to have a basic understanding of how your little one is trying to communicate with you.

The number of words an infant hears during the first twelve months has a direct effect on how quickly they learn language later in the preschool years. So talk as much as you can with your baby because these early experiences with language are crucial to activate the brain, firing those neurons up! Babies contribute to their learning too by consciously observing, exploring, experimenting, and seeking information as best they can.

This is broad general development information, so don’t stress if your baby is doing or not doing these things - every personality is different and each baby creates their own individual journey to language.

Newborn to 3 months

Babies strive to connect with their caregivers from their first moments. Through a combination of watching, listening, crying and moving, they soon learn how to let you know when they need something.

Right from the start babies take in information at an astounding rate through every one of their senses. They have already been listening for months from inside the womb and in the early days they prefer human voices to all other sounds, in particular their mother’s voice. A newborn baby will stop crying when Mum and Dad talk to them and Mum and Dad will talk to help their new baby stop crying – the beginning of deep communication within the family.

Mother and baby move in tune to the voice and sounds of each other - a beautiful dance that babies start within 20 minutes of birth. That’s biology baby…

Although babies recognise their Mama’s sound and smell from the first moments, they know and prefer her face within a couple of weeks, deliberately smiling at her from about 3-6 weeks. They start off seeing best at a distance of around 20cm, spot-on for when they’re being held close (newborn snuggles, genetically programmed to be perfect). Babies love to gaze at faces. Even very young babies will seek out the human voice to discover the face attached to that voice.

Newborn babies communicate with their head movements too, holding still and focussing intently when interested and turning away when they’ve had enough. Other body gestures start early - even the youngest infants open their mouth, poke their tongue out, and at a few weeks old, flail their arms about.

Even though babies are too young to understand what’s being said, parents and caregivers usually treat them as if they do, by looking directly at them during the conversation and pausing after they speak to give the baby a chance to respond. This is so helpful because it teaches the baby the rituals of our communication – taking turns, using facial expressions, nodding, smiling, and generally reacting to one another. By about 6 weeks baby will likely be vocalising, cooing and ‘talking’ back during the conversations (so cute!) Language expert Robert E. Owens Jr says "children become communicators because we treat them that way" and Noam Chomsky is convinced we're born with a 'language acquisition device' in our brains.

Babies need to develop their memory in these early days to be able to remember language patterns later. Creating regular daily routines is a great start.

It is in these early weeks and months that caregivers set up routines with their babies, rituals around daily activities that actually create the framework for language development. Take bath time, for example. With each bath the same sequence of events happens and it’s likely that similar words are spoken too. Babies soon learn the sounds and patterns of those sentences and later work out that they mean something (but not for a while yet - words need to be heard thousands of times before these connections form). But it’s the routine that creates the space for baby to learn in.

3 to 6 months

Somehow over these next few months babies must make sense of what they are hearing and seeing in order to form meaning from it. A mammoth task – but they happily take on the challenge.

By around 3 months, babies know different people, and respond accordingly by smiling longer at their caregivers and choosing not to smile at strangers unless they want to. It may not be obvious, but babies are deliberately imitating people’s movements by now, as well as facial expressions and sounds. During these months a child will see thousands of facial expressions – imitating as many as they can. Caregivers can imitate back – hours of fun! This is the season of face-to-face play (later it becomes more about toys and moving to explore).

It is really tough to distinguish between individual speech sounds in the ‘stream’ of chat, but somehow babies start to do this during these months. At around 5 months baby will begin to vocalise more deliberately, talking to themselves in the mirror and to toys too, as well as people. They also usually respond to their own name by about 5-6 months.

There’s a particular way that caregivers talk with young babies that really helps their learning. We use a squeaky high voice, exaggerated pitch and tones, gestures, gazes, and facial expressions, and we leave long pauses to include baby in each conversation. People all round the world do this with babies, no matter the language they are speaking – this is programmed into us! Experts call this ‘Infant Directed Speech’ (IDS).

IDS is different from regular speech because the adults speak slowly and in short simple sentences, we talk about what’s going on in the immediate environment (nothing too abstract or theoretical), we only use a few words and repeat these throughout the conversation. And although we’re not usually aware of it, we only use a few distinct sounds in each conversation too.

Whether or not a baby can perceive speech patterns at 3-6 months has a direct relationship to how they understand words and phrases later.

Once babies start to learn the sound patterns of their soon-to-be native language (or languages) they organise the sounds into types and sequences. This is a huge step. Baby is learning that there are rules to language, as well as learning the individual words. Playing repetitive games is important during these months. Grandma’s got it right with the hours of ‘peek a boo’ and endless nursery rhymes!

Perhaps the biggest step of all that babies take towards language in these early months is that they develop the ability to consciously focus on something at the same time their caregiver does. Experts call this ‘joint attention’. This skill is particularly important for language development because its another key framework that babies can learn in. Mum, Dad, or caregiver will hold up a toy or other object to draw the baby’s attention to it, then they will both study it, and the adult usually names or describes it. In a few month’s time, baby will be the one holding the toy up and looking at their caregiver to start the conversation, which is another exciting step towards language, but for now the adult needs to take the lead.

Experience of language is vital during the whole of the first year, as a lack of exposure can have a seriously negative effect on a baby’s later language development. As a caregiver, you can do so much to help your child with their language. This is the second post in our Language series 'Follow your child’s journey to language with Eardrops'. Next up we take a look at the language mountain that babies climb between 6 and 12 months and after that, see why primary caregivers are vital in a child's journey to language.

Ngā manaakitanga (with best wishes), Liz xx

Next up:

#3. 6-12 months and language

#4. The importance of primary caregivers

#5. Why are gestures important for language?

Dr Newbury's research

#1. Language is complex! Where to start?

May 22, 2017 Liz Donnelly

Eardrops blog language series title page post 1 what is language

Hi. Kia ora! How are you? Fine thanks. What’s that you say? Its language! Say what?

Language is a creative tool we use to communicate with each other, a productive, evolving, socially shared code (who loves the word 'code'?) The ability to use symbols (words) to organise our world and express our experiences is described by expert Robert E. Owens, Jr. as “the premier achievement of humans”. The average adult English language user uses 150 words a minute, choosing these from between 30,000 and 60,000 alternatives. The mind boggles... how on earth do we even begin to learn this? Thats the challenge our children fearlessly face every day with grace and good humour (well, mostly).

There are a staggering 6000 languages spoken throughout the world. Learning even one of these languages is a ridiculously complex process, although experts agree that the human brain does seem ‘wired’ for it. There are three steps we take to learn language, and we fire up multiple areas of our brain as we do it.

We learn how to listen and focus so we can decode the sounds within a word, then decode the whole word.
We relate that word to its meaning (we have to create our own little dictionary inside our head for this).
We use precise speech muscles to form a shape with our mouth to speak that word out loud.

Isthmus, anyone?

It is vital that children hear a lot of language spoken to and around them in their early days and months, because the number of words an infant hears has a direct effect on how quickly they learn language later in the preschool years.

Most of us learn language by listening. Children do actively contribute to their own learning by watching, listening, and experimenting with sounds (collective sigh, as we recall our cute babies babbling away in gibberish, naaaw).

Although we can communicate by writing, sign language and drawing, most language is transmitted by speech. On that note, children spend much of their first year experimenting with their vocal range, preparing to speak later. They produce many different sounds and little by little they fine tune them to match their native language - so clever and cute. Regardless of the language being learned, it appears that the first few sounds we make are the same the world over - sounds like ‘m’, ‘w’, ‘b’, and ‘p’. Our babies are actually born with the ability to create and use every sound combination possible, but they lose this potential if the sounds aren’t being used around them. Umm, no pressure!

Early language learning is all about patterns. The little linguists near you are listening all the time to work out the common sounds and phrasings of the language spoken in the home.

Kids don’t try and learn thousands of alternative words – they learn the base patterns then ‘freeflow’, which cuts down brain admin time and results in surprising (and so cute) word combinations. A universal favourite with parents is how children say 'goed' instead of 'went' - such fun.

Understanding a language is so much more than simply being able to say the words too. When we speak we use a lot of gestures, facial expressions, eye contact and body posture, which all communicate meaning - Robert E. Owens Jr says that these can carry up to 60% of the information. Remarkable, really! We also speak faster or slower depending on the setting, we emphasize words within a sentence, and talk in a higher pitch to turn a sentence into a question (the Kiwi accent does this with almost every sentence just for fun eh). By the way a child soon figures out that a long pause after they make a request usually means they’re going to get a NO answer. Yes parents, your pauses say so much!

Our genetics provide the brain structure and developmental timings - the rest comes down to individual personality and what we experience. Kids learn using all of their senses – linking and intertwining their hearing, sight, touch, taste and smell to make sense of the world (more about how we learn to listen here). As a caregiver, you can do so much to help your child with their language, and its helpful to have a basic understanding of how our language develops in the early years.

This is the first post in our Language series 'Follow your child’s journey to language with Eardrops'. Next up - check out 'Communication from the newborn' and 6-12 months. Language starting to land!

Ngā manaakitanga (with best wishes), Liz xx

Next up:

#2. Newborn communication

#3. 6-12 months and language

#4. The importance of primary caregivers

Dr Newbury's research