Have you ever thought about how you learned to speak as a baby? Speaking is actually weird if you think about it, it’s just a bunch of sounds. Since the start of times people have evolved to be able to understand combinations of sounds. But how did people conclude that different combinations of sounds have different meanings. How did everyone understand in each other in the beginning? How do babies understand when people talk to them? How do they know what the sounds mean?
There isn’t a lot of research done on how is it that babies are able to understand words. Plato believed that babies come with an “instructions book” on how to talk. Some other researchers also believe that speaking is an innate ability; this means that talking is an ability we are born with, we just have to learn how to develop it. Chomsky believed that babies aren’t born with a “blank linguistic slate”, instead we are born knowing the “Universal Grammar”, which is the fundamental rules of all languages.
Patricia Khul from the Institute of Learning & Brain Sciences at the University of Washington said that babies are able to understand language since they’re in the womb. The first voice they hear is the mother’s and babies are able to differentiate the mother’s voice after their birth.
My youngest sister was born when I was 12. Since she was born, I was fascinated by her and everything she did as she grew up. For the first months I noticed that babies are super boring because they spend the entire day sleeping. However, once she wanted to start talking things became more interesting. I noticed that she looked at people’s lips when they were talking, and she tried to imitate the movement of the lips with her own lips.
Most children learn how to pronounce words just by hearing the word and looking at the lips’ movement. This is known as phonological learning. I can verify this because that was exactly what my sister was doing. She was imitating and following specific sounds in each word.
The thing that interests me the most is how babies are able to understand the meaning of each sound/word? There aren’t many studies and the ones that are out there haven’t been able to prove Plato’s or Chomsky’s theory that say that we are simply born knowing how to speak. I wonder what babies are thinking about when they are born.
It is an interesting thought, considering how children learn to speak. It’s a very similar question to other things like the nature of consciousness and perception, but framed in a very light and everyday way. You could ask how it is that we learn anything, but in the end it boils down to the chemistry and biology programmed into our brain by evolution, which allows our brain to be “plastic.” I liked the inclusion of the gamut of thoughts that scholars have had on the development of speech, which contrasted nicely with your own personal experience.
This topic is definitely cool to think about! I’m sure one day we will be able to learn what babies think when they are just born. What an interesting topic.