Babbling babies...
Categories: Development
An article on the London Times website today suggested that your baby's babble is straight from the textbook of our universal grammar. According to the author, Anjana Ahuja, she planned on teaching her toddler, now 4, a second language. She discovered that she may be four years too late. According to one linguist, babies are born with the capacity to learn any language, but this plasticity withers as they concentrate on their mother tongue. Charles Yang, of the University of Pennsylvania, argues in a new book that babies are born with the templates for all languages in their brains, and that the underused templates are gradually discarded. According to Yang, "nature proposes, and nurture disposes". Most intriguing is Yang's observation that seemingly grammatically incorrect baby babble will usually be grammatically correct in another language. Baby babble, he infers, is the infant trying out various templates to see which one "works" (by eliciting claps, hugs and other signs of approval). So a sentence that seems to be a jumble of verbs and nouns when spoken in English, may well be correctly ordered in another language. Yang's theory takes, as its starting point, Noam Chomsky's enduring idea that there is a universal grammar embedded in the infant brain. Yang suggests that mixed-up baby talk is the toddler tossing out different variations of that universal grammar.
That explains everything: we all have brilliant babblers. They are just speaking to you in Chinese or Russian!
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
ann adams 8-29-2006 @ 5:20PM
That's interesting and it would certainly explain why the any bilingual kids in our neighborhood switch back and forth while their parents and I struggle. We're mostly Hispanic here but we have a fair size Hmong community as well. Their kids do the same thing.
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Claudia 8-29-2006 @ 10:52PM
this is true in the sense that if you speak to a baby in different languages, he/she will pick them up at the same time... my toddler, who now is 2, has been spoken to in English, French and Spanish from day one... I speak the three languages, my husabnd speaks French and English... She does not talk yet as well as one-language speaking girls/boys her age, but she understands perfectly the three languages, her vocabulary includes words in the three languages and she can tell when you switch from one language to another...
We're told that by the time she's 4, she'll be able to speak fluently in the 3 of them, though most likely she'll pick one she prefers to use...
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Catherine 8-30-2006 @ 7:54AM
We only speak English, but I always thought my babies were speaking in another language, accent and all. I think the oldest was speaking in Swedish, the middle one in German, and the youngest in Japanese! LOL
I did have to wonder why my middle son always called his grandfather "Grumpapa" - no-one I have ever known has called him that.
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