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!