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March 13 - May 11, 2022
They learn language when they are born into cultures that value conversation with infants. They also learn in cultures where parents don’t talk to their infants.
While boys do lag behind girls by a few months, they soon catch up. Since Tommy is a second child, his mother speaks and reads to him less than she did to her firstborn. This is probably a factor in his slower development as well.
David is in his high chair eating Cheerios. He’s just finished with his turkey and sweet potatoes, and is wearing his dinner proudly on his face and arms. The floor around him shows the carnage of the “battle,” since he is learning to feed himself.
Toddlers absplutely leave carnage in their wake
The second hurdle David faces is figuring out what Dada means. It could refer to Daddy’s hair or to Daddy’s clothes or to the peculiar way Daddy walks. Given how many babies call all males “Dada” for several months, we can see that this is no mean feat. Finally, David has to figure out just how to arrange his mouth and tongue to utter the word. Using your mouth is like playing a complex instrument. If you miss the mark—even by a little bit—you say an entirely different word.
I am so used to the verb suck meaning "is bad" lmap
Other than at nap time, quiet rooms in which children are seen and not heard is a cause for concern.
Babies growing up in an environment where no one talks to them or plays with them are left with unseen scars. These children may never have the brain capacity to develop normally. When the desperate parents of these children were interviewed, they said that they never knew about the consequences of early profound deprivation.
Current research, though, suggests that the ability to distinguish between various cries is a myth. Adults can distinguish the level of distress in a particular cry, but are rarely correct at guessing what the cry means.
Babies have to understand a good deal more about the individuals who populate their world before they are capable—around 13 months—of using an abbreviated, “fake” cry for the purpose of getting attention. For this reason it is foolish to assume that babies cry to spite us or to annoy us. Babies cry simply because they feel bad (for whatever reason), and not because they think crying will lead to relief.
The results showed that Samantha and other newborns wanted to hear their mother’s voice, even when it was paired with a pleasant-sounding female alternative. Samantha could tell the difference and preferred her mother’s voice. Clearly, she had learned something in utero about the quality of her mother’s voice.
I wonder if testosterone-affected voices of gestational parents who are trans are more resonant to a fetus
And most mothers’ voices have a higher pitch, allowing them to be more clearly heard against the low and intense sounds in the baby’s uterine environment. This may be one of the first ways in which babies find their mothers when they are born.
What If trans gestational parent though? Or contralto mom?
Babies born to deaf parents haven’t been given much verbal stimulation as fetuses.
Not true. Deaf people have to function among hearing people and frequently use speech in those situations.
Although the higher-pitched sounds of female voices and particularly mothers’ voices are preferred, newborns would still rather hear a male voice than silence.
I want to see research on this with pregnant people with deep or T affected voices. And if they're defining the gender of a voice by pitch or by factors like prosody or timbre. A low pitched voice can be read as female 100% of the time if the speaker's prosody is typical of women. A high voice with prosody typical of men will also be gendered as male. We can't extrapolate that babies prefer high voices and female voices from data featuring only gestational parents with voices unaffected by T of typical pitch and prosody
French newborns can also tell the difference between Japanese and English, languages they rarely hear. How do they do this? The rhythmic properties of these languages differ greatly, and babies rely on rhythm, not on the sounds, to distinguish one language from another.
That's how I recognize Polish as Polish too. I don't know enough words to rely on recognizing the ten words I do know.
By eight to ten months of age babies will focus on the sounds that are used in their own language, and the ability to recognize the sounds of other languages will fade away.
Along these same lines, should you hire that wonderful Hispanic or Chinese or Korean nanny you just interviewed? Will it hurt your baby to have him exposed to another language from such an early age? To the contrary, it will enhance the baby’s language and cognitive development to have access to another language.
Oof this sentence is assuming the reader is neither of those ethnicities and doesn't work as a nanny or housekeeper. This is also implying that people of those ethnicities who are working class know their ancestral language. If I were hiring someone to watch my kids, I'm not going to assign them a teaching role without their consent. Bilingual people don't exist to benefit other people's kids. And because of linguistic discrimination I am assuming that many bilingual nannies won't speak lamguages other than English around their charges even if their other language is stronger.
What they found shocked the scientific community. Nine-minute-old babies who had never before seen a face preferred to look at the drawing of the face that was anatomically correct.
I'm curious about the limits of what a baby can recognize as a face and if a photo of a person with an atypical face would still be seen as a face. Would wearing a nasal cannula prevent a newborn from classifying it as a face? What about a face without one eye or without a nose [e.g. nostrils without that structure as a congenital trait] or with the mouth atypically angled or with a harelip? I'd want to test minutes-old newborns.
They find that newborns prefer to look at their mother’s face over that of another female.
What about trans gestational parents? Does this pattern hold for their newborns? What makes a face female here
Researchers suggest that newborns can quickly identify their mothers through the sound of their voice and through the smell of their milk. With these clear identifiers in hand, the baby seems to “lock on” to the particular features of the mother’s face. They learn the visual association between face and their mother quickly because it is to their advantage to know what she looks like.
Once they have a starting point, babies quickly become expert in identifying faces or even languages. For example, studies have shown that newborns first look at the edges of faces and then come to look at the eyes to identify others when they are but five weeks old.
So how is this different in people with prosopagnosia
They also know to look at our eyes most of the time when we are talking. They seem to know intuitively that the eyes are windows to the soul and to the meaning the speaker conveys. Finally, babies actually look more at our faces when we are talking than when we are not!
How does this process differ for people with prosopagnosia
but instead of starting to coo and talk, present the baby with a “still face” that shows no emotion. Research suggests that the baby will vocalize at you and try to get you socially engaged. When you fail to respond, babies will then turn away from you and avert their gaze if you try to maintain eye contact. To prove to yourself that the baby found your still, unresponsive face disturbing, or at least unpleasant, come back in a few moments and go through your usual routine with the baby.
I think babies can recognize the subtler changes of a face that is less expressive like mine if that's typical of a caregiver.
But at this point we have shown only babies that look at pictures of faces in silence and listen to voices delivered from loudspeakers with no mouths in view. Must the infant learn to put the two sources of information together? What enables infants to connect the mouth and the talk that comes from it?
I want to know the mechanism of sensory integration and also how deaf, blind and deafblind babies differ
We fidget in our seats when we see a dubbed movie and the language is delivered even a fraction of a second after the mouth moves.
I might be unable to figure out the words here because mouth shape is a thing I can't tune out if the sounds aren't associated w the shape I see. I'd need to close my eyes.
Acts of imitation show the budding “intersubjectivity,” or two-way engagement, of infants and their caregivers. At an implicit level, acts of imitation seem to show that infants assume that “no man is an island,” and that they are related directly to the other humans in their environment.
Baby talk refers to the alterations we make in our language when we speak to infants, foreigners, and even to pets and plants.
I would hope that it's not a thing to speak to a grown adult like to your dog due to a language barrier? I know that anglophones will speak loud and slow unless they know better. Or maybe this just means using short words and repeating the other person?
To a baby we say, “Gooood mooooorrrrning” while to an adult we would say simply, “Good morning.” As the example shows, we greatly lengthen our vowels and produce exaggerated pitch swings. We also use shorter sentences and place longer, clearer pauses between utterances.
Recall that scientists have discovered that babies attend to the rhythms of speech. This is one of the reasons why baby talk, with its singsong properties, is so attractive to babies. Try saying something rotten to the baby in your nicest baby talk, something like “You were so bad today!” Then try to say something kind in a rotten voice, such as “You were so good today!” You will get a chance to see the baby respond to the cadence of the speech and not the message.
I don't want to scold a baby and upset them for science lol
Without it—as in the extreme conditions found in orphanages in poor countries—babies do not do as well. Articles about such adopted babies report that they have behavioral and academic problems as toddlers and beyond.
I wish this was expressed more sensitively and less "they gave a perfectly good child a horrible impedient." And I highly doubt that all American orphanages are adequately staffed so that every child's emotional needs are met
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While stimulation in general is important for development, linguistic stimulation—whether audible or visible sign language—is crucial for language development.
Laura Bridgman and Helen Keller though
Not only can babies see and hear (not a known fact until the late 1950s!), newborns are analyzing and remembering the experiences they have.
I feel like this is a reflection of rigid gender roles impeding science and how caregivers as mostly women without research jobs were excluded from being considered sources of knowledge. Caregivers knew but scientists didn't count that
Just as hearing babies produce vocalizations that sound like language but are meaningless, deaf babies produce hand shapes that look like sign language but convey no meaning.
We talk in a high-pitched, singsong way that seems to grab the infant’s attention. This “baby talk” is not only used by hearing parents, but by deaf parents who use sign language as well.
What's the babytalk version of signing look like? I need to know
The technical name for this kind of babbling is “variegated,” since the parts of any given babble vary.
Babies who can’t babble (like Jenny) or hear themselves babble (like Heidi) lose out on important practice in being able to manipulate these factors to suit their communicative needs.
I am uncomfortable with the suggestion that the deaf child is lacking something. And the suggestion that the other child is unable to communicate inmeaningful ways without speech
Although babies can see at birth, their visual acuity is only about 20-200.
Yet from having heard lots of speech addressed to them, babies expect to hear pauses and voices going down at certain places. In other words, babies during this period (four to eight months) understand the way language sounds.
I'm curious if there's anything different when a parent stutters. Does the baby then have more skill at determining natural pauses or is there a delay ?
After all, you probably know from experience that even if you are actively involved in a conversation at a party, you can hear your own name if you are being discussed in another conversation.
Not me lol
Names are arbitrarily linked to what they stand for. We can’t rely on the way a word sounds to help us figure out its meaning.
These studies also show that hearing one’s own vocalizations is critical for normal language development.
How can you say this unless you believe that signed languages don't count? This is only true for spoken language. Deaf people do learn language without delays if exposed to signed language by deaf parents and catch up to peers even if their hearing parents didn't learn until later
Herein lies a clue for what parents can do to promote language learning. Make sure your baby can hear.
Again this doesn't apply to signed language
What would it be like to have thoughts, feelings, observations, and desires, and be unable to communicate them to other people? Yet, from observing others, you knew that there was a way that people got their ideas across to each other. This passage describes a 27-year-old man who was born deaf and never given an opportunity to learn sign language or lip reading until he met Susan Schaller, a teacher of American Sign Language.
The hallmarks of “intentional communication” include many of the things Angela did—making eye contact, waiting for a response, and persevering in the face of initial failure. Only within the past week has Angela begun using her “eh eh eh” vocalization consistently in situations when she wants something. She also adds to or changes her signals when she doesn’t meet immediately with success.
I wonder how much of the language delay in certain autistic people is due to caregivers expecting eye contact and not looking for other signals. If eye contact is uncomfortable, why would I try to use it for communication?
The communication that goes on before this time in such situations depends upon the mind-reading skills of the parent or caregiver. At eleven months Angela’s behavior still requires that the adult make inferences,
If, like Irving, they vocalized and made eye contact with their moms, we decided that they were communicating on purpose, with the intention of contacting mom to help them out. If they only jumped up and down and whined or grabbed her arm with no eye contact, we knew that they hadn’t yet figured out that their vocalizations and eye contact could set their moms into motion on their behalf.
I'm curious about blind babies now
How does an understanding of cause and effect relate to early communication? Our original hunch was that only babies who understood cause and effect would be able to use their vocalizations with the intention of contacting their moms. Babies who weren’t yet using vocalizations along with eye gaze probably did not “get” the causal connection between communication and making things happen. We were stunned at how clearly the results came out. Every child who used vocalizations with intention (that is, with eye contact to the parent) was also capable of the highest level of causal reasoning in the
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How would this be done differently with blind babies? Blind people certainly learn cause an effect without eye contact, and blind parents don't make eye contact. I am seeing weaknesses in this paradigm that are potentially related to eugenics ideas of deaf parents and blind parents and speech disabled parents as unfit.
Babies do not communicate, or later talk, simply to get what they want. They communicate and talk because they want to share what’s on their mind.
Jordan was riding on his wooden giraffe on the porch. He bumped the back of his head on a chair as he got off the giraffe. He kept touching the back of his head and vocalizing, “mmmm.” I didn’t know what he meant. Then he touched the back of his head and the chair while still vocalizing, “mmmm” and looking at me. Finally, I figured out that he wanted me to say, “Oh, Jordan hit his head on the chair!” Once I did this he was happy.
Babies start to communicate and then to talk because they want us to understand what they are thinking. Babies want to create a “meeting of minds.”
Second, babies become sensitive not only to the types of sounds but also to the possible order of sounds in their native language. Polish words, for example, can start with “kto” while English words cannot.
