On a recent radio broadcast I came across some quotations that might be of some general interest to fellow logalugs - skip this if you like things short'n'sweet, honey.

Transcribed from:
Life As An Infant
Broadcast on BBC Radio 4, Tuesday 26th June 2001


Ms Alex Karmelov-Smith, head of Neuro-cognitive Development Unit at the Institute of Child Health in London:

“In the last 3 months of pregnancy babies are actively processing sound, and amongst the sounds they process are mother’s language – and the language she hears through the amniotic liquid, the baby will hear these. So the babies are born able to distinguish their mother tongue from language sin other language families, so they’ll suck harder on a dummy to hear their mother tongue than say another language. They recognise their mother’s voice at birth (and remember, once the baby is outside the womb the voice is very different to the way it was filtered through the amniotic liquid) so the baby has actually registered something about the abstract qualities of her voice, to recognise them against other females’ at birth. They also pay a great deal of attention to language, and this could be a great deal to do with what they have experienced in the womb, but also the fact that we interact with babies linguistically from the moment they’re born!”

“Early on the baby is picking up on sound patterns, and we know from tests that babies can discriminate between syllables (bah from pah, for instance) very early on (6 months). We also know (and this is an interesting fact) that they watch the mouth while people are speaking….” (demonstrated by orientation towards a screen matching the sound being played from choice of 2 screens)

“Babies of about 17 months know about English word order… before they are producing language themselves… and what you see developing in their production is first words, then putting two words together ( “mummy go!” )… and then gradually they build up strings of three and four words… and the grammar of English builds up gradually.”


James Law, Professor of Language & Communication Science at the City University, London:

“The most important thing a parent can do [to encourage a child’s language development] is to listen to them! Language is essentially a social activity… [children] will not learn language by being stuck in front of the telly!”


Alison Gopnik, Professor of Psychology University of California, Berkeley (also author of ‘How Babies Think’):

“When babies are born they are already making distinctions between all the sounds that are going to be important for all the languages of the world.”

“One of the things that you see with babies from the time that they’re about a month old is that they do something that can best be described as flirting. They don’t actually talk yet, but… it seems as if the babies are already turn-taking, they already have an idea of the structure of conversation, before they have any words. It’s like the aspect of conversation, which isn’t really about ‘I want to tell you what my plans for the day are’ but which is really about ‘I am a person and you’re a person and we are in touch with one another’, that part seems to be what babies learn first, before they have the part about ‘here’s something specific that I want to say, to inform you about what’s going on in the world.’”

“Children seem to be looking for patterns and regularities in the sounds they hear around them from a very early age… actively trying to figure out how they work… picking up ‘that’s what the rule is!’ , sometimes over-applying it.”


Laura-Anne Petito, research scientist at Montreal Neurological Institute:

“We have known for, like, 100 years that the left hemisphere of the brain is primarily engaged in language processing. We also know that very specific parts of grammar is processed in very specific tissue… in this are right near the ear on the left-hand side of the head.”

“By 12 months a child is combining sounds (‘gaba-ba-da-ga’) and… creating a temporal frame [which] is what human words get slotted into… Deaf children exposed to sign language, much to our surprise, also produced a highly selective set of hand movements, and these movements were combined in rhythmic moving and holding (move-hold, move-hold, just like alternating consonant-vowel, consonant-vowel) alternating patterns. Also like a hearing child, they produced these forms and they were entirely meaningless – so they didn’t want anything, it was just kind of the sound play you see in a baby, called crib-speech, it was the hand-play that was ultimately going to be used to construct all the signs in their language. That was what was so exciting… because at 6 months they went through the same developmental stages… jargoning. At 12 months, the deaf child expanded their manual babbling into the whole sentence of a signed language in the same way… jargon sign… controlled by the same brain tissue that controlled speech [in the vocalizing children]. The brain is highly flexible and is sensitive to particular types of patterns, but can grab every morsel of the body that you give it… it will take the hands if given the hands, the tongue if given the tongue [in order to output these patterns]…”

Hope I got the names about right - haven't checked yet [mumble-mumble]