From “Ga, Ga, Goo” to “I Love You”- the toddler’s speech development

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Ah, the pleasures of being a grandpa.  You get to see a child develop, but not have to change its diaper.  You get to indulge its passions, but not try to calm it for sleep (either a nap or nighttime).  You get to see it crawl, totter, and walk.  You get to hear the first communications (which sometimes strain credulity as to the exact word uttered).  I,  too, have been indulged in this manner.  My grandson spoke early and relatively clearly. Some of the words were amazing.  His ability to tell a story at the age of one was amazing. But, this is not really about him.

MIT’s Media Lab has a “Speechome” project.  Thy have been chronicling the age at which a child speaks its first 400 words for some time now (first publications were in 2006). They are trying to determine vocabulary growth and how that is influenced by its physical and social environment. The problem has been that the child’s vocabulary changes daily, but scientific observation has occurred at discrete intervals, separated by weeks or months at a time. Amazingly, Speechome has developed techniques to record activities at the child’s home without being obtrusive and following some semblance of privacy rules. It helps that two of the leaders (Drs. Deb Roy and Rupal Patel) were able to start by monitoring the actions of their own infants.

The project’s goals include discerning why certain words are learned and what order, the choice of sentence structure, the time between comprehension and use, among many others.  So, they have been monitoring infants ranging in age from 9 to 24 months, especially in relation to the influence of the caregivers of these children.  Children develop their language skills by connecting their actions to people, things, and their activities.  We also know parents (most of the caregivers) don’t just talk to their children, they tend to emote- they exaggerate the vowels, the loudness, and pitch of their speaking, to help the child begin to converse.  As such, that does influence how and what a child learns to speak.  That means that parents influence how a child learns, which makes the study more difficult.  Speechome has been studying this role of the parent’s prosody (rhythm, stress, and intonation of speech) in language acquisition.

As I stated in the first paragraph, it is amazing to watch a child’s vocabulary explode (the scientific term for this is exponential growth of language capability). They found that the number of new words within the child’s vocabulary grows up to 20 months in age, and then drops off.  But, that does not mean that the child is not learning vocabulary, but has now begin to arrange said words into utterances (they really cannot be termed sentences), which renders the observation of new word use more difficult and less in the forefront of the child’s development.  (Two utterances come to mind from my own grandchild.  “Count, 1,2,3,4,5, floor, uh-oh”, and “Eema (mommy), Saba (grandpa) very silly”.)

The two graphs show the exponential growth in vocabulary by tykes and the relationship between the frequency by which the caregiver states certain words and the usage of those words by the child.  You can follow the MIT Media Lab’s Speechome Project and its publications here.

Left graph: Exponential growth in word usage; the tapering off is when the child combines words into “utterances”  (MIT Media Lab image)

Right graph: Relationship between caregiver’s use of words and the use of same by the toddler.  (MIT Media Lab image)

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