Professional Documents
Culture Documents
S e p te m b e r/O c to b e r 20 0 9
Why Dont
Babies Talk
Like Adults?
MIND
MATTERS
J U P I T E R I M AG E S
he setting: a nursery. A baby speaks directly to the camera: Look at this. Im a free
man. I go anywhere I want now. He describes his stock-buying activities, but then his
phone interrupts. Relentless! Hang on a second. He answers his phone. Hey, girl,
can I hit you back?
w w w. S c i e nti f i c A m e r i c a n .c o m/M in d
FAST FACTS
Baby Steps
1>>
2>>
3>>
By studying international adoptees of varying ages, researchers found evidence that the stages of language
usage are essential and not dependent on mental development.
59
these strange patterns in child speech. Actually explaining one-word sentences is much harder. Over
the past half a century scientists have settled on two
reasonable possibilities.
First, the mental development hypothesis
states that one-year-olds speak in baby talk because
their immature brains cannot handle adult speech.
Children do not learn to walk until their body is
ready; likewise, they do not speak multiword sentences or use word endings and function words
(Mommy opened the boxes) before their brain
is capable of doing so.
International
adoptees offer
researchers a
chance to study
language learning
in kids with varying
degrees of mental
development.
(The Author)
JOSHUA HARTSHORNE is a graduate student in
psychology at Harvard University. He conducts
language experiments online at the Cognition and
Language Laboratory (http://coglanglab.org).
60
The second theory, the stages of language hypothesis, states that the incremental-step progress
in child speech is a necessary process in language
development. A basketball player cannot perfect his
or her jump shot before learning to both jump and
shoot, and children, similarly, learn to add and then
to multiply never in the reverse order.
In language learning there is also evidence of
such necessary movements toward fluency. For instance, in a 1997 review article cognitive scientists
Elizabeth Bates of the University of California, San
Diego, and Judith C. Goodman of the University of
MissouriColumbia found that studies of young
children consistently show that kids do not usually
begin speaking in two-word sentences until after
they have learned a certain number of words. Until
they have crossed that linguistic threshold, the
word-combination process does not kick in.
The difference between these theories boils
down to this: under the mental development hypothesis, patterns in language learning should depend on a childs level of cognitive development
when he or she starts learning a language. Under the
stages of language hypothesis, however, learning
patterns should not depend on mental development.
This prediction is difficult to test experimentally
because most children learn language at around the
same age and thus at roughly similar stages of
cognitive development.
In 2007 researchers at Harvard University
found an ingenious way around this problem. More
than 20,000 internationally adopted children enter
the U.S. every year. Many of them are no longer exposed to their birth language after arrival, and they
must learn English more or less in the same way in-
S e p te m b e r/O c to b e r 20 0 9
G E T T Y I M AG E S
C O L U M B I A T R I S TA R , C O U R T E S Y O F E V E R E T T C O L L E C T I O N
w w w. S c i e nti f i c A m e r i c a n .c o m/M in d
(Further Reading)
On the Inseparability of Grammar and the Lexicon: Evidence from
61