Section 2 – How do we learn to understand speech?
Learning to understand speech (never mind learning to talk) is a highly intelligent, complex and abstract process. But your average baby takes it in his or her stride – or shuffle – long before she has reached her first birthday.
Learning names
Her initial interest is almost always awakened by the names of things she encounters. Daddy, mummy, chair, table, window, door, plate, bowl, knife, spoon, wall, ceiling, shoes, trousers, shirt, dress, carpet, fire, stove, cushion, curtain, tree, bush, grass, flower – as well as the names of other family members and pets. Familiarity with these names helps her to make sense of her experience, which is what babies are passionate about doing.
Take the word ‘ladder’. A toddler might come across all sorts of different ladders in the first few years of her life. A toy ladder on top of a toy fire engine. A step ladder her Mum climbs to read the meters. An outside ladder her Dad uses when he is painting the house. Or a rope ladder across a gorge in a picture book – even a ladder in her tights.
The fact that all these different objects are labelled with the same name enables her to abstract the essential features of ‘ladderness’, and construct her own meaning for the word. Most ‘ladders’, she concludes, have two long bars with shorter rungs going crossways between them. You can usually move on a ladder by stepping up, or along, the rungs – not a ladder in your tights, though, which is called by that name just because it resembles other ladders.
And, of course, a small child is doing this for all the names she comes across, not only one or two. Clever stuff, I think you will agree.
Learning verbs
Verbs are like nouns because they name actions or happenings – jumping, running, smiling, climbing, sleeping, listening, being.
In addition, they can assert that a particular action has taken place, or is taking place, or will take place in the future. So they are much more powerful than nouns, they are the engines of every sentence, welding the other words in the sentence together, and enabling it to describe an event: Dad is climbing the ladder.
A baby learns to comprehend verbs in a similar way to nouns – by abstracting the essential features of an action, and investing the word she hears – e.g. ‘climbing’ – with the meaning she herself has formed.
Remembering words
Part and parcel of the whole undertaking is the ability to remember words. No use creating all these brilliant meanings if you can’t remember each particular pattern of sounds which houses each particular meaning. So there has to be a mechanism enabling a child to store the myriads of sound patterns which make up the language she hears.
The brain must record a sort of template for each and every word. Have you noticed that parents instinctively speak quite slowly and clearly when they are talking to their infants, especially if they are saying unfamiliar words? This enables a child to make an accurate recording of the word, clothe it in the meaning abstracted from his or her experience, and then match that recording with the same word when she hears it again. So she understands it straightaway.
You didn’t know your ten month old was doing all that, did you. But she is – she must be – in order to get to grips with hearing meanings in spoken words; and, later, learning to talk.