How babies learn language, and what parents can do to help

Anyone who’s witnessed a toddler meltdown knows that youngsters’ communication skills are a work in progress. From the moment they’re born, infants are surrounded by language, but it takes time and effort for them to progress from baby babble to childhood chatter.

We spoke with Dr. Alexis Black, assistant professor in the UBC School of Audiology & Speech Sciences, who shared what parents and caregivers can do to support early language skills, how to get the most out of bedtime reading — and why there’s no reason to feel hurt if a baby’s first word isn’t “Mama” or “Dada.”

When does language learning begin?

It starts before you’re even born. By the third trimester, your auditory systems are working, you hear and respond to sounds, and you’re getting a lot of input from the gestating parent’s voice and voices outside the womb. Even if you’re a non-hearing individual, you’re getting movement and motion that is also associated with language.

We know from studies that unborn babies also have memory and can remember sequences of sounds that they heard in the womb after they’re born. But while there is real learning happening in the womb, there’s little evidence that exposing a fetus to things like Mozart music is helpful. The ambient sounds they’re hearing from the gestating parent communicating with people in their environment is the kind of auditory and language-rich information they can really tune into and learn from.

What can caregivers do to support a child’s early language learning?

Have a rich language environment. Talk and play with your kids, and encourage them to play with friends. It’s important to note that there are big cross-cultural differences in how much adults talk to children, and when and why they talk to children — and everybody learns how to talk, unless, of course, there’s actually something else going on and there’s a problem. The most important thing is for children to feel safe and supported and loved, and therefore free to play and to talk and to communicate with whoever it is that’s communicating with them.

Does reading to kids help?

Yes! Reading to and with kids is very helpful for language, literacy and social development. Studies also show that back-and-forth interactions while you’re reading are helpful. Have conversations while you’re reading, let your kids point to stuff and talk about the stuff that they point to, connect things that you’re reading about to things that have happened in your lives. These are also techniques used in speech and language therapy, because they do seem to help enrich the linguistic experience.

Are there any considerations to raising children in a bilingual or multilingual household?

All the evidence suggests that our brains and bodies are very well adapted to deal with multiple languages, and we need to embrace the message that multilingualism is completely normal; in fact, it’s more common than being monolingual. There are no reasons to think that children find multiple languages confusing or that it holds them back in a typically developing context.

We do know that language learning follows language input. With only so many hours of the day, multilingual children’s language exposure is divided across the different languages they hear. This means their vocabulary in one language might appear smaller compared to a monolingual child of the same age, but if you take their total vocabulary across all languages into account, there’s no delay at all.  They’re really right on track. At the end of the day, you should talk to your kids in the language or languages that you want them to know.

What influences a child’s first word?

There are many things that go into how those words develop. There’s the input — the things they’re hearing really frequently. There are the things that they care about. And there’s also how their bodies are developing. They’re really figuring out how to move their tongues and lips, and every baby is going to have sounds that are easier for them to make than other babies. Don’t be disappointed if it’s not “Mama” or “Dada”; they may simply find it easier to make other sounds like “ba” or “na”.