Beyond Just ‘Ma’ or ‘Da’: How Kids Learn to Speak Like Adults

Anyone who has ever spent time with toddlers has noticed that kids do some very inventive things with speech, such as regularizing irregular verbs ("go-ed," "swimmed") or misunderstanding that "dog" applies to all furry four-legged friends and not just the one at home. It can seem overwhelmingly difficult to imagine the process that underlies how children learn how to speak.

A long history 

The interest in how children acquire language goes back much farther than you might think. The ancient Greek historian Herodotus records what is probably the first child-language experiment performed in antiquity, although the babies' welfare was certainly not the primary motivation. 

Instead, an Egyptian pharaoh set out to prove the superiority of his people by showing that the Egyptian language would emerge spontaneously as the primordial language from babies who were kept away from any type of language exposure. He commanded a local goatherder to take on the role of primary investigator, raising two babies in silence among his herds.

While certainly not so great an experience for the babies, it also turned out not so great for the pharaoh, because their first word was reportedly "bekos," which was not an Egyptian word but a Phrygian word meaning "bread." The Phrygians were another powerful empire in what was at the time western Anatolia.

Though this ancient experiment was not about language acquisition per se, it is often discussed by linguists as support for one of the leading theories about how children learn language so quickly early in life, known as nativism or innatism. In other words, nativism is the idea that children’s ability to speak emerges as a matter of biology, rather than any "learning" like we need for other higher skills such as reading and math. After all, how many people remember being introduced to the underlying grammatical rules of their language before they went to elementary school, and yet most 4-year-olds are very accomplished at talking in complete sentences.

Linguistic landmarks in infancy

Even before they hit the year-old mark, babies have a remarkable ability to communicate with adults by babbling even just a few vowels and consonants. "Ba," "ma," and "da" may not sound like much, but they sure seem to send a clear enough message, like "Get me my bottle!" or "Ma, get over here."

Looking at research on child language acquisition, these early pseudo-words do seem to mean much more than they might appear to on the surface. They represent not simply a name for objects in their vicinity but attempts to converse about what they want those objects to be doing. 

Between 9 and 18 months, with only about a 50 word-...

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