Learning to Speak

Learning to Speak

Have you ever thought about how we learn to speak?  How do we come into this world not being able to understand others, then somehow, we manage to learn the sounds that produce words, then sentences enabling us to communicate our thoughts with those who are around us?

To be able to learn a language you first have to be able to know where each sentences starts and finishes and to be able to group all the noises into words and phrases. It’s believed that infants learn the patterns of sounds that are formed by words. This is how they tell how a word, and when a word, starts and finishes.

Once we have figured out where the words are, we then need to figure out how to produce these different noises. This comes from practice. Infants start off with single words, like ball. They will use body language to assist their communication, such as pointing or simple looking at what they want. Before they can actually say the word in the way we can understand they go through numerous attempts that just sound like random noises. We call this ‘Baby talk’ and it’s simply their attempt at communicating and producing speech.

Scientists have also found that while parents are trying to teach their child how to speak, they change their way of talking so that it is more understandable. The will shorten and simplify their sentences and will put emphasis on certain words in the sentence. E.g. “Is that mummy?” this also helps the infant hear the difference between words.

http://whyfiles.org/058language/baby_talk.html

"Why Do  We Talk" - Documentary SBS.