Roberta Michnick Golinkoff - How Babies Talk: The Magic and Mystery of Language in the First Three Years of Life

Communicating through language is the crowning achievement of the human species. Dogs cant do it. Whales cant do it. Even our evolutionary cousins, the great apes, cant do it. Yet within every infant lies the potential to learn a language. Equipped with the power of words, every one of us can talk about a future and resurrect a past. With language we can mentally move through time and space unlike any other species.

Through human language we have transformed our planet and launched spacecraft to Pluto. Through well-chosen words a three-year-old can exclaim that she wants the red cup with the giraffe on it, not the blue cup with the elephant. Language enables us to embrace an idea, to share our feelings, to comment on our world, and to understand each others minds. Precisely because language is so pervasive, we fail to realize the remarkable capabilities that we take for granted. Trying to appreciate the complexities of language is somewhat like trying to appreciate the design of your eyeglasses while you are looking through them. With your glasses on, you gain a whole new perspective on the worldbut you never stop to consider how your glasses actually work.

In the past several decades, specialists in the field have made enormous progress in understanding the intricacies of learning to talk. When you realize that you can chat on the phone for hours without ever planning what you are going to say or can generate a sentence that is as long as this one by stringing together a limited set of building blocks like nouns and verbs, you begin to see the vastness of the system that young children have to learn. We have no problem turning a sentence like this one into a question. (Do we?) And it is a commonplace assumption that a word like window can be widely applied to such instances as the stained-glass depictions in a church or the window opened on a computer screen. How do we know when to use the word window? What does window really mean? How do children ever learn to use words correctly?

As we begin to scratch the surface, we see that there is a great deal of extraordinary in the ordinary. The achievements of chess grand masters, musical virtuosos, and Olympic athletes hardly match what children accomplish in language learning by the tender age of three or four years. How do children do it? How do they learn to get their tongues in just the right place to pronounce a word? How do they learn those noun and verb building blocks that allow them to construct sentences? How do they learn the difference between I eat to live and I live to eat? These questions lie at the foundation of the mystery of language development.

Where can the answers to these questions be found? A commonsense approach was taken by our grandmothers. How do children learn language, you ask? Its obvious. Parents teach their children to talk.