Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
From the brains behind brains on, this is the Moment of Um. Moment of Um comes to you from APM Studios. I'm Anna Goldfield. Um...
I love words. Little words and big words, from bug to behemoth, from dot to dodecahedron. I love descriptive words like incandescent and odiferous. I love onomatopoeic words that sound like the action they're describing. Pow! Zap! Zip! Bling! Splat! My brain is buzzing with syllables and phrases and paragraphs.
But how did all those words get into my noggin in the first place? When do we first start understanding that words are sounds with meaning? We got a question from listener Evie who wondered, "Do babies understand what their family is saying to them?" Don't worry, Evie. I got you. We're going to talk to the person who taught me my first words, my mom. Oh, do babies understand words? That's a very, very interesting question.
And the short answer is yes, babies do understand words, but not until they are about six months of age. My name is Beverly Goldfield and I teach psychology courses at Rhode Island College. I'm also director of the Rhode Island College Infant and Child Lab. And this is where we do research on early language development.
Starting around six months, some of the things that their brain has been able to do and some of the things that the people who talk to them have been doing begin to have an impact and they begin to understand single words in this stream of speech that they've been hearing for months and months and months.
So we know that babies around six months of age, they're not talking yet. So this is just understanding words. They're understanding mommy.
Most of them understand daddy. And they also tend to understand a few food words. So cookie and maybe yogurt or milk or bottle tend to be among those first words understood. And also a few body part words. So some babies might understand toes or hands or feet, those kinds of things.
In general, if you look at babies' early words, like their first 30 words that they understand, they tend to be words that name things that babies can act on.
So, for example, among the first words that name clothing items, babies tend to understand sock and shoes because those are things that they like to pull off. Or maybe hat. They understand words for things in the environment that make noises. So what they are paying attention to are the words that they will learn very early on.
Babies are actually hearing before they're born. So around five or six months prenatally, two or three months before birth, the ears and the brain become able to hear sound. And what babies are hearing, since they're in mom's tummy, is mostly mom's voice talking.
So after two or three months of hearing speech and mom's voice, right after birth, research has shown that babies like to hear speech more than any other sound. And interestingly, many babies pick one thing to sort of focus on. And what about me, mom? So although you were relatively early at talking, you were relatively slow at walking.
So a lot of babies are out there walking at, you know, 10 months, 11 months, 12 months. You really didn't get up to walk until more like 13 or 14 months. But by 14 months, you had a vocabulary of hundreds of words. And eventually the walking caught up. Um, uh,
Babies have brains like sponges. They're constantly soaking up information from the world around them. So the more a baby hears their parents or other family members talking, the more likely they are to understand what words mean, even if they can't join in the conversation yet. Most babies will start talking when they're between 9 and 14 months old. I started at around 9 months with my first word, banana, and I haven't stopped since. Thanks, Mom.
If you liked this episode, take a second to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you feel like branching out, check out the Brains On podcast, where we have a whole episode all about how trees grow. If you have a moment of um question, we'd love to help you answer it. Drop us a line by going to brainson.org slash contact. See you next time and the next day and the next day and every weekday. Until then, um.