Babies Can Learn Words as Early as 10 Months

linguizic writes "According to Scientific American Online: '10 month olds can learn to associate words with objects in their environment when given interesting enough stimuli. A two-year-old can quickly link an object--whether a flashy rattle or a boring latch--to a word. Even a one-year-old can follow a parent's gaze to an object and match it with a word being spoken. But although anecdotal evidence seems to show that babies younger than one year can learn words, it remains unclear whether they are in fact mastering language. Now a new study reveals that 10-month-old infants can link words and objects, but only if the object is already interesting to them.'"

Comments

Re:Baby Sign Language

[Migraineman]

We started Baby Sign with my daughter at about 6 months. My mother was offended, convinced that we were going to retard the child's lingual development. At about 10-months, we started to get coherent responses to queries. It started out with simple concepts like "eat" and "done." Once she realized that she could communicate with sign, the learning and communication grew exponentially. Her lingual skills were delayed slightly, but she went from no verbal communication to full-polysyllabic-sentences almost overnight. The transition was astounding, and her sign vocabulary was well over 150 signs (we couldn't keep up ...)

Don't listen to the buttheads who claim children can't communicate before 12-16 months. Oh yes they can. Many tantrums are a result of frustration because the kid can't verbalize what he wants to communicate. Signing is a whole lot more practical than speaking for someone with limited motor skills.

We've still maintaiined some signs, but not nearly to the level we used to have. It's a wonderful skill for communicating across distances - you don't need to shout across a large room to confirm that your kid is okay after tripping and falling. Also, I credit the early sign exposure for jump-starting my daughter's reading and writing abilities. She's five now, and can read books, can write her own stories (which look like something from Infocom,) and has an amazing vocabulary.

No kidding

[grasshoppa]

As a parent myself, I know my little one knew what I was telling her before she was a year old. She was an early walker, so after I would change her, I would give her the wrapped up diaper and tell her to throw it away.

A complex sentance, loaded with stuff she'd have to figure out on her own, and she did just fine.

So, from the parents of the world, let me just say, "no shit".

I have news for you

[GuloGulo]

Many linguists disagree with Pinker, and he is by no means in the majority with his suppositions.

I've read your posts. You seem to have been convinced by a very good writer that he has the inside track on the truth.

However, to give you some perspective, Noam Chomsky disagrees with him. He's not the only one.

http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~mnkylab/publications/l anguagespeech/EvolLangFac_Cognition.pdf

Pinker did the same thing to you that he does to so many others. He convinced you with flowery porse that disguised the lack of empirical support for his idea of "evolutionary psychology".

Pinker isn't in the majority. How you could be a linguistics student and believe this is beyond me.

I agree. My son has spoken.

[Wokan]

I agree. My wife has been teaching out son sign language and he spoke a complete sentence before he was 8 months old. (It was "I want my mommy" while I was trying to feed him breakfast, much to my chagrin.) We normally ask him about a particular toy or person during playtime and most (80%+) of the time he does identify the correct item or person. (He has 3 siblings and 2 parents to pick from, so random looks would only make him right about 20% of the time.)

And now I'll probably get modded down as some kind of Slashdot infiltrating imposter for claiming to be married and having children. C'est la vie.