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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.'"
From the Slashdot: .A two-year-old can quickly link an
object.... Yeah, but at what age can a baby levarage
development patterns? No baby is going to be much use until he
(she) knows the difference between a Singleton and a Factory.
I don't find this surprising at all. My friend's daughter started learning sign language before 10 months. At her first birthday she constructed a novel and meaningful sentence in sign. She, apparently, was tired and overstimulated and started telling people to "Please bye-bye."
Anyway, at or about 10 months she could request several of her favorite foods, and was pretty disciplined about saying please and thank you! She could also identify a helicopter by its sound and give her variation on the sign for helicopter.
-Peter
William Sidis could read at 18 months, and taught himself Latin at 3, Greek at 4, and had written a treatise on anatomy at 5. He had written 4 books and knew 8 languages by age 8, and when he entered Harvard at 11, he was lecturing auditoriums of mathematicians.
But surely it's better to watch Barney, Sesame Street, and Blue's Clues until you're at least 14, so as to grow up to become a well-rounded American.
Seriously, do these people have kids themselves?
My son is 18 months. He's got a vocabulary somewhere around 50 words and strings together short sentences. "I got out" was the first sentence we heard him say, maybe two months ago.
At 10 months, he had actually named his two favorite toys (Gah and Meh) and would look up if you said "light". If you said "tractor" he would want to go outside, because that's where the tractor is at his grandfather's house. He wasn't talking then (he barely is now) but it was clear that he understood words.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
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.
My mother is a doula (works with women in more of a supportive mental sense than a medical sense during pregancy, childbirth, and afterwards) who is doing a class on sign language for mothers to be or recent mothers.
According to her (with about 15 years of experience under her belt as a doula, and "speaks" fluent sign language), babies can learn basic sign language before they can talk, and that teaching them sign language will enhance their mental capabilities (speak earlier, read earlier, higher IQ). She's listed off studies to back this, though I've never checked into them myself.
However, I don't doubt it. After all, we can teach monkeys to communicate via sign language. While certainly not dumb animals, they don't have the mental capabilities of humans (do monkeys have soap operas? There you go), so it shouldn't come as a surprise that we can teach humans sign language at an early age.
I grew up in a medium sized family with lots of brothers, a sister, cousins, nieces and nephews so dealing with kids is normal. Unfortunately as an adult I am always amazed at how clueless many of my peers are when it comes to being parents. I have co-workers who have no idea that most children talk early if their parents encourage them to communicate, or learn to crawl earlier if you play tug-of-war, or walk if you support them by letting them hold you fingers. Watching my 12 month olds outclass 18 months olds is priceless. Its not the kids who are behind, it is the parents.
My daughter was using sign language at 8 months, and by 9 months old, she was becoming a voracious inquisitor. If she saw something she didn't have a sign for, she asked (she made up her own signs for this interaction). If we didn't have a sign for it, she made up her own. By 10 months old, she knew around a dozen signs for colors alone, several dozen for toys and environmental objects and phenomena (hot, cold, pain, tree, rock, rainbow, rain, clouds, sun, moon, etc.), a dozen animals (at least!) and of course, the necessities (milk, juice, water, diaper change, food - cereal, fruit, etc) She also began making up signs on her own, sometimes without telling us until it was time to guess. That made things very interesting at times, but quite fun. By 14 months, she had well over 120 signs. And no, I don't think this is exceptional (though I do think my daughter is :), it's just a result of constant interaction without any pressure to advance faster than she wished.
For each sign she knew, she certainly recognized the spoken word associated and could demonstrate on verbal interaction without the object being present. She just focused more on the meaning than on teaching her mouth to make the sounds come out right.
So, I don't think the scientists are getting the whole picture when they restrict their research to actual verbal language. Studies have shown (both formal and informal, but don't ask me for the links - find them yourself if you're that interested) that children are intellectually capable of beginning their mastery of language much earlier than 10 months. The problem is that most people (scientists and non-scientists alike) forget that a physical inability to form words doesn't mean an intellectual inability to understand them.
Personally, and I have no evidence to support this, anecdotal or otherwise, I think babies begin linking sound to meaning as soon as they can visually focus on their parents, and hear their voices. Voice has been suggested as a major factor in bonding between mother and child, and I think there was a study done about this some time ago. There's probably a lot more physiological detail here that I'm certainly not qualified to expand on, but right or wrong, that's my opinion for the time being.
The only trick with sign language is in realizing that babies will use their mouths for getting food in and tasting things - which doesn't really require much oral dexterity, but they use their hands and fingers a lot more when pulling ears, noses, hair, etc. and when poking eyes and grabbing things to put into their mouths. They learn hand dexterity more quickly than they learn how to use their tongue - after all they can see what they're doing wrong with their hands and learn from it. Even so, they don't get signs as precise as an adult would, but they get them close enough for a parent - or anyone communicating with them regularly - to understand them perfectly. Some people have expressed concerns that using sign language will delay verbal language use, and this appears to be true in a small percentage of cases, but the only time I've ever seen it is when there were other issues with hearing that weren't caught early enough.
After our experience with sign language the first time around, we enthusiastically recommend it to anyone and everyone we come across with a small infant (at least those that stand still long enough to listen), and we plan to introduce it even earlier with our next child, coming later this year.
The naturally gifted people can have a harder time making the transition than the hard workers, but it's not unsurmountable. Mainly, I've noticed that the gifted often have trouble figuring out what they want to do. (When my brother took the ACTs, he scored 33-35 on every section and the area where it recommended areas of study translated those even results to "You have no particular talent in any area.") Often, they're the ones who spend years in an undeclared major, or switch frequently. Or, more sadly, they lock themselves in for four years of a degree, then realize it wasn't what they wanted.
The other big problem for gifted people is adjusting to difficulty. You can see this some with bright kids who go to college, realizing that they've gone from being the big fish in a small pond to being a midsize fish in an even bigger pond. And then, there are some who still breeze through college without effort. When they're confronted with a situation which requires them to buckle down, they may not find they have the skills for it whether it's holding down their job or maintaining a marriage.
My feeling is that what's important for bright kids, at any level, is to keep learning no matter how hard the teachers work to prevent it, and to never settle for just coasting by when you know you can do better.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.