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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.