Baby Talk Critical Review

Social Being Since an Infant

Patricia K. Kuhl wrote an article about child’s language development in an infant called Baby Talk. There, she mentioned about several things about the ability of an infant in learning language: (1) There are specific ages for an infant when they are able to perceive languages, and later distinguish the distinct phonemes of their native language based on the culture they lived on using statistical learning; (2) Social context and activity are important and essential in order to make the infant learn language; (3) The manner of speaking to the infant — parentese, like higher pitch, slower tempo and exaggerated intonation attracts infants more; (4) The biomarkers, brain scientists who study child development, are trying to understand language learning in infants to help identify whether the child develop normally or not, so that infants with disabilities can be treated early.

After reading the article, I found an interesting point: we need to pay attention to psychological things such as social context, manner in speaking to teach the infant. However, why cannot it be just formal strict professional lessons like classroom using advanced technology? To answer these questions, I decided to research more about child’s language development and connect it to us being a human.

We humans are social beings. Everything that happens in the humans’ life needs some social interactions and communications among each other. That is why, we follow our natural instinct as a social being by learning to interact with the others since we are infant. As an infant, we have our limitation as we literally do not know anything about the world. Thus, we try the easiest way to become one with our surroundings (as we are social beings) by imitating our surroundings speaking their language. The interesting question to me is why the infant cannot imitate/learn the language by listening to video or audio recording? As the article has said, only the infants that are lived with live speakers from Taipei learn Chinese. Is imitating their speeches not enough?

The problem is not about imitating the speech to learn the language, but the human interaction that is happening. The first main “quest” that infants need to do is to learn how become social being, and that is by learning the language. Language is only a tool, not the main “quest” itself. Thus, we cannot eliminate the social interaction process in learning language, even if the process is easy: imitating. Humans are indeed imitating each other, but only when they are on the same side — interested or engaged with the others (Morgan, 2015). That is why sometimes the manner of speaking is helpful to make the infant engaged.

“The experience of a young child learning to talk, in fact, resembles the way birds learn song,” says Kuhl (2015) on the article Baby Talk. She also suggests that learning to talk needs to be active and social experience is essential. “Both human and bird babies immerse themselves in listening to their elders, …” Kuhl also implies that as a bird learns from birds, an infant also learns from humans, not computers. A video by Sprouts (2019) states that infants need the motivation to learn through the interaction and relationship with humans. Thus, infants cannot learn language via technology. Talking about interaction and relationship, infants learn not through language lessons, but through the experience they get, for example, learning to communicate by looking at the nonverbal and social behaviours (Gleason & Ratner, 2017). The example is when the Mandarin teacher glances the object while naming it makes it easier for the infant to understand the vocabulary in the article.

To conclude, child’s language development is a part where they are learning to be human. Their main purpose is not learning the language, but to become human that can communicate with each other. That is why, social interaction is important, and we need to pay attention to the psychology of the infant. We are not teaching them to become a robot that can talk, but we raise them to become a human, social being, that can communicate well.

References

Gleason, J., & Ratner, N. (2017). The development of language (9th ed., p. 4). Pearson.

Kuhl, P. (2015). Baby Talk. Scientific American, 313(5), 66–69. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1115-64

Morgan, N. (2015). We Humans Are Social Beings — And Why That Matters For Speakers and Leaders. Forbes. Retrieved 11 May 2021, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/nickmorgan/2015/09/01/we-humans-are-social-beings-and-why-that-matters-for-speakers-and-leaders/?sh=5354ef36abda.

Sprouts. (2019). Language: The First 5 Years of Life of Learning and Development [Video]. Retrieved 11 May 2021, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u49uLLCUlEk.