Learning to Speak

When I was pregnant with my firstborn daughter I stumbled upon an article describing the Infant Language Project at the University of Delaware. I had dabbled in anthropological linguistics in graduate school - working for a year as the assistant in the newly opened Native American Languages collection of the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History (now the Sam Noble Museum) - and my husband received his master's degree in computational linguistics from Indiana University (essentially, figuring out how to "teach" computers to understand and use normal human languages) - so the study of how and why humans learned (and learn) to speak was of great interest to both of us.

Daughter - aged 2 - Exploring Language
Dressed in Signing Time DVD and
UD Infant Language Project
T-Shirt

We signed our unborn baby up as a research subject right away. Three or four times a year for six years my daughter - and after her, my son - would play games or watch videos or complete puzzles designed to track, examine and, hopefully, one-day, explain the miracle that is the development of this spectacularly mundane and essentially human gift of language.

Any parent can tell you that watching a child develop language is amazing.  They babble meaningless babbles that begin to take on the shape and structure of language - without the meaning - until, delightfully, meaning connects - "Da" or "Baba" or "Agu" becomes not just a sound but a signal for "Daddy" or "Grandma" or  "Water".  And it happens fast - one word, ten words, 50, 100. My daughter, who is 6 years old, probably knows something in the range of 24,000 words and uses about 2000 of those words regularly and comfortably. It is not rare that my son or daughter will use a word, correctly I should add, that I cannot fathom how they came to know. "How do you know that?" I ask them. But they cannot tell me. No-one can tell me.

Language is amazing!

But in the middle of all the amazing  - in the middle of the learning and the joy - all the speaking and shouting and singing and expressing - we grown ups start doing something important, but also dangerous: We start fixing. We start bounding. A gentle shush in church or at a movie, or when someone else is speaking. A nudge toward a better pronunciation or proscribed grammar. "Not 'done', dear, 'did'." And then we worry about propriety, "We don't use that word." "That word is bad!" And then we, the grown ups, just don't have time for all the language flowing at us - all the enthusiastic storytelling and event reporting and arguments that novice speakers, there tongues so newly loosened, cannot seem to stop pouring forth. "BE QUIET!" We shout. And, grudgingly and briefly, silence reigns.

This pruning is necessary. A great communicator has learned to use words and silence, to modulate their tone, topic and vocabulary for the audience at hand.  What happens, though, when a child grows up to believe that words - especially their own words - aren't beautiful and powerful and valuable, but risky and useless and unwanted? What happens when a voice goes silent?

Stay tuned to find out.