Adapted from “A Little Book of Language” by David Crystal
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It's really interesting to listen to babies during their first year of life, and try to workout what they are saying. We can learn a lot about language that way.
Now the baby (first few months) cry goes something like this:
W
a
a w
a a
a a w
a a a w
a a a a
a a a a
The pain cry starts off in the high part of the voice with a huge burst of noise, then the next burst is a bit shorter and lower, and the next ones are shorter and lower still. If the baby is picked up and cuddled, the crying stops. If not, the pattern is repeated until someone comes along to comfort it. And if the baby is content? Then the noises are quieter and more relaxed – more like gurgling. They’re sometimes called ‘pleasure cries’.
Now here’s a question. If we couldn’t see the baby, but heard only those cries, would we be able to tell which language it was learning? Do those cries sound English or French or Chinese? The answer is ‘no’. At this age, babies all over the world sound the same. Researchers have done experiments to prove it. They’ve recorded hunger, pain, and pleasure cries from babies in different parts of the world, mixed the recordings up, and then asked listeners to sort them out. ‘Can you tell which is the English baby?’ they asked. No. ‘Or the French one?’ No. ‘Or the Chinese one?’ No. It can’t be done. But one year later, these same babies will definitely sound English or French or Chinese.
Is there such a thing as English cooing and French cooing and Chinese cooing? No. At three months, babies with these language backgrounds still sound exactly the same.
Rhythm is the ‘beat’ a language has. In a language like English, we can hear that beat if we say a sentence out loud, and clap each time we hear a strong sound. In this sentence: “I think it’s time we went to town”, the strong beats are on ‘think’, ‘time’, ‘went’, and ‘town’. And the rhythm of the sentence as a whole is ‘te-tum-te-tum-te-tum-tetum’. Now this sort of rhythm is typical of English. French people don’t speak their language like that. Their speech has a rhythm which is more like ‘rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat’. And Chinese people don’t speak their language like that either. When English people hear Chinese people talking, they often describe the speech as ‘sing-song’.
At around nine months of age, then, babies start to give their utterances a bit of a beat, reflecting the rhythm of the language they’re learning. The utterances of English babies start to sound like ‘te-tum-te-tum’. The utterances of French babies start to sound like ‘rat-a-tat-a-tat’. And the utterances of Chinese babies start to sound like sing-song. Of course, none of their utterances are very lengthy yet. These babies aren’t telling their mum ‘I think it’s time we went to town’. But they are trying out tiny utterances, such as ‘mama’ and ‘dada’, and these sound like real words. The utterances don’t have a clear meaning yet, but they are being pronounced more confidently and consistently. We get the feeling that real language is just around the corner.
This feeling is reinforced by the other feature of language I mentioned a little while ago: intonation. Intonation is the melody or music of a language. It refers to the way the voice rises and falls as we speak. How might we tell someone that it’s raining?
It’s raining, isn’t it! (or ‘innit’, perhaps)
We’re telling the person, so we give our speech a ‘telling’ melody. The pitch-level of our voice falls and we sound as if we know what we’re talking about. We’re making a statement. But now imagine we don’t know if it’s raining or not. We think it might be, so we’re asking someone to check. We can use the same words – but note the question-mark, this time:
It’s raining, isn’t it?
Now we’re asking the person, so we give our speech an ‘asking’ melody. The pitch-level of our voice rises and we sound as if we’re asking a question. So now I can answer the question I asked at the end of Chapter 1. Which bits of their mother tongue do babies learn first? Answer: the rhythm and the intonation. If we mixed up audio-recordings of nine-month-old English, French, and Chinese babies, and asked people to identify where they came from, they could do it. The English-learning babies are beginning to sound English. The French ones are beginning to sound French. And the Chinese ones are beginning to sound Chinese. We can hear a rhythm and an intonation that sound familiar. By the time babies reach their first birthday, they’ve usually begun to develop their intonation patterns, using them to express different notions. There’s an old song which goes ‘It ain’t what you say but the way that you say it’. That’s something that stays with us all our life. We often hear someone say something and think ‘It wasn’t what he said, it was the way he said it that annoyed me’. As we’ll see in a later chapter, tone of voice is a very important way of conveying meaning. And babies start using tones of voice to do this at around one year of age.
I have a recording of one of my children at around this age. He heard footsteps on the path outside and he said ‘dada’ with a high questioning intonation: it meant ‘is that daddy?’ Then I walked into the room, and he said ‘dada’, with a strong falling intonation – it meant ‘Yes it is daddy’. Then he put out his arms and said ‘dada’ with an appealing intonation – it meant ‘Pick me up, daddy’. Later, when he’d learned how to string words together, he would be able to say properly: ‘Is that daddy?’, ‘Yes it is daddy’, ‘Pick me up, daddy!’ A question, a statement, and a command. But he couldn’t string words together at 12 months, because he only had one: ‘dada’. When did he learn ‘dada’? When do children learn their magical ‘first word’? And when do they start stringing words together to make sentences? That’s the next stage in the amazing process of language acquisition.
Question:
Which bits of their mother tongue do babies learn first?
ANSWER:
The rhythm and the intonation.
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