Learning To Talk — Accentricity

Transcription by Aileen Marshall: contact her at aileentranscribes@gmail.com.

Sadie: This is an episode about tiny people, which is entirely suitable for tiny people to listen to, with none of the usual swear words or anything like that. Well, there’s kind of half a swear word but it’s said by accident by a two-year-old, so I don’t think it really counts.

This is Accentricity, a podcast where I examine the eccentricities of language and identity. This is Episode 4: Learning to Talk. In this episode I’ll be asking how babies learn how to talk, how they go from little howling machines to little sentence builders in the space of only about three years. In this particular episode, I’ll be focusing on kids who are picking up spoken language and who are moving towards communicating in the same kind of way as I am now. Of course, kids are much more diverse than this. Not everyone learns to talk, and some people develop communication strategies which involve single words or sounds, rather than phrases or sentences. Some people learn to speak using sign languages and in these cases the story is in some way similar to this one and in other ways quite different. This episode is just about one of the many ways of growing up and learning language. I hope to visit some of the other ways in later episodes.

[baby crying]

Baby Harris is two months old. He’s never said a word. Never said something stupid at a party and regretted it the next day. Never accidentally called someone by the wrong name. Never told someone he loves them. He can’t talk yet but that doesn’t mean he isn’t working on it. Here’s his mum Angie telling me about his best efforts:

Angie: That’s the other thing he’s been doing in the past two weeks, is just so many more noises. Like now he has a little giggle when he laughs or when he smiles. He definitely has different noises for when he’s grumpy, and different noises for when he’s just happy or when he’s just talking to himself. Or when he’s trying to -- he’s looking at your mouth a lot, so it looks like he -- and he says things basically, almost like he’s trying to talk because he’s copying you, basically. He does that a lot more. Lots of noises now. Not just -- he used to just grunt all the time; he still does. [baby crying] He’s still just crabby. You going to be super crabby today?

Sadie: He might be tiny but already he’s able to communicate some of his needs to his dad and mum.

I’ve heard about babies having different cries for when they’re hungry or when they’re sad -

Angie: Yes. There’s a pain cry. There’s a kind of fake half-assed cry that he does.

Sadie: A fake cry?

Angie: Yeah, when he’s just like “urgh” and then his little face scrunches up and you know that cry’s not going anywhere.

Sadie: Is that just to get attention?

Angie: I think so, yeah. It’s like he’s not really trying. You know he’s not really going to belt it out but he just kind of wants a little bit -- or he’s just not sure what he wants. Maybe he’s actually happy or something.

Sadie: His little baby brain is absorbing all of the chat going on around him and he’s starting to work out how to use the apparatus that he’ll later be using to talk. But to be honest, his chat isn’t up to much yet.

[baby noises]

At eight months old, Mila is a little bit further along in her linguistic development. She’s learned some vowels and she’s working on her consonants. She’s at what we call the babbling stage. I went to visit her and her mum Nichola.

Nichola: It’s funny cause the other day she started making new noises, so she’s been making “g” sounds lately. That’s her new thing. She’ll kind of gurgle away to herself. It used to just be like ma-ma--ma-ma-mam and da-da-dad, and then bu-bu-buh. It was kind of just one tone, and then it started -- she started having tonnes of inflections --

Sadie: Ah like singing?

Nichola: Yeah, yeah. And chatting. Like chatty kind of tones. It was cool. It’s very cool.

Sadie: That’s really cool.

Nichola: And she’ll fall asleep and wake up and have different chat than she’s ever had before.

Sadie: So, she’s developing so fast that she will have different chat from day to day? Wow.

Nichola: Yes, it’s so weird. It’s so weird.

Sadie: At the stage Mila’s at, the noises she’s making are just practice noises. They’re not yet connected to things in the world. They’re also interestingly not language specific so babies all over the world will try out the same consonants, saying gaga and baba and mama, regardless of what languages they’re hearing around them.

Nichola: When she’s like really unhappy and wants me to come and get her, at night when she’s on her own, she kind of goes goyle, goyle, goyle, goyle, goyle, goyle, goyle. Like one of those little weird shaky things, you know you had when you were a kid.

Sadie: Mila doesn’t yet have the words to say things like “hey, I’m hungry. Can you feed me please?” or “hey, I would like some attention so could you please look at me right now?” but she is able to communicate things vocally.

Does she make any noises that you know what they mean even though -- because she’s not said a recognisable first word, right?

Nichola: Nah, not really.

Sadie: But do you understand sometimes what she’s trying to say?

Nichola: Yeah, if you’re not looking at her -- [baby noise] that’s it. She’ll make that noise for you to look at her. So she kind of goes “ugh”.

Sadie: It works as well, doesn’t it? I looked straight at you.

Nichola: You’re clever.

Sadie: Even at the tender age of eight months, Mila has a lot of linguistic skills, but there’s a big step she hasn’t got yet. She hasn’t yet learned to link sounds to things in the world. She’s picking up new sounds all the time, but her sounds don’t yet have semantic meaning. That’ll come a bit later.

Hi Connie.

Connie: Hi

Sadie: Connie is one year old. She’s taken that next big step and started to link sound and meaning. She’s taken the consonants she learned when she was Mila’s age and she’s started to put them together in to what we linguists call words. Well, sort of. Her words aren’t quite the same as adult words yet but the people who spend the most time with her do understand what she means at least some of the time. I went to visit her at her gran Sheila’s house where I also met her mum, Kat, and her dad, Andy.

Connie: [baby sounds] Num-num.

Sadie: Num-num.

Kat: You showing off your num-nums?

Sadie: Does num-num mean food and eating?

Kat: Yeah --

Andy: I think it means she’s hungry and also --

Sadie: I’m hungry.

Kat: -- She’s enjoying it.

Andy: -- enjoying something as well

Sadie: Ok, yeah. It’s a positive reinforcement thing. Like well-done family. You can make more of that.

Kat: Give me these again.

Sadie: Connie’s kind-of-words are what’s often called proto-language. They’re approximations of grown-up words which carry semantic meaning, at least between the baby and their care givers, if not between the baby and the rest of the world. At Connie’s stage, kids have a limited repertoire of sort of words, so they often use a single word to stand in for a range of meanings. This is called semantic overextension. For Connie, num-num expresses a range of thoughts and ideas, all related to the topic of food.

Parents often go a bit crazy the first time their baby says mama or dada but actually babies usually make these sounds before they know what they mean. They’re sounds that babies experiment with during the babbling phase before they have any link to semantic meaning. So when they’re saying mama or dada, they don’t necessarily mean mother and father.

Kat: But she’s been saying mama and dada since she was really young, but she definitely didn’t know what it was.

Sadie: Right, yeah.

Kat: And then for a long time we were both dada.

Sadie: First words are a big deal for parents. They represent a boundary crossing, when babies move from their baby language world into adult language world, but by the time the first word comes, the kid has already laid all of the groundwork. They’ve learned their vowels and consonants, they’ve worked out how to connect sounds to things, and they already understand loads of what their parents are saying. The first word is when they get all the glory but it’s a bit like a graduation ceremony.

First words tend to be certain sorts of words. They’re often nouns, things a baby can point to or see. They tend to be things that are important to the baby’s life and that can be picked up and easily handled. So your baby’s first word is unlikely to be something like anguish but occasionally you do get some weird ones.

This is Connie’s mum, Kat, talking about the first words in their family.

Kat: My mum still insists that Martin’s first words, or maybe Joanne’s, I can’t -- see if I get it wrong but -- my Granny used to have a candle in her living room of Pope John Paul, and every time you’d walk about and she’d go, in a proper Irish accent, “Pope John Paul. Pope John Paul.” And one of them, to be fair, their -- maybe not their first, one of their very first noises was “Pope John Paul”, but they couldn’t say it properly, so it was “Puda Paul”.

Sadie: That’s hilarious.

Kat: It must have been Martin because I was about six and I remember being like you weird, weird child. Like that can’t be normal.

Sadie: Martha is one and a half. She has grown up words and lots of them. Right now, she’s picking up new words really, really rapidly. Some researchers talk about kids going through what they call a vocabulary spurt around about their first birthday. For some parents it feels like their kid has new words every single day.

Jennie: Her favourite word is woman which I think is hilarious. Martha? Martha? Are you going to say the word nipple?

Euan: Yeah, she likes nipple.

Sadie: Nipple!

Euan: She was on my -- I had my t-shirt off and she was on my chest and she was just grabbing it. She gave me a nipple gripple. I was like “ahh, my nipple” and she was like “nipple.”

Jennie: And now she just says it all the time.

Martha: Nipple.

Euan: Yeah, nipple!

Sadie: Martha’s also learned to stick words together which is very useful when you want to say something like more yoghurt or no bed. She can now be more specific about what she wants. Not just more, but more yoghurt. Not just no, but no bed. Most kids start sticking words together once they have a vocabulary of about 50 words.

Euan: Crumbs, okay.

Martha: No!

Sadie: Is she allowed another?

Euan: One more Martha, okay?

Martha: One mega more.

Euan: One more.

Sadie: One mega more?

Euan: One mega more. That one, okay? And then we’ll maybe put them over here for a little while.

Sadie: Along with her other new words, Martha’s learned the word no. It’s a very important word for communication and one that’s really popular with the one- to two-year-old demographic.

What’s it like being a baby?

Martha: No. No.

Jennie: Do you even know you’re a baby?

Martha: No.

Euan: You think everyone else is a baby apart from you Martha, don’t you?

Jennie: Do you?

Martha: No.

Sadie: Martha can say lots of recognisable words. She can join them together and she can even have the beginnings of a conversation, but she isn’t all of the way there yet.

Martha: [incomprehensible baby sounds]

Jennie: Mm-hmm.

Sadie: Did you understand that?

Jennie: No. Just agreeing.

Sadie: We often imagine that parents teach their kids to talk but we never sit down with our kids and say, “well my boy, to make a ‘t’ sound, we block the air flow coming from our lungs by placing the tip of the tongue behind the teeth for just a moment and then we release the air in a burst to create the sound.” Kids really have to work that out for themselves. Largely by trial and error.

Martha: Seep. Seep.

Sadie: Seep. Where’s a seep?

Jennie: A sleep.

Sadie: Oh, asleep!

A lot of grown-up sounds are difficult for kids to make and it takes a while for them to work out how to make them with their wee junior vocal tracts. The harder sounds like “ruh”, often don’t get sorted out until long after a kid’s in school. Until then, they have to find strategies to get by. These include simplifying consonant clusters, so that the word sleep becomes seep, deleting weak syllables, so that banana becomes nana.

Martha: Nana.

Jennie: Banana, yes. What else can you see?

Sadie: And substituting hard sounds for easy ones.

Martha: Hog.

Sadie: So that frog becomes hog.

Say hello Kira.

Kira: Hello Kira.

Sadie: Kira is two and a half. She’s learning new words all the time. I went round to visit her and her mum Joanna.

What’s this called Kira? Do you remember the word for it?

Kira: Red.

Sadie: That’s red but what’s the thing it’s on?

Joanna: A…? What’s it called?

Kira: Beega!

Joanna: It’s called an a…

Kira: Ass!

Joanna: Ass! An abacus!

Kira: No, abig-dus.

Sadie: Abacus. That’s it.

Kira: No, abig-dus.

Sadie: Abigidus.

Kira: No.

Sadie: She can do all kind of things with language now. She can politely make requests.

That’s a recorder.

Kira: Please press it.

Sadie: Please press it?

She can ask questions.

Kira: Where’s my butterfly?

Sadie: Of course, she hasn’t yet got everything worked out. She still struggles to make herself understood sometimes.

Kira: Mummy, where’s my gargen?

Joanna: Where’s your garden?

Kira: Where’s my gargen?

Joanna: We don’t have a garden.

Kira: Where’s my….?

Joanna: Oh, your dragon. Sorry baby.

Sadie: You can hear Kira’s frustration here. It’s because at her stage, her perception is better than her production. She can absolutely hear that her mum is saying garden and that’s not right, but she can’t quite work out how to make the sound of the word dragon so that her mum can understand it.

Kira’s at what’s often called the telegraphic stage, so called because her grammar is a bit like a telegram. Back in the day when people sent telegrams, to save on time and words they would simplify sentence structures. You would get messages like “arrive Sunday morning”, instead of “I will arrive on Sunday morning”. Although Kira’s learned how to link words together to create bigger meanings, she hasn’t yet worked out how to change the shape of words like adults do. For example, to indicate different tenses, or how they link content words like Sunday together with function words like on. Here’s her mum Joanna interpreting for her.

Kira: Park Sadie park.

Joanna: Aww.

Kira: Come Sadie park.

Joanna: You want to go to Sadie’s park. Do you have a park?

Sadie: My park?

In English we have a rule, where to signal possession we add “s” or “z” to the end of a noun but Kira’s not got the hang of this yet. She doesn’t say Sadie’s park, she says Sadie park and, of course, aside from that content wise there’s also the fact that I don’t actually own a park. Notice that although her sentence structure isn’t adult-like, the order of her words definitely isn’t random. She says Sadie park, not park Sadie, and more bread, not bread more.

There are still lots of aspects of language that are just beyond Kira’s grasp.

Kira: Kira.

Joanna: That’s right.

Kira: You.

Joanna: Kira’s me but also you. Me. You.

Sadie: So which one of you is Kira then?

Joanna: Who’s Kira?

Kira: Um -- nope. Not me, mum.

Joanna: Me. You. Look. But when it’s you saying it --

Kira: That’s me. No.

Joanna: No, no. That’s me. That’s you. That’s me. That’s you.

Kira: No. That’s me.

Joanna: That’s right.

Kira: That’s you.

Joanna: Yay. Well done.

Sadie: But despite her confusions, and her frustrations, and her struggles, Kira can do some amazing things with language. She can express her thoughts and ideas even about things that aren’t actually there. She can talk about feelings and fears and memories that have popped into her head, and that’s something she couldn’t do six months ago.

Joanna: What’s wrong?

Kira: No dragon eat me.

Joanna: No dragon will eat you, no.

Sadie: Are you tired Kira?

Joanna: Are you sleepy?

Sadie: Emilie is three and a half. I went and met her at her nursery, just shortly before Christmas. Emilie’s one level up from Kira. She can construct narratives. She can put together content words, like picture and dad, with function words, like for and my, to create entire sentences.

Emilie: This is my picture for my dad.

Sadie: She can describe habitual actions.

Emilie: I always cut my pictures out.

Sadie: She can construct complex sentences with multiple clauses.

Emilie: My Grandma picked me up and I get my Peppa things because I left them when I was going to a thing and that’s okay.

Sadie: Not only can she tell me about things that happened in the past, but she can do it using multiple different tenses. Here’s her using the past continuous.

What have you done at nursery today?

Emilie: I go into my tent.

Sadie: Your tent? Have you got a tent? What were you doing in your tent?

Emilie: I was seeing what that noise was. It’s a television.

Sadie: And she can tell me about what’s going to happen in the future.

Are you excited for Christmas?

Emilie: Yeah.

Sadie: Yeah? What’s Christmas going to be like?

Emilie: Santa’s going -- I’ve got a special Peppa – Emilie key in my bedroom.

Sadie: Oh yeah? And what’s going to happen on Christmas Day?

Emilie: I’m going to open my box of -- and then there’s this dress, and then I’m going to put them in my bedroom in my boxes.

Sadie: Aww is it going to be exciting?

Emilie: Yeah.

Sadie: Yeah. Are you going to have Christmas dinner?

Emilie: Yeah.

Sadie: Yeah? What you going to have?

Emilie: McDonald’s.

Sadie: McDonald’s? Are you?

Emilie: Yeah.

Sadie: Are you? You’re going to have a non-traditional Christmas dinner?

Emilie’s friend Ronan is four. Here he is using a whole multitude of linguistic skills to tell me what he’s going to do if the Grinch tries to steal his Christmas presents this year.

Ronan: I’m going be at the door and then mum’s going to be in the living room and dad’s going to be in his room and Darcey’s going to be in her room. And then I will punch him in the back and then --

Sadie: Oh, my goodness.

Ronan: And then mum will punch him in the knee and then Darcey -- and then Dad will punch him on the head and Darcey will punch him in the face.

Sadie: Oh, my goodness. And that’s going to beat him, do you think?

Ronan: Yeah.

Sadie: Emilie and Ronan are still really small, but they’ve learned so much about language. They’ve worked out how to do things like conjugate verbs, but chances are that no one’s ever sat them down and explained to them how verb conjugation works. So how do they know?

In 1958, Jean Berko Gleason developed the Wug Test. She wanted to test whether kids learn how to construct sentences by copying the speech they hear around them or whether they understand abstract patterns in language. The test involved showing kids pictures and giving them made up names for the pictures.

Okay, so this is a wug. And now there’s another one. So, if there are two of them, there are two…?

So you probably know that there are two wugs. If you got that right, well done. A wug isn’t a real thing so you might never have heard anyone say the word before. You don’t know what the plural is from experience, you just know the structures of English grammar. You know deep down, although you might never have thought about it, that in English we show pluralisation of nouns by adding “-s” or “-z”, depending on the final sound in the word. If the final sound is “-g”, we add “-z”. So there are two wugs.

Okay, so this is a wug. And now there’s another one. So if there are two of them, there are two…?

Emilie: Chicks.

Sadie: Yeah, excellent. Cool.

At the pre-wug stage, kids can produce plurals for words they’ve heard before but not for made up words like wug. It’s not really clear whether Emilie’s at that stage or whether she’s just a kid who’s aware that a wug is not a thing and she’s just completely unwilling to play along and pretend that it is. The picture of the wug does look like a crude drawing of a chick so in that sense, yeah, she’s absolutely right but she hasn’t got the plural for wug.

Here’s Ronan.

Okay. So, you ready? So this is a wug. What’s it called?

Ronan: A wug.

Sadie: That’s right. And this is another one. So now there’s two of them, so there are two…

Ronan: Wugs.

Sadie: That’s right. Well done.

Ronan is half a year older than Emilie. Here he passes the Wug Test with flying colours. Next the test gets harder. With some nouns we form the plural not just by adding ‘-s’ or ‘-z’ but also by adding a vowel sound. We do this with vowels ending in “-ch”, “-sh”, “-s”, and “-z”. So we get plurals like matches and boxes and roses.

So this one here -- see this guy? This is a gutch and this is another one. So now there’s two of them. So there are two…?

Emilie: Ducks

Sadie: Again, Emilie refuses to play along. She identifies the creature as one that she knows the name of in real life and she gives the correct plural for duck. Again, the slightly older Ronan absolutely nails it.

Ronan: What’s that thing?

Sadie: This one is a gutch. Drawn in the picture here. So, right, so this is a gutch. And here is another one. So now there are two…?

Ronan: Two gutches. I can draw --

Sadie: Two what? Now there are two…?

Ronan: Two gutches.

Sadie: That’s right.

Ronan: I want to draw one.

Sadie: Now it really heats up and we move to verb conjugation.

This a man who knows how to zib. He’s zibbing -- Oh, you lost your pen -- This man is zibbing. And he did the same thing yesterday. So, what do you think he did yesterday?

Emilie: I don’t know.

Sadie: You don’t know. So if he’s zibbing today, and he did the same thing yesterday. What did he do yesterday?

Emilie: Played games.

Sadie: Played games. Yeah. Good answer, good answer.

Again, a perfectly fine answer but not the one we were looking for. Here’s Ronan with another made up verb.

So, see this guy?

Ronan: Yeah.

Sadie: He knows how to rick. See this? He knows how to rick. He’s ricking, right? And he’s a ricker. He did the same thing yesterday. So yesterday he…?

Ronan: Ricked.

Sadie: That’s right. Good work.

Ronan: He always ricks.

Sadie: He always ricks. That’s right, good work.

Not only does Ronan get it right, but he actually offers an additional habitual form of the verb without me asking for it. Some might say that at this point he’s just showing off. The difference between Emilie and Ronan shows just how fast kids are developing at this age. In the six months Ronan has on Emilie, he’s learned to apply abstract rules to new words as they enter his vocabulary. That or he’s just more interested than Emilie in telling podcasters with microphones what he knows they want to hear.

[baby noises]

Baby Harris is two months old. He has quite the journey in front of him. Over the next few years, if all goes according to plan, he’ll follow in the footsteps on Mila, Connie, Martha, and Kira, and eventually reach the same heady linguistic heights as Emilie and Ronan. He’ll learn vowel sounds. Then he’ll add consonants. Practicing the noises he needs with words that don’t mean anything. Then he’ll start to connect his speech sounds with things in the world; giving his sounds semantic meaning that at first might only be clear to his family but which will later begin to line up with the sound and meaning connections that the adults around him make. He’ll say his first word, then his first words, and then start to combine them into telegraphic phrases like Kira’s. He’ll begin to develop an understanding of how words fit together to form sentences and how they change shape to indicate pluralisation and tense, so that duck becomes ducks, talk becomes talking and talked, and wug becomes wugs. When he’s pieced together the sounds and structures of the language he’s grown up with, he’ll have reached what we call full morphological competence.

The crazy thing about all this is the process usually takes kids only three or four years and it’s not like they’re not busy with other tasks at the same time. They’re also growing, learning to walk, getting potty trained. Talking is complicated; the most complicated tasks that kids have to learn. It involves high level understanding and fine motor skills but it’s also really, really important. Communicating with our caregivers, siblings and friends allows us to build social relationships, express our desires and shape our little corner of the world. Even if it’s just in small ways at first like asking for one more or saying no to bedtime. And that’s surely more exciting than learning to go to the toilet by yourself, right?

I’ve written a blog post to go with this episode which tells you a little bit more about the wug test and allows you to try it out for yourself. It includes some of the drawings which go with the test, which I showed to Emilie and Ronan. You can find it at accentricity-podcast.com/blog. You can also get in touch @accentricitypod on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, if you would like to chat some more about baby talk.

Thank you to all of the babies and toddlers in this episode, and to the parents and grannies who told me all about their chat: Harris, Angie, Braxton, Mila, Nichola, Connie, Kat, Andrew, Sheila, Martha, Jennie, Euan, Kira, Joanna, Emilie, Jenn, Ronan and Lynsey. Thanks also to all of the other people who volunteered to help out but who I didn’t get a chance to meet with this time round: Cat, Anna, Tanya, and Shona for volunteering you kids, and Katy, Rebecca, and Jenny, for telling me about the kids of friends and family.

Massive thanks to Jennifer Smith of Glasgow Uni for helping me out with the content and for some very valuable fact checking. And thanks also to Linda Campbell for your help. Thanks so much to all of the new patrons of the podcast: Chris Rodger, Osh Kealy, Daibhidh Eyre, Scott Hames, and Sam Wrigglesworth, via Patreon, and Rachel Smith and Hilary Stewart, via the donate button on the website. All of the money raised will go towards making the second series of the podcast.

Massive thanks as always to John McDiarmid for production support, and to Seb Philp for the music.

See you all next time.