Q: What can I do to help my 10-month-old learn to talk? I have a neighbor whose baby already says a few words!
A: There is a wide range for when young children start to talk. Some children say their first words at 9 months and others at 18 months. What’s most important is that your child is moving forward in her communication skills–using her sounds, gestures and facial expressions in increasingly complex ways. For example, she moves from babbling to making consonant-vowel sounds (such as da, ma, ba). She goes from grunting when she wants something to reaching towards or pointing to what she wants.
As far as what you can do, talk a lot with your baby. Talk about what you are doing while changing his diaper, dressing him, or fixing a bottle. Sing songs, and play “back and forth” games (like peek-a-boo) throughout the day. Having early “conversations” like these helps babies learn language. It can also make transitions between activities easier and relieve stress for both of you.
What we’ve learned over the last few years is that there is a fairly strong relationship between what caregivers produce and how children learn language. We used to think that it was just the number of words that children hear that’s going to be predictive of their outcomes. It turns out that’s definitely not the case. Of course, it is important to hear words in order to learn words, but we now know that there are specific features of input that can be particularly important for language development. But what these features are, of course, changes over time.
For a child who’s just learning to produce words, the features of parental input that are going to be important are going to be different compared to a child who’s already producing long sentences. It really comes down to parents and caregivers being able to scaffold their child’s language, to realize where the child is linguistically and meet the child where they’re at and just be one level above the child and provide that type of support. Many parents do this unconsciously. It’s really interesting to study that process because what we’re seeing is that parents are actually very, very good at this. And then as the baby responds, we see this feedback loop between the baby and the parent and the back and forth. That then leads to further growth.
