Babies have vocal control
I’ve been rather impatient for my almost two year old toddler son to talk. My impatient is partially attributed to expectations set by his older sister who was speaking rather well (as far as memory serves me) at the same age. Everyone keeps telling me that boys speak later, boys potty train later, but I don’t wish to get into these stereotypes at this time. However, since we are experiencing a prolonged period of babble-talk with my son, I can’t help marvelling at the sophistication of his ‘language’.
He clearly knows what he wants to say. And I’m starting to understand a lot of what he says. But it baffles me that I cannot repeat words the same way he pronounces them. His consonants are soft, it’s as if they were not even uttered. Yet they were there. When he says “Stop it mom”, it’s not quite STOP. The ST combination is there but different. It’s uttered so delicately I cannot reproduce the sound. And that’s what gets me thinking - the fact that I cannot reproduce the sounds he makes. If my vocal cord is more developed, more advanced, should I not be able to make my advanced sounds as well as the less advanced? Does advancement make us lose the ability to create delicate sounds that are similar and yet distinct? Or have we simply lost our ability to listen for these differences, hence lost our ability to generate the sounds?
I don’t know. But I feel we are born with the ability to generate a much broader array of sounds than we end up with as we grow. The language spoken around us as kids help us select the sounds we keep and the ones we discard. These are just idle thoughts that pop in my mind every now and then. But this morning as I listened to NPR on my drive to work, I heard about a research conducted on new born baby cries in France and Germany. It was found that the language spoken influenced the way the baby cried. So at birth, babies were already discriminating in the sounds they made. Which means the vocal cords at birth are more sophisticated than previously thought. The research, it appears, was carried out in mono-language environments - French and German. Where a child is exposed to multiple languages, does this automatically set the child up for a greater degree of variability in sounds he can make? Kinda makes sense.
As for my son, perhaps I should stop harping on about how he should be talking like the rest of us by now. And let him enjoy what appears to us as babbles for a little time longer. Perhaps, when he emerges from his babble phase, he will be emerging with two languages - English and Yoruba - despite my lack of attempt at making sure I propagate Yoruba to my kids.
