{"id":1757,"date":"2021-09-27T05:00:57","date_gmt":"2021-09-26T20:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kotoboo.org\/?p=1757"},"modified":"2023-06-28T16:23:49","modified_gmt":"2023-06-28T07:23:49","slug":"how-do-babies-start-learning-words","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kotoboo.org\/index.php\/2021\/09\/27\/how-do-babies-start-learning-words\/","title":{"rendered":"How do babies start learning words?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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At first glance, it can seem that one of the biggest challenges for learning language is figuring out what each word means. For example, learning that \u2018dog\u2019 means any furry animal that barks. We often overlook the challenge of first figuring out that when someone says something, like \u2018furry dog\u2019, \u2018furry\u2019 and \u2018dog\u2019 are words but not \u2018rrydog\u2019 or \u2018og\u2019. You may have already had the experience of mistakenly thinking that two words or part of a word was an actual word in one of your second languages. If you do not know the word \u2018microphone\u2019, you could think that it is actually two words, \u201cmy\u201d and \u201ccrophone\u201d. Yet, somehow, by 6 months of age babies have already figured out where some words begin and end, like \u2018baby\u2019 and \u2018bottle\u2019!

One of the cues young babies can use are \u2018prosodic breaks\u2019. These are breaks in the rhythm of language. A break in the rhythm can be a pause, so just some silence between words. For example, there is a pause between the words \u2018birds\u2019 and \u2018sing\u2019 in the sentence: \u2018The birds sing in the morning\u2019. Another kind of break can be a change in intonation. In English, for instance, there is a regular change in intonation on nouns: a \u2018strong-weak\u2019 stress pattern. You would say MOther, and not moTHER. Or the break could be part of a word that is stretched out. In some languages, like English, the last word of a sentence is longer than the rest. The word \u2018there\u2019 is longer when it is at the end of a sentence like in \u2018Look over there\u2019 than when it is not like in \u2018There are so many birds in the sky\u2019.

Prosodic breaks never happen in the middle of a word; rather they happen between words. A break would happen after the word \u2018dino\u2019 in the sentence \u2018the dino roars\u2019, but never after \u2018din\u2019. By listening to the changes in rhythm, babies can start figuring out where one word begins and another ends!

These breaks are just part of how we speak naturally so we are already giving a baby a helping hand learning language just by speaking to her! We may even sometimes exaggerate these breaks without noticing when we talk to babies (See our comic Why do we talk to babies the way we do?<\/a>). 

Join us next time when we uncover all the different kinds of rhythms babies use to learn language across the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018There\u2019 when it is at the end of a sentence (e.g., \u2018Look over there\u2019).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\u2018There\u2019 when it is at the beginning of a sentence (e.g., \u2018There are so many birds in the sky\u2019).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The scientific sources of our comic\uff1a<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Abboub, N., Nazzi, T., & Gervain, J. (2016). Prosodic grouping at birth. Brain and Language<\/em>, 162<\/em>, 46\u201359.<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Christophe, A., Millotte, S., Bernal, S., & Lidz, J. (2008). Bootstrapping lexical and syntactic acquisition. Language and Speech<\/em>, 51<\/em>(1-2), 61-75.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gout, A., Christophe, A., & Morgan, J. L. (2004). Phonological phrase boundaries constrain lexical access II. Infant data. Journal of Memory and Language, 51<\/em>(4), 548-567.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Johnson, E. K., & Jusczyk, P. W. (2001). Word segmentation by 8-month-olds: When speech cues count more than statistics. Journal of Memory and Language<\/em>, 44<\/em>(4), 548-567.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mehler, J., Jusczyk, P., Lambertz, G., Halsted, N., Bertoncini, J., & Amiel-Tison, C. (1988). A precursor of language acquisition in young infants. Cognition<\/em>, 29<\/em>(2), 143-178.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At first glance, it can seem that one of the biggest challenges for learning language is figuring out what each word means. For example, learning that \u2018dog\u2019 means any furry animal that barks. We often overlook the challenge of first figuring out that when someone…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3072,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[72],"tags":[80],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"lang":"en","translations":{"en":1757,"fr":1745,"ja":1731,"uk":2494,"es":2742,"zh":3068},"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/kotoboo.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/FEATURED-IMAGE_Comic40_color.png","pll_sync_post":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kotoboo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1757"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kotoboo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kotoboo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kotoboo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kotoboo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1757"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/kotoboo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1757\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2753,"href":"https:\/\/kotoboo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1757\/revisions\/2753"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kotoboo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3072"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kotoboo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1757"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kotoboo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1757"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kotoboo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1757"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}