Interpreting Baby Talk

What do an infant's cries mean? Hunger, usually, or discomfort, or fear. But they also reveal a slow process of learning how to communicate. Within a few months the baby's noises already show signs of patterns: a cry followed by a pause to listen for reactions, then another cry.

So reports Jerome Bruner, 60, longtime Harvard psychologist now teaching at Oxford and author of such pioneering works as A Study of Thinking (1956) and The Process of Education (1960). In a recent address to the 21st International Congress of Psychology in Paris, Bruner challenged the popular view that infants are born egocentric and acquire language merely through some innate skill. "If you look at the child's behavior as he develops procedures of communication," said Bruner, "you cannot help but be struck by the fact that from the start the child is sociocentric. The child communicates not only because it is alive but because it is stressful for the child to be in a noncommunicative situation."

Adult Vicars. Learning to talk is no sudden discovery, according to Bruner. It takes about two years of dogged practice--by the mother as well as the child. (Bruner means not necessarily the child's natural mother, but someone who acts as "vicar" of the adult community.) Every word the vicar uses is a lesson in what sounds and tones work best. By the age of two months, the child can make a cry that demands or one that requests, i.e., one that awaits a response from the mother. "Mother talk," corresponding to "baby talk," tells the child that its request will be met and gives the child signs of the consequences of his requests. Says Bruner: "Linguistic competence is developing before language proper."

In addition to making sounds, mother and child use their eyes as part of the communication process. A mother spends much of her time during the child's first four to nine months, says Bruner, simply trying to discover what the child is looking at. At four months, 20% of babies can be induced to follow their mother's gaze, and by one year, 70% can do the same thing, even if she is looking at an object behind the baby.

She begins pointing out objects and giving them names. From ten months onward, the child as well begins pointing out objects. Mothers introduce a familiar pattern: 1) pointing to an object; 2) putting the question to the child, "What (or who, or where) is that?"; and 3) labeling the object, person or place ("That's a hat," "That's Grandma," "That's the bedroom").

Without knowing it, the mother has already set in motion the process of fostering the four basic skills that Bruner considers essential for making sentences later on:

>"Well-formedness," when the mother demands a closer approximation to the correct pronunciation of a word with each repetition.

> "Truth functionality," generally begun after the first year, when she corrects a mistake: "That's not a dog, it's a cat."

> "Felicity," which means that the manner of speech must be appropriate to the situation.

> "Verisimilitude," when she allows a child to place a box on his head and pretends it is a hat, but does not encourage him to do the same thing with, say, a ball.

Step by step, in a steady series of accretions of meaning, these lessons lead toward acquiring the gift of speech. Says Bruner: "Man realizes his full heritage when he reaches language. But he is doing things along the way which are also quite remarkable."

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