LISTEN TO YOUR CHILD--A Parent's Guide to Language--By David Crystal
BEGINNING AT THE BEGINNING
The acquisition of our mother-tongue is the most significant act of learning of our early life, perhaps of our whole life. Once we have language at our disposal, we have a key which will unlock many doors. We have permanent access to the records of our past. We can contribute in full measure to the developments of the present. We can plan our future. Language acquisition is thus a subject which pre-eminently deserves our understanding, & it is not surprising that it has these days become a major field of academic research. Yet, people do sometimes ask, "What is there to research into?" When the "Journal of Child Language" was first published, in the 1970's, a correspondent wrote to me, as the editor, & asked why it was needed. "Children's language is hardly a complicated matter," he wrote. "Surely all that children do is imitate their parents. Why is that so surprising?"
Of course, if that was all there was to it, there would indeed be little need for a research journal, & this book would stop here. But one of the first findings of child language researchers in fact demonstrated that simple explanations of this kind do not work. Children do sometimes imitate their parents & others around them, as we shall see, but a great deal of what they say could not possibly have come from the language of adults.
Children are not parrots, they take an active role in their own linguistic future. The situation is plainly far more complicated than might appear at first sight, & it is this complexity which has motivated all the research.
But this book does not aim to turn parents into researchers. Its intention is simply to provide some insight into the course of language acquisition, & thus to contribute to the sense of satisfaction which comes from knowing as much as possible about how our children "work," & the pride we feel when we recognise their achievements.
THE FIRST YEAR
When does language acquisition start? It's widely thought that the significant time is around the end of the first year, when children produce their "first words." "He's started to talk today!" is the kind of happy remark parents often make. And in a way, the remark is true. There is something special about the first intelligible word a child produces. It's an exciting day when the child officially joins the speech community. There ought to be a badge to commemorate it.
But despite all the excitement, the first word doesn't in fact mark the beginning of a child's language learning. It is the result of a great deal of hard work on the part of both parents & children that has gone on throughout the first year of life. It is the climax of a complex series of linguistic developments which begin at birth--or even before.
What kinds of development are involved? Let's begin with a general observation. In order to communicate with someone, using spoken language, three abilities need to be present. Obviously, you need to be able to make sounds & string them together into intelligible utterances. Less obviously, you also need to be able to perceive sounds, & understand the meaning of the utterances the other person makes. And, least obviously, you need to know how to interact with that person--how to hold a conversation. By 12 months, children have become quite sophisticated in all three areas.
Stage 1 (0-8 weeks): Basic Biological Noises
The child won't see it like this, nor will the parent: But it must be the case that while babies cry & gurgle, they are getting practice in moving their vocal organs & controlling the flow of air through mouth & nose. It is only a small step along the long road to spoken language, but it is a fundamental one.
Stage 2 (8-20 weeks): Cooing & Laughing
From around three months, the vegetative sounds of the early weeks begin to die away, & the amount of crying becomes much less. Soon, most of the child's vocal day is taken up with cooing sounds. And then, at around four months, the first throaty chuckles & laughs emerge. For many parents, that is the first convincing sign that they have a social human being on their hands, not just an automatic food-processor.
Stage 3 (20-30 weeks): Vocal Play
What does the baby get out of this stage? There's plainly a lot of fun to be had, as can be seen from the way mother & baby spend long periods happily imitating each other. I have heard a two-minute conversation which consisted entirely of seemingly senseless sounds on both sides! On the other hand, "play" is a misleading label for the stage, because it doesn't convey the other thing that the baby is doing: Getting practice, at a very important time. At this age, the proportions of the baby's head & neck are rapidly growing, & the vocal organs are moving into positions which are much more like those of an adult. The tongue has more room to move, & fresh places to move to. There is thus a great deal of oral pioneering work to be done: New positions for the tongue to explore, & new sounds to make. At the same time, the baby experiments with the different speeds at which the vocal cords can vibrate. Make them vibrate very fast, & then the pitch of my voice goes high! Make them vibrate slowly, & my pitch is low!
Stage 4 (25-50 week): Babbling
Babbling is the most familiar of all the types of sounds a baby makes in the first year of life. Everyone knows of the typical [ababababa] or [dadadada] sequences which emerge from around six months.
Babbling is sometimes said to be a way of practicing the sounds & sequences which will later be used in speech, without the child having to worry about the meaning of what's being uttered. There's some truth in this, & a good babbler is likely to be a good talker.
Stage 5 (9-18 months): Melodic Utterance
Towards the end of the first year the baby's utterances become much more varied. A wider range of sounds enters the babbling, as we've seen. And, from around nine months, the melody, rhythm & tone of voice of the utterance develop also. These are the features which make language sound fluent & natural, & some children become very adept at manipulating them.
Perceiving & Understanding
The production of spoken language begins about age 1, but the comprehension of spoken language starts well before this.
How far back do we have to go? When do children first start to understand the speech that adults direct at them? More basically, when do they start to perceive it? There's an important difference between perception & comprehension, as anyone knows who's been in contact with a foreign language. It's easy enough to perceive that foreigners are talking to you; but working out what they're saying is a very different matter. And a similar problem must face the baby during the first year.
How far back, then? The amazing answer to this question is: All the way. Right back to birth, & perhaps even before.
Psychologists have been able to show all kinds of auditory abilities in the newborn baby. Babies turn their heads towards the source of a sound within the first few days. They prefer human voices to non-human sounds as early as two weeks. They can even recognise their mother's voice before they are a day old. How do we know? By carrying out experiments in which we play different sounds to the baby, & carefully monitor the responses he or she makes. In one experiment, for instance, day-old babies heard the mother's voice speaking normally, the mother's voice speaking abnormally (in a monotone), & a stranger's voice. Only the first caused the babies to attend.
Talking Together
Here's a conversation with a three-month-old. It looks very one-sided, but there were definitely two participants, who took turns to talk. Unfortunately, one party's contribution to the conversation consisted solely of cries, gurgles, splutters & cooing sounds, to which it isn't possible to do justice, using the letters of the alphabet.
Michael: (loud crying)
Mother: Oh my word, what a noise! What a noise! (picks up Michael)
Michael: (sobs)
Mother: Oh dear, dear, dear. Didn't anybody come to see you? Let's have a look at you (looks inside nappy). No, you're all right there, aren't you.
Michael: (spluttering noises)
Mother: Well, what is it, then? Are you hungry, is that it? Is it a long time since dinner time?
Michael: (gurgles & smiles)
Mother: (nuzzles baby): Oh yes it is, a long, long time.
Michael: (cooing noise)
Mother: Yes, I know. Let's go & get some lovely grub, then. How about that...
A foundation for social interaction has been laid. There may be no child language yet, but there's lots of communication.
Talking to Children
Not everyone finds it equally easy to talk to babies. Indeed, some people find it difficult to talk to anyone, whatever their age. So what do you do if you're a naturally quiet parent, & you don't find your linguistic instincts working as well as the research suggests they should?
The short answer is that you may have to go out of your way to provide your child with the stimulation it needs. The research makes it quite clear that the only way to a good command of language is to feed the child language from the outset.
You have to use the situations from which speech can naturally arise, in the course of every day, & which will promote joint activities. Here are a few such guidelines.
* Give the baby the chance to pay attention. If there's too much noise going on--especially if the noise pattern is always changing (such as people coming in & out, or machines switching off & on)--this will be difficult. Always try to have some time alone with the child each day.
* "Talking to" means "looking at." To get real communication going with the baby, you have to keep in eye contact.
* Don't correct the child's language. This is a point more relevant for children in their second & third years, of course, but it might as well be mentioned now. There's a time & a place for correcting grammar, & it isn't the first three or four years of life. Children won't linguistically run before they can walk.
So, if the child says, "Me got car," don't say back to him, "Listen, Ted, say `I've got a car'." Be subtle. Say, "Yes, you have, haven't you. And look. I've got a car, too." In this way, you get the best of both worlds. You reply to the child's remark as a normal human being should--& you drop a hint, a second later, that there just might have been a better way of saying such a sentence.
* Likewise, don't try to correct the child's pronunciation. One of the worst things you can do is insist on the child pronouncing something "correctly" before you give something. It happens. [Da] said an 18-month-old, pointing at his toy dog. "Say `dog'," said the parent, emphasising the final [g]. [Da] said the child again. "Not until you say `doG', insisted the parent. The exchange went on for quite some time, with a fairly predictable result: Tears & sweat all around. Far better to accept the child's version, & then demonstrate the correct form by casually saying the word yourself as you pass the object over.
* Talk about what's going on, especially in the baby's field of vision. Don't talk so much about what has happened or what will happen. Keep the topics to the "here & now." And make the language as specific as possible. "Look at that" isn't going to be as helpful as "Look at that car."
* Babies will learn to communicate only if people treat them as communicators right from the start. Show lots of interest in everything they "say." Parental listening is just as important as parental talking.
* Last, don't overdo things. Don't be talking all the time. Babies like some peace & quiet, too!
To Conclude
By the end of the first year, as children approach their "first words," a great deal of preliminary linguistic spadework has already taken place. They have learned a great deal about how to pronounce & listen to sounds; they have made inroads into the comprehension of the language used around them; & they have begun to learn the basics of all social interaction--how to carry on a conversation. The next step is to put all of this learning to work, in the active use of the sounds, grammar & vocabulary of their language. The language now has its foundations, & it needs a first floor. This will be built in the second year of life.
THE SECOND YEAR
Around 12 months of age, a child's first words begin to appear. That's an average age, of course. A few children have been heard to produce real, identifiable words from as early as eight or nine months. Others babble on until 18 months or so, without producing a single definite word. Some even lapse into silence in the second year, not taking off until they're nearly two. These children often miss the "first word" stage completely, & launch themselves into language with complete sentences. One of my own children was like this. If I hadn't known better, I'd have begun to be worried by the time she was 18 months. But no: A few months later, she was chattering away just like any two-year-old. No one has yet been able to explain why such delays take place.
By 18 months, a child can speak about 50 words, but can understand about five times as many. By age two, spoken vocabulary exceeds 200 words, & comprehension has increased to--? Here, we have a difficulty. Deciding whether a child has understood a word is one of the thorniest problems facing anyone who studies children's language. There are all kinds of uncertainties.
"Where's your bowl?" says a mother to Jimmy, a high-chaired 15-month old, & he obediently points to the dishful of food. Later, having washed up, she passes the child carrying the clean dish & she asks the question again. This time, Jimmy looks confused, & doesn't respond. Does he understand the word "bowl" or doesn't he? If he does, why doesn't he point correctly? If he doesn't, how do you explain the first reaction? Perhaps he thinks the word "bowl" means "food" or "dinner," so that when it's clean it can't be a bowl any more.
Children present us with numerous problems of this type, during the second year. After age two, these problems become much less, because the children have learned more about the World & can handle more complicated sentences, so they can "explain themselves" better.
What Do They Mean?
Mark jumps up with excitement as he hears a knock on the back door. His mother goes to open it, & there's the milkman. "Dada," says Mark, in delight.
Mark may of course be right. Perhaps his father is a milkman. But there aren't enough milkmen to go around, so there has to be some other reason for this curious use of the word "dada."
In fact, this "extending" of a word to mean more than it should is a perfectly normal feature of language development during the second year, & it lasts until about halfway through the third year. To understand why children over-extend words in this way, you have to remember that there are two sides to learning a word. It's one thing to learn the "shape" of the word--how it sounds. It's quite another to learn what the word means--that is, children don't pick up a word with all its grown-up meanings neatly packaged inside it. They have to work out for themselves what it must mean. We have to do the same if we meet a new word in a foreign language, & there's no dictionary to help us out. Quite often, we get it wrong.
Perhaps the child has worked out that "dada" is the word you use whenever you see someone in trousers, or with a deep voice. Then along comes someone else with these features, & so they are "dadas" too.
It may take quite a long time for children to work out exactly what meaning a word has. One reason for this is that they aren't learning words one at a time. Everything's happening at once. If there's a nice clear contrast between two things, there won't be much of a problem: "Cat" & "dog" are likely to be sorted out early on because of the obvious differences between them. And, as the child acquires more vocabulary, more of these differences will emerge.
Of course, parents help in all of this. They help by pointing out contrasts to the child. They say things like, "That's not a cat, that's a dog," & then they explain: "Listen, it goes `woof'. Kittycats go `miaow'." Parents are very good at "going on" about something in a relevant way. If their child says, "There green car," they go on to talk about cars of other colours, drawing the child's attention to the contrast.
Asking Questions
When do children first start to ask questions? And which questions do they ask first? From the beginning of the second year, until well unto the third, three main stages of development have been identified.
Stage 1--Children show signs of wanting to ask questions as early as the end of the first year. They haven't got any grammatical skills at this point, of course, but they are certainly able to convey a question's meaning, by using the melody of the voice. This is something adults do as well. "Lunch?" someone might ask. When this is written down you know it's a question because of the question mark. In speech, you know it's a question because the pitch of the voice is high & it rises as you say it. One child said, "Dada?" upon hearing a noise outside at the time when daddy was expected home. Another held his drink over the edge of his high chair & said, "Gone?" After he'd dropped it, he looked down at the mess he'd created, lowered his tone & said definitely, "Gone!"
Stage 2--During the second year, children start to use question words: These are words such as "what," "where," "when" & "why." "What" & "where" are usually the first two to emerge in a child's speech, often being used just on their own at around 15 or 18 months. Soon, they come to be used along with other words: "Where that?", "What that?", "What doing?" They start asking "why, "how" & "who" questions sometime afterwards. And "when" questions are later still.
Stage 3--Questions become more complex, as the child moves into the third year. Sentences are longer now. "Where daddy going?" "What you doing in there?" This is the time when children discover the rule for turning English statements into questions. The rule is quite a simple one. To turn "That is a car" into a question, all you have to do is reverse ("invert") the order of the subject & verb: "Is that a car?" Children pick this rule up quite early in the third year for some questions, but it takes longer in the case of others.
To Conclude
As the second birthday approaches, most children have built up a core vocabulary of a couple of hundred words. They've learned to join these words together into simple sentences. And they can cope with an increasing number of sounds--at least a dozen, & perhaps as many as 20. But despite this great progress, two-year-old language is still noticeably immature. It's probably the cutest period of language development, as these tots charm us all with their struggles to make longer sentences, bigger words & more complex sounds. But it doesn't last long. The third year is on the horizon, & that's serious.
THE THIRD YEAR
The third year is truly remarkable from a linguistic point of view. So much progress is made. So many things happen at once. No other year can match it.
You'll get an immediate sense of the linguistic leap children make if I list some typical two-year-old sentences & some typical three-year-old sentences (taken from several children). It is a different World at three.
Age 2:
Teddy on floor.
That stuck now.
Mommy gone out.
No daddy go.
Open it.
Age 3:
You put that on there.
Me got lots of cars like Jimmy.
Mommy want me to go in the garden.
Where you going with that red shovel?
Daddy comed to see me in the garden.
Vocabulary
Nobody's ever been able to arrive at an accurate estimate of a child's spoken vocabulary in the third year.
Those who have tried to study vocabulary in the third year report a real spurt in the second half of the year. One report mentions 500 words by 2-1/2, & 1,000 words by three, but this is certainly an underestimation for many children. It also doesn't allow for the way in which words come to be used during this year. For a two-year-old, the word "dog" refers to the animal "dog" & to little else. By three, many words have begun to take on several meanings.
This is the normal state of affairs in language. Most words in English have more than one meaning, as is immediately obvious if you look at the pages of a dictionary. All the different senses are listed there. "Table" can mean a piece of furniture, the food served at a meal (he keeps a good table), a negotiating session (the peace table), a list of figures (Table I) & a piece of flat high ground (Table Mountain). Then there are all the idioms which use the word, such as "it's on the table" ("it's been put forward for discussion"), "turn the tables" ("to cause fortunes to be reversed"), or "put your cards on the table" ("to divulge your intentions"). To learn vocabulary is to learn all of this, or at least the commonest meanings.
Most of the senses of "table" are for adults only, of course. But there are many words that three-year-olds are likely to meet where meanings need to be distinguished.
Funny: "amusing," "strange"
Call: "shout," "visit," "telephone"
Leave: "go away," "let something stay as it is"
Plug: "object in a wash basin" (which you're allowed to touch), "object in the wall" (which you're not)
Side: "a part of your body," "one surface of a piece of paper," "a team of people"
Low: "near the ground," "not loud"
Now imagine two 2-1/2-year-old children. Both have learned these six words, but one child has learned only one sense per word, whereas the other child has learned all the senses of each word. If you just counted the words, the two children would come out the same. But if you counted the meanings, the second child would have a total of 14 different uses, compared with the first child's six.
You, Me & the Others
Language gone mad! That must surely be the verdict of any child who meets words like "I," "me" & "you" for the first time--the "pronouns." Put yourself in their shoes. What would you be thinking, on your first close encounter with linguistic situations like these?
Daddy says, "Show me," & "me" means Daddy.
Mommy says, "Show me," & "me" means Mommy.
I say, "Show me," & "me" means me.
How can a sensible person be expected to learn a language if there are words which change their meaning all the time? Oh for the days when "dog" meant "dog" & that was all there was to it!
Children come to grips with pronouns in the third year. The amazing thing is that, despite the complexity, they do so well. Faced with a situation where "me" & "you" change their meaning, depending on who is talking, you might expect that they would always be mixing them up--saying "you" instead of "me," & vice versa. This is in fact quite rare.
It takes children the best part of two years to work out all the complexities of the English pronoun system. But the effort is well worthwhile. There are few words which will be used more frequently throughout the rest of their linguistic lives.
Saying No
There's the important skill to be learned of saying no without saying no. Parents are particularly good at this, when talking to children in their fourth year or later. "Can I have a cookie?", asks the child. "It'll be snack time in a little while," says mother, a negative sentence if ever there was one, but containing no negative word at all. Children don't quite know how to take these, when they first hear them:
Child: Can I have a cookie, Mommy?"
Mother: You've just had one.
(Pause)
Child: Yes, but can I have one now?
Mother: No, I just told you, you've just had one.
But they soon learn. Mother spells out the negative meaning in her second reply & emphasises it with a sharp tone of voice as well. By five, the children have become quite skilled at reading between the lines of an adult sentence.
To Conclude
At two, children are linguistic toddlers. At three, they're linguistic analysts, full of questions & arguments. They say much more, & they say it with impressive fluency & accuracy. There are still lots of errors to be sorted out, of course, & there are large areas of language waiting to be explored.
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Professor Ernest Brennecke of Columbia University is credited with inventing a sentence that can be made to have eight different meanings by lacing the word "only" in all possible positions in it:
"I hit him in the eye yesterday."
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THE PRE-SCHOOL YEARS
At around age three, there is a dramatic change in children's language. If any age has to be called a linguistic milestone, it has to be this. And yet it's all due to one of the smallest words: "And."
If you look out for the word "And" in your child's speech, you'll probably first notice it towards the middle of the third year. It's used in short phrases, such as "Mommy & Daddy," & is often pronounced in a clipped way, as "'n."
Why is the use of "and" a breakthrough? Because it's the first real sign of the use of "complex sentences," as they're usually called in grammar books.
The effect is striking. Immediately, children's utterances become twice as long as they were before. Once children learn "and" in this way there's no stopping them. Soon a whole string of sentences come out, joined in the same way, limited only by the child's memory, shortage of breath, or adult patience.
Joanne rushed in from the garden one day, took a deep breath & launched herself into this great saga:
"Daddy--Daddy have breaked the spade all up, &--&--& it broken &--he did hurt his hand on it &--&--& it's gone all sore &..."
We can stop Joanne there because the point of the example is clear enough.
About one in three children seem to have a great deal of trouble, as they start to produce a complex sentences. Their speech becomes much jerkier, with pauses all over the place. They begin to repeat not just single words but whole groups of words, as in this case:
"I saw Mark & he gave me--he gave me--he gave me this car."
Most noticeable of all, they start repeating single sounds, as here:
"The doggie ran across the road & he f--f--f--found himself bone."
A stammer. Alarm bells! Panic stations! No. Don't panic. There's no need.
This kind of non-fluency is a perfectly normal development at this age. Faced with the enormous task of making your sentences twice as long, remembering twice as many things to say at once, thinking ahead to what you want to say in the sentence after next--it's enough to make anyone stammer! What's surprising is that more children don't end up giving their parents a fright in this way.
If it's left to itself, a stammer will last a few months, & then usually die away.
What do I mean by saying "leave it to itself"? Several things. Don't get impatient with such children, as they try to get the word out. Don't say things like "Spit it out," "Come on, I haven't got all day" & the like. If you do that, you'll draw attention to the stammer & you might make it worse. You have to realise that the children themselves usually don't realise they're stammering. You can tell them from the routine way in which they stand in front of you, without a care in the World, producing a word's first sounds perhaps a dozen times or more. They're not struggling to get the sounds out, as an adult stammerer often does. There's no sense of strain, or tension, or anxiety. The only people who naturally feel anxious are the parents--& that's what you have to try to hide. If you don't, the child will sense your anxiety, & that could lead to trouble. In fact, one of the main theories about why real stammering develops is based on this point. According to this theory, if children are harassed while working through this normal stage, they'll become nervous about their ability to say things fluently, & the stammer will stay.
Pronunciation
Between three & five, the child's language greatly increases in quantity. Some of the most important rules of the language--those to do with the order of words in a sentence, for instance--have been largely mastered; & they have a working vocabulary which must be approaching 5,000 words. Fortunately, their pronunciation has been keeping pace with these developments.
By five, only some of the more subtle friction consonants cause any problems. Children at this age may still be having difficulty distinguishing such pairs of words as "fin" & "thin," for example, or "sin" & "shin," & these difficulties may show up in the way they pronounce these words. "W" & "r" may still be confused, as when "red" comes out as "wed." But on the whole, pronunciation errors with single consonants are found only in long or unfamiliar words. When children hear a word such as "disturb," for instance, they often pronounce the final "b" as "v"--though they would never normally mix up "b" & "v" in this way.
A child who can't manage an "r" sound & who says "wed" for "red," or "bwik" for "brick" is doing a perfectly normal thing. In fact, it's so normal that to call it an "error" is really quite misleading. Children are unable to do anything about it, until their ability to make certain distinctions with their lips & tongue reaches a particular stage. They then slip into making the distinction quite naturally. They won't be rushed. And parents who don't like a particular pronunciation, at this age, won't get anywhere if they try to change it. Everyone will get upset, & that's all.
THE EARLY SCHOOL YEARS
Most five-year-olds are very fluent beings. To hear them at play must surely convey the impression that the period of language acquisition has come to an end. They say so much & they understand so much. There's nothing more to learn. That must be it. Language acquired. All done.
It's a tempting view, but it isn't correct. We have to realise that language learning never ends. The vocabulary level of the pre-adolescent child must be somewhere between 10,000 & 20,000 words--but this is only a fraction of the total vocabulary of the language, which is lurking silently in the wings. There are over a million words in English. Of course, few speakers ever master more than about a tenth of this total. The remainder is taken up by the enormous number of technical & regional terms, which only small numbers of people ever learn. But still, a tenth of a million is a lot of words. Whether you're nine or 90 years old, there's always vocabulary to learn!
COMPLICATIONS?--Being Bilingual
"And what will happen to my child?", you might be asking, if you happen to be a reader with a foreign spouse. One worried parent wrote like this: "I am French, & married to an English husband. We live in England, & we have just had our first child. I want to speak French to her, but my husband can only speak English. What should we do? We don't want to confuse the child..." This view is very widely held. "If children are exposed to more than one language at an early age, they will become confused. They'll mix up the languages & speak neither well. They'll fall behind in school. They'll..."
Enough of this gloom! There's no reason for it. The World is full of children who grow up bilingual without a linguistic care in the World. I mean that literally. Well over half the children in the World grow up in a multilingual environment. Traditionally, that hasn't been the case in Britain & the U.S.A., so we're not so used to it. Most children in these two countries are monolingual. But as you travel around Europe, Africa, South Asia, China...you'll find that we are the exception rather than the rule. There are millions of children who know two--or even three or more--languages, & thrive on it. They are certainly not delayed or disadvantaged by their bilingualism. On the contrary, their ability to handle more than one language can prove to be a real asset.
Let's return to the French/English situation, & see why there won't be a problem here either. The mother is probably thinking that her child will hear so much French & so much English at the same time that there's bound to be a muddle. But it won't be like that. Children aren't usually exposed to 50 per cent of one language & 50 per cent of another, during the first years of life. Usually, the mother is in far more contact with the child & that means the linguistic environment will be largely a monolingual one. Sometimes, the amount that a father says to his child, during the first year, can be as little as a tenth of what the child hears from the mother.
Even when a child is exposed to two languages equally, there's no problem. By the end of the fourth year, in fact, most bilingual children have reached the same stage of linguistic development in both languages as have their monolingual counterparts.
There have now been several studies of bilingual language acquisition & the message is loud & clear. There's no cause for concern if parents treat their children in a normal, sensible way, talking to them in the way which comes most naturally & not getting self-conscious or contrived. Above all, it's not necessary to develop a complicated language-teaching policy--something which can happen when both parents are fluent in both languages. I've been told of one family who were so concerned to promote equal facility in their child that they worked out a timetable--English Mondays, Welsh on Tuesdays, & so on. Of course they couldn't keep it up, but the home situations became quite tense for awhile, until they dropped the idea.
Language Delay
There's so much individual variation among children that all ages have to be taken with a pinch of salt. Thus there's no cause for concern if your child hasn't begun to produce some first words by 12 months, or has reached two & is still not joining words together into single sentences. I know of many cases of children who have been virtually silent until two, & who have then begun to speak with a vengeance.
On the other hand, the averages do mean something. If most children are producing first words by 12 months, & your child still hasn't produced a word six months later, then it's only natural to feel concerned. Other parents will be proudly talking about what the children are saying, & you will feel out of it. The best advice I can offer is to say, if you do feel concerned, talk about it--to whoever will listen. Compare your experiences with those of other parents. After you've heard a mother of seven say that "two of hers didn't talk until three," or words to that effect, you'll feel a bit better.
GAMES WHICH HELP LANGUAGE
It's difficult to think of a game where language doesn't have some role to play, but some games are particularly good at focusing on certain aspects of spoken language. Here's a section which can be used with children in the pre-school period.
* Pre-reading books. For example, the Ladybird "Talkabout" books. They contain many interesting pictures & picture stories, which can provide the focus for a conversation, as well as special tasks which focus on spoken language, such as "Which noise does each animal make?"
* Favourite toys which involve many components are good for vocabulary development, such as a doll's house & furniture, or a farm & animals. Incidentally, boys get as much fun out of a doll's house as do girls.
* Do what I do. You take turns to instruct each other in a sequence of events, such as "Touch your nose, clap your hands, scratch your ear." Good for listening comprehension as well as the production of sentence sequences.
* Hunt the...anything--bricks, pennies, toy cars etc. Parent & child take turns to hide & find. "Where's the car? Is it under the chair? Behind the clock?" The game makes use of a lot of spatial language, & is particularly useful if the parent has to stay in one place (e.g. while cooking, feeding another child & so on).
* What am I thinking of? Parent & child take turns to describe an object in a room, one feature at a time. "It's something big...with four legs..." The game helps the development of vocabulary by making the child focus on the features of an object which are central to its meaning.
* Puppets are very useful in getting children to use questions, commands & other kinds of language which they may not so readily use with adults.
* What's missing? Show a small selection of familiar objects. Take one away & see if the child can remember which it is. The task helps to train memory in relation to vocabulary. But don't take turns on this one, if you can possibly help it. Otherwise you might begin to feel very depressed, when you fail more than the child does!
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"I made it 'specially for you,"
He said, & handed me
The dubious daub of colour
He had made for me to see.
A horse? A cat? A fish? A shoe?
Who quibbles with such art?
No matter what it was I knew
It came straight from his heart.
I told him it was beautiful--
I loved his big surprise!
And a million Dollars couldn't buy
That pleased look in his eyes.
"Especially for you"--three words
Such potent magic hold,
They turn the smallest gift on Earth
To one of purest gold.
--Helen Marshall
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