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Teaching Your Baby to Speak

Talking to baby

Teaching Your Baby to Speak

Q-tip

The social months from about five months old until stranger anxiety grows toward the end of the year are a great time to introduce your baby to different people: not just grownups, but other children as well. Take your baby out for visits and playdates, or invite people into your home. Before long, you may even be able to teach her to wave bye-bye.

Your baby's repertoire of sounds and syllables starts to expand between now and her first birthday. Over the next few months, she'll slowly begin adding consonants, beginning with the explosives P and B and the humming M. The combinations of vowels and consonants will, for the first time, make it sound as though your baby is talking to you. She may sound, for example, as though she's saying, "Maaaamaaaa, Maaamaaa" and "Paapaa, Paapaa." But don't kid yourself. Your baby's not calling you by name just yet. These words mean just as much (or as little) to her as "Baaabaaa, Baaabaaa." At this stage, she's just having fun making noise.

By five or six months, your baby will string sounds together in a meaningless yet always sweet-sounding babble. This babble serves as good practice for later conversations. By six months, your baby will probably want to practice her new "language" skills with anyone who's willing to listen. Six months is a very social age. Your child will most likely welcome the company of others and will start talking (saying gaga or baba) to almost anyone.

Can We Talk?

As soon as your baby starts making vowel sounds, he starts to consider himself a real conversationalist. It hardly matters that you can't understand him and he can't understand you. (After all, the same is true of many conversations between adults.) Your baby wants to talk to you the same way he's heard you talk to others.

You may be surprised the first time your baby seems to wait for you to respond to his babbling. It seems incredible that in just six months, he's picked up the nuances of conversational style. When he starts pausing (perhaps to make sure you're listening), you can have an entire babbling conversation. First your baby talks and you listen; then he knows it's his turn to listen and your turn to talk. Indeed, because he stops to listen when you talk, you may find your infant much more civil than many adult conversationalists.

Q-tip

Imitate and echo your baby a lot during the next few months. Before long, your baby will begin to mimic and echo you, too. Okay, so he'll probably do that even if you don't imitate him, but in the meantime you'll both have fun babbling, and your baby will enjoy these conversations with you.

When your baby tries to have a "conversation" with you, be polite. Respond to your baby as you would to any adult who started to talk to you. Stop what you're doing (at least some of the time) and engage in face-to-face conversation. Listen to his babbling. When your baby pauses, he's probably waiting for your reply. (You may even hear his voice rise just before he pauses, as if he were asking you a question.) You can respond using real words, or you can echo your baby's sounds. As soon as you stop talking, your baby may start up again, trying to keep the conversation going.

Talking to your baby is not only polite; it speeds up your child's learning process. In general, the more you talk, the more your baby will try to talk. When your baby starts babbling conversations with you, at least initially, he's getting some social practice. But in the coming months, your conversations will become a tool for your baby to learn more complex sounds. Talk a lot to your baby if you can, but don't monopolize the conversation. Remember to give your infant a chance to talk while you listen.

Understanding conversations

Watch Your Language

Q-tip

Get in the habit of providing your baby with a narrative of your life together even before she can understand any of what you're saying. Whenever she's alert, tell her what you are doing. "Okay, I'm going to change your diaper now. First we have to take off your pants..."

Also describe to her what she is doing. "Look at you! Holding that rattle all by yourself. Can you shake it and make a sound? Good!" Your talking will hold your baby's interest, help her polish her social skills, and lay the groundwork for learning words.

What's the best way to talk to your baby? Let's start with a basic guideline: Try not to feel too silly talking to her. Even though your baby can't understand your vocabulary, she's beginning to understand the conversational process. The more you talk with her, the more she learns.

Feel free to talk to your baby in the same high-pitched, sing-song voice that parents have used with infants for centuries. Infants respond better to higher pitched sounds, so using a high voice will more readily capture your baby's attention.

Talk naturally. You don't need to simplify your words or grammar for your baby's sake. Remember, no matter how much you simplify your language, your baby doesn't understand what you're saying (at least not until around the sixth month). Your baby is not listening to you because she's fascinated by your ideas or your stories. She listens because she's fascinated by anything you do. Your baby just loves to interact with you. She could care less whether you're talking about the weather, your chores, or the thermodynamics of nuclear fusion.

Don't expend a lot of time and energy trying to understand what your baby is saying. She's probably not saying anything yet. (Real words don't usually come until around the first birthday.) For now, she's just trying to make sounds with her mouth and be sociable-just the way she has seen you do it.

By the end of the sixth month, long before she utters her first word, your baby begins to understand a few simple things that you say. So now's the perfect time to start providing a blow-by-blow of your life with baby. In addition to describing what you are doing (or she is doing), point out objects as you name them. Concentrate on immediate sights and sounds. The more you talk to your baby about the here and now and focus on the moment and describe what's there or what's going on, the easier it will be for her to make connections between the sights and sounds and tastes she perceives and the words you attach to them.

Q-tip

If you like children's music, you can choose from a huge selection of children's tapes and CDs. Most are well worth the investment. As long as the CD or tape features songs with a simple, catchy melody and easy or silly lyrics, your child will enjoy listening to it over and over again. Some favorite recording artists for young children (including infants) are Raffi, Barney, the music of Sesame Street, Tom Paxton, Joanie Bartels, and Peter, Paul, and Mary.

From six months (or even earlier) to a year, speak slowly and clearly to give your child a better chance to understand and distinguish individual words. Emphasize important words, especially nouns (person, place, or thing), through vocal stresses and frequent repetition. If you stress the same nouns often enough, your child will soon understand that these sounds she keeps hearing are the names of the things in her world: bottle, diaper, mama, dada. (Even if she doesn't understand their naming function, your baby will at least begin to associate the names with the objects.)

Same Old Song and Dance

Although conversation with you should provide the bulk of your child's pre-verbal language learning, other avenues can teach your baby about language. Like all learning tools for infants (and toddlers and preschoolers, too), the ones that teach language best are those that encourage your child to have fun learning:

Q-tip

Start your child on the road to reading early. Get your baby books of his very own that he can read with you or play with by himself. But at this age, avoid books with paper pages. Your child will not just "read" his books, but will pull on them, tear at them, chew on them, throw them, and drop them.

Sturdy board books, with pages made of thick cardboard, hold up well. So do bath books with pages made of padded vinyl or plastic. Cloth books will probably survive your child's infancy, and texture books like Pat the Bunny will get a lot of use before your child manages to rip out all the pages.

• Songs. Whether it's a bathtub song that you sing while washing up, a diaper-changing song that you've invented, silly sing-along songs by the likes of Raffi or Tom Paxton, "circle time" songs that encourage activity, or soft-sung lullabies at bedtime, your child will love it if you sing to him. The rhythms and melody of music may also facilitate language learning. A year from now, your baby's first extended strings of words may be those he's learned from listening to songs.
  If you do buy commercial children's music, don't let the tapes or CDs do all the work. Your child will respond much more readily to you singing along with taped music than he will to a disembodied voice through a speaker. So listen to the music with your child and work on memorizing the lyrics so that you can sing along, or sing your baby's favorite songs on your own when the tape deck or CD player is not available.
• Nursery rhymes. Read or recite nursery rhymes often. Repeat the same rhymes over and over again. Your baby will not mind the repetition (although you may tire of it). In fact, your baby will appreciate the familiarity of favorite pieces. At this age, he learns more from the repetition of a half-dozen or dozen well-chosen rhymes than he would from hearing 300 different rhymes with no reruns. With repeated hearings, your baby will start to pick out different words, if not to speak, at least to understand.
  Beginning around your baby's half-birthday, he will especially love nursery rhymes and songs that involve activity: bouncing on your knee (This Is the Way the Gentleman Rides and others), clapping, and finger play (Pat-a-Cake). Later in the year, when he begins standing up, he will also enjoy rhymes and songs that involve standing up and sitting down (Ring Around the Rosy, London Bridge, and the like).
• Books. Even at this early age, many children appreciate the worlds that books open up to them. In buying or borrowing books before your baby's first birthday, pick ones that feature just one colorful illustration of a single object per page. Busy pages that depict full scenes with painstaking detail may be more interesting to you, but they will confuse your baby, who won't know what to look at.

Reading, singing songs, and reciting nursery rhymes can all encourage the development of your infant's language and communication skills. But the main appeal of these activities to your baby is the sound of your voice and the loving attention you give him.