How Babies Learn to Talk: It Takes the Whole Body to Learn Language Skills

At age one, most babies can be heard saying a few basic words such as Mama and Papa. Oftentimes, it’s an incessant chatter of babbling that hardly makes any sense to adults. However, this babbling is proof of tremendous brain development in an infant. In fact, by age one, scientists are able to predict a child’s language skills and abilities based on the anatomy of the child’s brain.

Surprising study

When babies learn language, it isn’t just a matter of hearing the language or just the development of one part of the human brain. A recent University of Washington study has some very surprising results when it comes to linguistic development of babies.

In the study, the brain matter of seven month old infants was measured using a voxel-based morphometry in order to get whole-brain imaging results. The test measured the amount of gray matter and white matter in the brains of the infants. The gray matter is made up of nerve cells, while the white matter shows the various connections in the brain. In this case, the more grey and white matter, the merrier!

A child’s growing brain

In the first three years of life, a baby has as much as double the number of synapses in the brain compared to when he reaches adulthood. This is because by the first year, the brain size of the baby will have doubled in size and by the third year of life, it will be about 80% of its adult size.

In the study, when the babies reached a year old, the same babies were once again tested and the results surprised researchers.

Results show that the development of motor skills and memory processing skills are also integral in the baby’s ability to learn a language by his first birthday.

Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area

The cerebral cortex is responsible for a person’s cognitive abilities. However, it’s not just the part of the brain relating to language that is developed during infancy. Typically, Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area are known to be the main major areas of the brain responsible for language skills development.

Added role of the cerebellum and hippocampus

However, the cerebellum and hippocampus also need to be properly developed. This is surprising because these parts of the brain are responsible for motor learning and memory processing rather than for language skills.

Learn language skills: What it means

Based on the results of the study, it seems that the way a baby learns a language or develops his linguistic skills is through a combination of listening and memorizing. This is followed by displaying keen motor skills in making the mouth and tongue to imitate the sounds the baby has heard.

Therefore, language skills are a combination of developing keen listening skills, memorizing the sounds heard from the environment, processing it then trying to imitate the sounds using the mouth and tongue. This is why so many areas of the brain are affected when it comes to language development.

Photo Credit: Baby