Werker – newborn communication

Newborn infants are prepared in a number of ways for acquiring language. I wouldn’t say that they really speak yet, at birth. They have some vocal repertoire, primarily crying and vegetative sounds. Some people say, and there’s some research to suggest, that those ultimately turn into the vowels and consonants of language. But what newborns do have is wonderful skills for listening to language. They seem to have been prepared both by biology and by prenatal experience for listening to the mother’s voice and to the sounds and rhythmical characteristics of the native language.  

So at birth, newborn infants show a preference for their mother’s speech; their mother’s voice over other female voices. They show a preference for language samples with the rhythmical properties of their native language versus an unfamiliar language. So for example, an English-exposed newborn will prefer listening to English and German and other languages with that kind of rhythm over languages like Spanish and Japanese that have different timing characteristics.  

Newborn infants also show a number of other biases and preferences that are harder to explain on the basis of prenatal experience. They show a preference for listening to speech over non-speech. They show a preference for, or an ability to discriminate words that will ultimately carry meaning versus words that will ultimately carry structure in language. So content versus function words have different characteristics. Nouns, verbs, adjectives–words like dog, run, pretty; they treat as different than words, function words, that will ultimately carry structure like with, the, of. And they discriminate those two classes of words categorically.  

So the set of abilities, some of which are probably given, as I said, by biology or an interaction between biology and prenatal experience and some of which are completely tailored from prenatal listening experience, prepare the newborn infant, at birth, to listen to speech over other types of sounds, to listen to their mother’s voice, to listen to and pick out members of their linguistic community, and to begin to classify those words that they’re hearing into the two big categories that will ultimately be necessary to put together meaning and grammar in acquiring a language. So they’re pretty well prepared at birth for acquiring language.