Research Book 3/5

   The time has come to find out “What Children Learn about Language”. I found it rather remarkable just how much children know, and how much they learn in such a short period of time. The two major reasons that babies and young children learn so much about language is that first, we are actually born with a certain knowledge about language and secondly, we have great tutors surrounding us at all times (parents, siblings, and grown-ups). When babies are born, before they can even speak, they are able to distinguish different sounds such as “l” or “r”  in any language, with no regards to the language that is being spoken at home. This is rather difficult to accomplish by a Japanese adult because when we are accustomed to a specific language it changes and molds the way we respond to specific sounds, but it seems to come natural for a newborn whose one month old. At first, babies place the sounds they hear in their language into various categories, so that these sounds can be smoothly incorporated into words, they reach this phase by the time they are about twelve months old. This is easily noticed when babies begin to babble. As it turns out babies who heard Spanish sounds, babble in a way that sounds Spanish!, and the same goes for every other language, this is when babies start to take up the sounds of their individual culture. This baby babbling is a crucial process for babies to get to know the language they are learning because it appears they are actually “creating a kind of mouth-to-sound map, relating the movements of their speech articulators…to the sounds they produce” (124). This idea reveals how inborn speech and language clearly is.  Grown-ups and family members are a big part of this learning process, but not as much as the mothers themselves and their Motherese language. Motherese is referred to the way mothers speak to their babies, in that affectionate and slow, dragged out pronunciation of words. If babies had a choice in what to listen to, they would definitely choose motherese, because there’s a comfort level associated with it, and it is also a universal language. Motherese consists of  clean short words or sentences, with clearly pronounced sounds that are usually repeated over and over. This simple unconscious everyday talk brings together, nature and nurture to aid these babies through their never ending journey of language.