Does your baby talk? I bet your initial answer was no. But I wasn’t asking if your baby said anything that you could understand, I was asking if they could talk. You see, there is a very large difference between whether your baby talks and whether you can understand what your baby says.
When my daughter was a baby, she talked non-stop. The trick was, we didn’t always know what she was saying. Babies seem to speak their own language and it is not a language that we as adults are privy to.
The reason I call it a language is because studies have been done scientifically and you can do them yourself. Put your baby in a room with another baby of the same age but from a different culture and they will not have a language barrier. They will speak to each other and play.
So what language do babies speak? Why can a baby from Africa, a baby from South America and a baby from Russia understand each other? Because babies communicate on the most basic of levels and it is fascinating to watch. I know some parents who want google and babble back at their babies in the same language they use, instead they feel that if they just speak to them in whatever their native language is, eventually the baby will understand it.
Have you ever wondered if your baby understood a lot more than they were letting on? Babies understand your language a long time before they speak it. Their urge to speak the language is driven out of a need to communicate. This is particularly true if they cannot get through to you any other way.
Babbling to your baby in baby talk will not delay this process. Instead, it will delight them because while it may just be meaningless babble to you – they appreciate your efforts. My daughter identified a lot of objects by odd vowel and consonant combinations. But since I used them back to her, I began to identify what words she used for what.
We were communicating long before English was a factor. She may not have spoken her first English words until nearly a year old, but she and I were talking for months before that. Oh – and her first English words were: Daa, BestBuy and Ed.
Yes – she called me Ed.