1. KIDS ARE ABLE TO LEARN THE LANGUAGE AND EVEN PERCIVE IT
WHEN THEY ARE STILL IN THE WOMB. HOW DOES IT HAPPEN?
By, Jenniffer Lilibeth De Jesús Navarro.
When children are born, their sounds are mainly limited to crying. They are not yet using
sounds to communicate, but simply expressing their feelings in the only way they have.
At this time, they may start making sweet sounds or laughing. Perception of speech
sounds, however, develops even before birth, according to some researches was
discovered that unborn babies’ heart rate will decrease at the sound of their mother’s
voice. Further, the study has indicated that new sounds directed at the womb through a
loudspeaker can also cause the heart rate to decrease, and as the sound is repeated,
the heart rate will eventually increase again. When tried with stories and poems, the
heart rate would also decrease with the new sounds, and decrease with repetition. It
seems that babies can learn to recognize speech patterns and voices before birth.
With the time, when babies are born they start to make many more sounds. Before
speaking words, babies go through a period of babbling, in which they are practicing the
sounds, intonations and rhythms of language. They learn to repeat sounds they hear
and how moving their tongue and lips change the sounds they are making. They learn
to adequate their voice, to yell and whisper. They start to babble in reaction to stimuli,
and eventually use it to manipulate others by expressing needs and wants. When they
are about 1 year old, the child’s babbling becomes more melodically clear and

2. intonation starts to sound more like adult patterns, at the beginning, the sounds will be
mainly drawn out vowel sounds and soon after they tend to add consonant sounds and
repetitive sounds, like “ma” or “papa.” They may combine these first sounds with
gestures.
In this stage children learn to recognize words, and even begin to understand their
meaning. This is quite a feat considering how most people speak. Through normal
adult conversation, children must learn to pick out sound patterns that are repeated and
attach meaning to them.
Likely, through a combination of child-directed speech, repetitive observation and innate
ability, by the end of the first year babies may have a vocabulary of 50 or more words.
You can ask a 10 month old where his blue car is and chances are he will look around
or point to it, maybe even crawl over to it. They are unable, at this point to say the
words, however. It takes time and practice to open their mouths and produce a specific
sound on purpose. They are storing these words and meanings and slowly learning to
make sounds. Eventually they will put them together and learn to speak words. They
begin with content words. Sometimes a single word may represent an entire thought.
“Boo” may mean, “read me a book.” If a baby wants a bottle and is just beginning to
learn to use language to manipulate, he may point to his bottle, say (or scream), which
obviously means, “give me my bottle, now!” Of course, this becomes problematic when
a child yells, and the parents do not know whether he wants a bottle, a ball, or a book,
or if he just feels like yelling.

3. Soon, when children are about 2 years older or so, spoken vocabulary starts to catch
up. This is the vocabulary spurt and it goes from a new word every few days or so, to
as many as several new words a day. On average, 22 to 37 new words a month. This
of course varies from child to child. It is at this stage that children begin to learn words
by imitating. This is when adults begin to hear words they would rather not hear and
wish they had not said. Children begin to string two content words together to indicate
location, “daddy gone;” possession, “doggie mine;” or action, “mommy juice.” This is
also called telegraphic speech. It is quite an accomplishment because it shows an
understanding of language; not only words, but context, and the difference between
action words and objects.
Gradually, through practice, they begin to master the morphology of language and start
adding affixes, like “ing.” “Mommy walk” becomes “Mommy walking.” Soon they start
using function words like “the” and “is,” and string together grammatically correct
sentences, like “Mommy is walking.” Eventually, they master syntax, so that “Daddy
grandma phone talk” becomes “Daddy is talking to Grandma on the phone.” By this
stage a child is certainly able to communicate and will spend the rest of their childhood,
and indeed their adulthood, expanding their vocabulary and knowledge of language,
then when they are older and attend to school they become being aware of the merely
use of the grammar point, connotation etc.
Finally, I have to say it, “Language is just a beautiful miracle, which is developed with
the time, some people more than other, but it is a blessing to have this means of
communication”.