The Physical Limits to Speech

 How’s life in the trenches today? Is it a day you contemplate having a dozen children because they are just so cute and sweet and who can have too many of these little angels? Or is it a day you are questioning every life choice you have ever made that lead you to believe you could rase a child? A day where, no matter how hard you have tried, you still raised your voice and yelled at your child after they asked for the umpteenth time “why can’t I?” A day where your child snuck into the kitchen and dumped all the flour on the kitchen floor because it reminded her of that one time she played in snow and you just do not think you will both survive the rest of the day. 
  Those days are a harsh reality when you are a parent. The bad days make the good days that much sweeter. Though knowing that doesn't make it any easier to get through the bad days when they happen. And they do happen, and they happen to all of us. 
If you have a child, you have gotten through the hard stages of their inability to communicate their needs. If you have a really young child, you may be in the midst of this experience as you read! I am here to tell you that we do all get through it…eventually. With that being said, let’s look at why babies can’t speak right out of the womb.

  I know when we first brought my daughter, Brooklyn, home from the hospital I wished with every bone in my body that she could just tell me what she wanted when she wanted it. Sadly, it doesn't work that way and as my husband and I took our daughter to all of her pediatrician appointments we slowly learned that every few months she should be moving through five stages toward developing speech. 
  Our pediatrician explained to us at her newborn check up that she would go from just making reflexive phonation, such as coughing and crying noises to cooing, sounds that resemble vowels, in the first month alone. At her three month check up he told us that she should start, if she wasn't already, making clear vowel sounds with a variety of new sounds such as yells, raspberries, or screams, and that this stage was called expansion. Three months later at her six month check up, we were told that she should be starting to “babble,” or more technically canonical babbling, which occurs anywhere from five months to ten months of age and is when infants start producing strings of consonant-vowel syllables, such as “mamama” or “bababa.” Lastly, at her one year checkup we were informed she should be speaking meaningfully, which occurs anywhere from ten to eighteen months of age, and is when infants mix both babbling and meaningful speech to produce long intonated sounds. The doctor also explained to us that the time period allotments to each stage would vary with each child and not to worry if our child seemed “behind” schedule because a wide variance can exist before anything is truly “wrong” with the child. Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on who you ask, this was not the case with our little Brooklyn, as she was speaking in three to five word sentences at her first birthday, which makes for a funny, smart and a very opinionated one year old.
     Next, we learned that there are two critical factors involved in infants’ abilities to speak, and those are anatomical change and vocal learning. We basically learned that infants are not physically ready to speak no matter how much we teach them in the first days of their lives. Young infant’s vocal tracts are very different from adult’s and actually resemble that of a nonhuman primate  than that of an adult human! So all those times you call your infant your “little monkey,” you actually are not far off. Infant’s not only have a vocal tract that is, of course, much smaller than an adult’s, but it also has a broader oral cavity, a tongue mass that is proportionally larger and more anterior (frontal), and a more gradually sloping oropharyngeal tract. 

These physical differences start undergoing dramatic changes in the first six months of life as it develops into one that resembles that of an adult human. These anatomical changes contribute, at least to some extent, to the stages seen in infants’ vocalizations, which explains why those squishy newborns cannot tell us that they are still hungry at three in the morning when it seems you have fed them every hour on the hour.
     If you want to continue reading more information about the physical aspect of speech, Infant vocalizations in response to speech: Vocal imitation and developmental change, is a great and thorough article to look at. 
     Are you having fun yet? If not, try learning this sign and see if that helps!