Molding by Experience

If you've ever had a younger sibling or anyone in your life and watched them grow and mature, you know that how they speak is always a particularly interesting area to joke around with. For example, my younger sister would make up two syllable words for our names by the time she was about two. For example, my sister Kathryn was "kaka," then there was mama, dada, gaga, etc. What was interesting about this was that since my name began with a vowel, she put a "y" in front to compensate so my nickname became "yaya." This all directly coincided with what we learned in lecture about how young babies talk using only vowels including our names to grasp our attention for something she needed at the moment. But remembering how my younger sister learned to talk, I always picture her attentively listening and watching us converse on occasion. Brains are so malleable at that age, it's unbelievable to think of everything she was absorbing and how we were inadvertently teaching her to speak. As discussed in lecture, we can actually do very little to teach them how to talk, it is mainly what they absorb on their own and gather from their surroundings. Just like my little sister, picking up on the main consonants in everyone's names so she could begin joining the conversation.