Mind your grammar around babies. They might understand the speech patterns even though they might not understand the words yet.
“Babies are constantly looking for language clues in context and sound,” said Jill Lany, psychologist and director of the baby lab at the University of Notre Dame, in a press release.
Lany’s study hints that during the first year of life, babies track word patterns to lay a foundation for learning words later in the months before their second birthdays.
“My research suggests that there are some surprising clues in the sound stream that may help babies learn the meanings of words. They can distinguish different kinds of words like nouns and verbs by information in that sound stream.”
For example, babies seem to be able to recognize “adjacent relationships” in which particular sounds, such as the phrase “it’s a,” herald an object in the stream of words.
“If I were to say to you, ‘Oh look, it’s a dax,’ you might not know what a ‘dax’ is, but the cue ‘it’s a’ lets a baby know that what follows is an object,” explained Lany.
By the same token, “I’m daxing it” would indicate that “dax” is an action.
“We often think about grammar coming after word-learning, but in fact, my research shows that all this information that babies are picking up in that first year of life about how words are occurring in their language, actually is supporting this process of word-learning prior to mastery of language.”
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