Baby Talk

My sisters and I are very close in age, essentially all babies at the same time. So we remembered and talked among ourselves about some of our baby talk later in childhood. I had a hunch that our phonetic sounds, even the shapes of our mouths when speaking, mimicked the shapes of the things we named. Because I had entertained these thoughts, when my fifth grade teacher prompted the class for a mnemonic to remember which measure is a decigram (1/10 gram) and which is a dekagram (10 grams) I immediately went for the soft consonant sound versus the hard one. Hard sound = large unit; soft sound = small unit.

Fast forward to the present day. I'm watching a television story about synesthesia which concludes with a scientist indicating an association between phonetic sounds (again, as represented by the shape of the mouth when making them) and physical characteristics of objects named or described, as a possible foundation for the development of spoken language. How frustrating for me, when they could have asked children about their baby talk and come to the same conclusion at any time in history. Nobody asks the children. (OK, I mean, not enough people ask the children.) People! Duh, no shit Sherlock. Ask the children! As the people between the pre-verbal and the verbal life. That's where the answers live. Thank you for letting me rant. My inner ten-year-old is upset.