When adults talk, babies listen—and learn.

In fact, infants are listening to conversation and learning their first words as young as 10 months, but they are only bothering to learn words for objects they find interesting.

That’s a conclusion reached in a recent study by Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, H. Rodney Sharp Chair in Human Services, Education and Public Policy at UD, and colleagues at Temple University and the University of Evansville. The researchers found that babies don’t learn the names of things that a speaker is trying to teach them unless they already are interested in those particular objects.

Golinkoff, who has been studying language acquisition as director of UD’s Infant Language Project since 1974, says parents and caregivers can use this new research to interact more effectively with babies.

“The key for parents is to read their babies’ cues,” she says. “Talk with them, interact with them, but talk about what they’re interested in. They won’t learn the name of something they’re not interested in, so talk with them about an object they’re playing with or reaching for or looking at.”

In fact, Golinkoff says, babies up to about 10 months old are so self-centered that they will “mismap” names of objects, making it a waste of a parent’s time to try to teach them the name of something in which they’re not already interested. Looking at an object, holding it up for the baby to see and talking about it won’t work if the baby still considers the object uninteresting.

“They will learn the name of the boring object that the parent is saying to them, but they’ll apply it to the object that they’re interested in at the time,” Golinkoff says. “They just don’t take another person’s perspective into consideration, because they have limited awareness that another person even has independent thoughts.”

By about 12 months, she says, babies are becoming better at picking up social cues, and when they realize that a speaker isn’t naming the object they find interesting, they no longer erroneously attach the name to the interesting object. “Instead, they just won’t learn the name of the boring object at all,” she says.

By about 18 months, they start being able to learn the name of the object that a speaker is telling them, even if it wasn’t the object they found interesting. “And, by 24 months, they’re pros at reading social cues,” Golinkoff says. “They can watch what you’re doing and follow your gaze to see what you’re interested in, and they learn from that.

“That ability to pick up on social cues is one reason we think most kids have what’s called a ‘vocabulary spurt’ or a ‘word explosion’ between 18 and 24 months of age.”

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, psychology professor at Temple and director of its Infant Lab, who collaborated on the research, describes an 18-month-old as “a social sophisticate who can tap into the speaker’s mind and the vast mental dictionary that the adult has to offer.”

Golinkoff and Hirsh-Pasek conducted the research in collaboration with Shannon Pruden, a psychology doctoral student at Temple, and Elizabeth Hennon, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Evansville.

The findings were published in an article titled “The Birth of Words: 10-Month-Olds Learn Words Through Perceptual Salience” in the March/April issue of the journal Child Development. The study was funded through a grant from the National Science Foundation.

In their study, the researchers showed infants an “interesting” object and a “boring” one. They used a measure of word comprehension to examine whether they were guided by how much they liked an object (perceptual cues), as well as which object the speaker was naming (social cues), in learning a new word. They found that 10-month-olds, while unable to say the words, were able to learn the meaning of two new words in a single session.

According to the researchers, these results also have important implications for parents and caregivers. They suggest that babies are listening into our conversations and trying to learn words well before they can say them.

“Little babies are learning words fast, even at 10 months when they aren’t saying much at all, and that’s huge,” Golinkoff says. “So, parents should talk with their babies from early on because that’s the only way that infants can learn language. And, of course, they should talk about what the baby is interested in.”

She emphasizes talking “with” rather than “to” a baby, allowing the infant time to respond and to babble.

Golinkoff, whose previous research with Hirsh-Pasek has resulted in such books as Einstein Never Used Flashcards: How Our Children Really Learn and Why They Need to Play More and Memorize Less (2003), says the new research reinforces her previous advice to parents.

“It’s all about interaction with your child, not about buying the right educational toy or the right instructional software,” she says. “Sensitive and responsive parenting is what it’s all about. That’s how babies learn, and that’s how they become good people.”

Golinkoff, who is internationally known as an expert in infant language development and related issues, has co-authored six books. Einstein Never Used Flashcards, which won the 2003 Books for a Better Life award from the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, has been translated into Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Indonesian.

She and Hirsh-Pasek will soon publish a new book, Play=Learning, which grew out of a 2005 conference by the same name that they led at Yale University.

Golinkoff earned her doctoral degree in developmental psychology at Cornell University. She holds joint appointments at UD in the School of Education and the departments of Psychology and Linguistics and is a member of the University’s cognitive science program.

More information about the Infant Language Project is available on the web site [www.udel.edu/ILP/]. Parents interested in having their child participate in the research can call the lab at (302) 831-2073.