That Was Supposed to Happen

Even before babies learn to talk, they begin imitating their parents' speech. There may not be any words, but the stream of gibberish is richly imbued with emotional meaning. They also learn to imitate the nuance of pauses and intonation found in adult speech patterns. Add in extra "communication channels" like gestures, body language, and facial expression, and Baby is actually conveying an astonishing amount of incredibly meaningful information. Of course, all of this potent communication ability is eventually augmented one step further with the addition of a linguistic punch, the use of words and language, to add yet another layer of meaning. (Here's a funny example of what this looks like in an advanced stage.)

Over the last year or so, Shiloh and I have been working on developing these communication channels (also called "modes" in development jargon), and Shiloh's gotten very good with body language and facial expression. He's even fairly good at simple gestures, and can communicate very strong emotions in his inflection. But so far we haven't witnessed an attempt to mimic the nuance of adult speech patterns -- until last Friday.

I was getting Shiloh to practice making very specific sounds by asking him to tell me what kind of animal we should look up by imitating their sounds. After going down a short list, I threw in the catchphrase of a character on his favorite TV show (Widget from Wubbzy). At around the 37-second mark, he responds to my prompt by imitating her phrase exactly. He doesn't say the words, of course, but he does imitate the tone and intonation exactly. Which means that the imitation of adult speech patterns is finally beginning to emerge. We don't expect him to be hosting his own talk show by tomorrow morning, of course, but we're one definite step closer to the goal.