Sorry, fathers: Babies utter seemingly mundane words before they get to ‘dad’

Dads will just have to wait.

While children’s first words are often “mama,” across different languages and cultures, kids’ primary words are generally “this” and “that” before they utter “dad.”

These study of early vocabulary.

Children are excited to spread their curiosity with others and thus, use “this” and “that” early on to help demonstrate their point of view, according to a research team from Cornell University.

Kids generally learn the words between 12 and 18 months and they attach themselves to the phrase because they find other peoples’ perspectives hard to understand.

Amalia Skilton, a linguistics scholar at Cornell University, said children utilize “this” and “that,” in several languages such as English, Spanish and Mandarin, which have relatively simple systems for demonstratives.

Skilton also observed a community of roughly 5,000 people in Peru, who speak Ticuna. She found that the kids learn “ecocentric” demonstratives such as “this near me” or “here near me” two years earlier than “interactive” demonstratives such as “that near you” or “there near you.”

3

She found that 12 of the 14 1-year-olds in the community said “this” and “that” or “here” and “there.”

Ticuna is spoken by around 69,000 Indigenous people living around the Amazon and Solimões River in Peru, Colombia and Brazil. The language has six demonstratives, and four were studied because they are the ones most commonly said.

Skilton explained: “Children learn demonstratives that call others’ attention to objects – such as ‘this/that’ and ‘here/there’ – at extremely young ages when they know very few other words.”

3

“ ‘This’ and ‘here’ show up just as early as stereotypical first words like ‘mama,’ ” she added.

She went on: “While adults think of these words as simple, their meanings are fairly challenging for children to understand at young ages and having trouble with them is a typical part of child development.”

3

Skilton stated that these phrases demonstrate the universal drive to share attention, and said that the finding confirms that parents can expect their child to say those words at around 12 to 18 months old, “no matter what language they speak.”

She believes that knowing these words is a function of cognitive language, rather than any particular language learning. Writing in the Journal of Child Language, Skilton even assured caregivers that they shouldn’t be worried about children under 3 making mistakes when using interactive words.