I’ve just realized something about infant speech development

I’m a mother of a few kids. I probably should know a lot about the speech development of children by now, but I’ve just realized that all these years I’ve apparently been harbouring a major misunderstanding about the speech development of babies. I always thought the important thing about speaking and speech was the correct use of words (from the language that one is raised in) and the appropriate use of these words to transfer meaning from one person to another, and back again. I always thought speech was about accuracy and the transfer of meaning, but apparently the earliest speech development of babies has nothing at all to do with meaning or content.

The first hint that I’ve been making an apparently incorrect assumption came during discussions with an infant health nurse during our baby’s standard developmental checks. She kept insisting that it is of huge importance that the baby be making lots and lots of babbling and “jargoning” noises, which are strings of utterly meaningless sounds in a pattern that at a distance might sound to the ear like enthusiastic and expressive speech, but when analysed, is pure nonsense, just a random string of phonemes (English language phonemes). I thought it was more important that our baby had already appeared to say a few meaningful words to refer to things and people in baby’s environment, but the nurse remained fixated on the question of whether baby was coming up with enough excited gibberish.

I picked up an old edition of a baby manual that I may have read years ago, I don’t remember. I was sceptical about the advice and predictions in this baby manual when it was new, and with the wisdom of hindsight I’m all the more sceptical. It describes all manner of good and undesirable toddler behaviours that I’m sure our older kids never did (such as lying in toddlerhood), and it describes many practices and problems that we never experienced. In the text I found confirmation of the things that the baby nurse had been saying. According to Penelope Leach “There is no particular point in trying hard to identify your baby’s first words. It does not matter whether he uses any or not at this stage. His expressive, fluent varied jargon is an absolute assurance that he is going to speak when he is ready.” Leach goes on to explain that babies typically get the idea of using a particular word to refer to a particular object later in their speech development. So according to the experts, being able to speak fluent nonsense, (or baloney or bulldust, whatever you wish to call it) in a social, expressive manner, as though you want to be a part of the social world of speech but have nothing to say that is meaningful or makes sense, is the precursor to the development of what is generally considered speech. Might this explain why so many autistics are so late in their speech development?