That's Me!

Babies and Name Recognition

By Katherine Bontrager

Andrea Burnett and her partner were stunned when their twins began to recognize their own names at 5 months of age. "We couldn't believe it that when we called Ava, she looked at us," says the mom from Richmond, Calif. "When we called Sophia, she looked at us, too. But Ava didn't look when we called Sophia and the same for Sophia when we called Ava. It was so interesting!"

Burnett says that they didn't do anything special to help the girls with the recognition. Rather, it was a matter of unplanned repetition. "We just repeat their names to them over and over, though not to the point of being obnoxious, and make eye contact as much as possible when we speak to them," she says. "Saying their names within other sentences and while doing something together, especially while feeding them when you really have their undivided attention, really helps, I think. When I breastfeed them, I look into their eyes and say, 'I love you, Ava' and 'I love you, Sophia.'"

Burnett's experience is a normal one, according to Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a child development psychologist and co-director of the Temple University Infant Lab in Ambler, Pa. Hirsh-Pasek has researched cognitive and social approaches to early language development for children 0 to 3, with particular emphases on early grammatical learning, word acquisition and language comprehension.

"There was a 1995 article titled Infants' Recognition of the Sound Patterns of Their Own Name by Mandel, Jusczyk and Pisoni, which detailed a study focusing on when children first learn their own names," Hirsh-Pasek says. "The study found that by 4 1/2 months infants are already tuned in to listening to the sound of their name, its stress patterns and the sounds that go with it."

Hirsh-Pasek says that it's to be expected that children would quickly grasp the sound of their own names – after all, it's often the most frequent sound they hear. "In natural speech with children, we use the name as a wedge," she says. "It's much the same as when you travel to a different country. You choose words that are wedges for you – you recognize the word and then figure out the words around it."

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