That's Me!

Babies and Name Recognition

By Katherine Bontrager

Heather Bortfeld, an assistant psychology professor at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas, also has discovered this to be true in her studies with infants and language. Bortfeld works on research with special emphases on experiential and contextual influences on language development and use.

"Parents often speak to an infant using his or her name in isolation, for example when trying to attract the infant's attention," Bortfeld says. "Given that frequency and regularity of verbal input are the driving forces behind language development, it's not surprising that an infant's own name is one of the very first things a child recognizes."

Bortfeld says that other important words include "mommy" and "daddy" – or whatever terms parents use to refer to themselves and to one another. "My research has demonstrated that infants are then able to use these highly familiar words to begin to segment subsequent words out of the speech stream, which opens the door to further word recognition," she says. "Word recognition is the first step in word learning, so this is a fundamental step in the language development process."

A child's first word won't be until around 12 months, but they'll comprehend a few other words, between 20 to 25, by 10 months, Hirsh-Pasek says. "But by comparison, it shows just how impressively early infants can understand their own name," she says.

Burnett and her partner had no plan to help their girls learn their names – there were no games or activities that spurred this learning on. And that's the way Hirsh-Pasek says it should be.

"Parents need to just act natural, and children will learn their names," Hirsh-Pasek says. "Infants learn their names because we us their names a lot. We talk to them in register, which means we speak with slowed down, simpler sentences. We call them by name to try to attract their attention, so what often happens is that we use their names more often than we would in normal conversations with older children or adults."

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