Babies learn how to take turns in a conversation long before they can string a sentence together, according to fascinating new research.
While the average baby doesn’t start babbling until at least nine months, scientists have discovered that infants start perfecting their manners long before this.
According to a new study published in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences, six-month-olds are capable of responding in communication, with their responses taking about 200 milliseconds on average – the same time it takes to blink. Words, in comparison, take around 600 milliseconds to formulate.
According to Stephen Levinson from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistic, in human infants, turn-taking is found in the ‘proto-conversations’ with caretakers, appearing around six months of age, long before infants know much about language. These infant-caretaker interactions are initially adult-like in terms of how fast infants can respond. But as they develop into more sophisticated communicators, infants’ turn-taking abilities slow down, likely due to both learning more and more complex linguistic structures.
All of this suggests that humans may have inherited a primate turn-taking system, which may have started out as a gestural form of communication then later (about one million years ago) became one primarily expressed through voice.
