Chapter Four: On syntax and how children put words together

Petit Sounds

It might not take long for your baby to go from speaking their first words to combining them, but the way they do so is more exploratory than you might think. In this fourth episode, Elaine and Héctor take a look at syntax: verbs, nouns, adjectives, and adverbs.

Humans aren't unique in identifying speech sounds. We all know that parrots can replicate speech, but dogs have been known to identify objects by name, cats can recognise their owner's voice, and even African elephants have been able to identify the sounds of speech.

Links

• A dynamic systems approach to babbling and words
• Elephants can determine ethnicity, gender, and age from acoustic cues in human voices