Professor Christian Keysers discusses the hypothesis that babbling in infants may actually be the way a child trains its mirror neuron system.

There has been a lot of thought about the role that mirror neurons could play in language, and there are in particular two ways in which the two things have been linked. One is if you imagine a young infant trying to learn to speak, say the parent is trying to talk him into saying “Papa” before “Mama”, and therefore keeps telling “Papa” to the baby. What the baby needs to be able to do is match the sound with what it takes to produce a similar sound. Now we have quite a bit of evidence that while you hear as an adult the sounds of someone else, you actually activate the motor program it takes to reproduce that sound, making this mirror [neuron] system very useful in learning to reproduce words we hear in other people. Now in infants, we believe that babbling may actually be the way the kid finds out and trains it’s own mirror [neuron] system. We also know that in songbirds, we find things that are very similar to mirror neurons, and these songbirds need them to be able to learn to sing a song by listening to their parents. Now at this level we have good evidence for the link between the mirror [neuron] system and language. There is another domain in which the two have tried to be linked, and there the evidence is a little bit less strong, and it’s the idea that we understand language because we map it on our own body. So if I would ask you whether running was an action, part of why you would know it was an action is because you would actually activate your own motor program for running if you hear the word running. And this kind of embodiment of the words you hear seems to be working well in utilizing things that are similar to mirror neurons for action words like running, but it’s less clear whether they are important for other aspects; say if you think about words like an idea, or words like generosity, which are not directly actions but concepts.

mirror neurons, mirror system, language acquisition, babbling, christian, keysers