COPENHAGEN, Denmark — An article a few years back in Psychology Today attempted to explain why the much-discussed “middle child” differs from the others. One of the reasons, the writer posited, was that the parents teach the first-born to talk, whereas the second child and subsequent children acquire most of their verbal skills from the older sibling.
Other skills, painstakingly taught to the elder by the parents, get passed on through the older-sibling conduit.

It’s interesting to watch as the older child passes language on to the younger in the same way we parents instructed the older one. They use the same word clues, explanations and examples.
The notion of oldest child as teacher made sense to me all these years, until a very recent experience made me wonder whether it’s the children who teach their parents to speak, or at least how to speak. The experience demonstrated almost a total regression from intelligent speech to guttural, gurgling, cooing sounds that babies make.
Let me explain:
Lapsing between soporificness, somnolence, stupefacience and narcolepsy on a nine-hour flight from Atlanta to Copenhagen last week, I picked up most of a seatmate’s pre-dawn conversation. My contribution was limited to “Oh, I see,” “How interesting” and “You’re right,” not because of boredom or haughtiness on my part but due to her effusiveness; I began by asking her a question and she took it from there; I had primed the verbal pump.
I’d overheard her cell phone conversation with her husband prior to take-off. She spoke only Danish, then handed the phone to her daughter, about 3, and said, “Dad wants to talk to you.” Did that statement mean she spoke only English to her daughter? The child spoke only English to her dad.
Once we were airborne, I asked my seatmate, Mette (pronounced Meta). She explained that yes, she spoke only English to her child, for two reasons: The parents were free to speak Danish without fear of being understood; second, “If my daughter’s to succeed in the world, she’ll have a better chance with English.” She mentioned also that “Some day I’ll get around to teaching her Danish.”
Yeah right, in the same way that my parents got around to teaching us five children Spanish, and the way I — and most of the Southwest — somehow got around to teaching Spanish to our youngsters.
Our conversation started because of my fascination with how Mette spoke and the smooth, lilting qualities of her English. She hasn’t picked up the American mannerism of sprinkling “like” and “ya know” throughout her speech. Maybe that’s next.
But things went south from there. It turns out that her 3-year-old, Line (pronounced Lena), is only half the equation. The daughter also has a little sister, a 3-month-old whom mother and daughter were eager to get back to, somewhere in Denmark. When I inquired about other children, my seatmate began such a transformation that I suspected she’d regained her infancy. What previously was mature conversation, inflection and intonation suddenly became baby talk.
She cooed and gave a lengthy dose of ga-ga, goo-goo palaver. It’s true that when referring to young ones, adults often effect a more childish, kinder, gentler tone. But this woman had tailor-made patois for her husband, for her 3-year-old and for the infant as well.
Thus, a reference to the baby necessitated a constriction of the larynx to make mommy sound more like an infant running through random sounds. Now everything Mette uttered was clear, but it seemed odd that a woman in her late 20s would be sounding like a newborn, however a newborn sounds. The plus is that all three of her loved ones know exactly who’s being addressed or referred to. And when speaking of her by-then-dozing Line, Mette spoke like a 3-year-old. Mette sounded like an adult in making any reference to her husband.
Listen sometime to a parent describing the clever thing a child just said. Quite often, the parent imitates the child, using the same juvenile speech patterns of the child. But in the case of my seatmate, she went way beyond the pale. And that’s why Mette appeared to gurgle a lot. Probably because she surmised babies sound a certain way, Mette needed to return the speech in kind.
Why do people baby-talk? I painfully imagine pre-speech creatures, listening to a gurgling, cooing, twaddling parent and thinking, “Enough already. I understand what you’re saying but I don’t dig the way you’re saying it.”
Trying to capture the right flavor of what someone said can be difficult. Notice how many women, imitating how their husband put them down, will imitate the masculine speech by making it sound rough, gravelly, unrefined and, if she’s angry enough, stupid.
Similarly — as anyone who’s ever watched a high school play based on mistaken identify can testify — males imitate female voices by giving them an artificially high-pitched quality. In reality, male and female voices are not that different from one another.
I once watched auditions for a children’s play, in which a dozen kids, under age 10, did a fine job of reading lines for roles of children their age. Upon hearing them, the director said something like, “I’d like you to try it like this” and spewed out a few lines of what he really thought was kid-talk, but he sounded more like a duck. It came out strained, and the children who reacted to the new instructions obviously felt uncomfortable as 8- and 9-year-olds trying to sound the way the director thought it should be.
Well, the lengthy three-frequency monologue delivered by my Danish companion made me want to locate that Psychology Today article and try to determine whether I’d misread it. I’d really been sold on the theory that kids acquire language from their parents. But in the case of Mette, she had the benefit of three instructors: her husband, her 3-year-old and her almost-newborn.
When I returned to my assigned seat, where my wife Bonnie had just finished copping a few zees, I was relieved to hear a person utter real speech, not twaddle. And that sounded good.