Dr. Nancy Shankle begins our third class with a question, “How did we learn to talk?”
Dr. Shankle doesn’t sound like my mother but she is like her in every other way. I arrived to the first Introduction to Linguistics class on a crisp January day to find Dr. Shankle is a woman with the same dyed auburn hair, the same quick smile that strikes me more as a feminine tick than friendliness, and the same first name as my mom. Nancy.
Daughters seem to find their mothers everywhere.
She offers the question to the room of 20 or so other students who signed up to for this course to meet the language science requirement of our English degree without taking the other, more ominous option of Advanced Grammar. We look blankly at one another and a prickle of heat finds my cheeks. Another silent beat ticks by.
One student from the back, lanky, clean-shaven, huffs into the shoulder of his school issued sweatshirt, “Well, we don’t really remember that far back. We were all to young to remember.”
Dr. Shankle pulls her mouth into that tightlipped smile I’ve seen before on my mom’s face. I look away from her and down at my lap as if she’s about to scold me. Instead, she taps the keyboard to begin the powerpoint. I put my hands to my cheeks to cool them.
“Mr. James may not be able to remember but there are many things we know pretty intuitively about language acquisition.”
She taps again to make the words Language Acquisition appear on the screen. I copy the words at the top of the blank page in front of me. Tap tap. Three bullet points enter from the left.
“Language acquisition happens naturally. And there’s still so much that linguists don’t know. In fact, most of the conclusions we’ve arrived at in linguistics have been known by mothers for centuries.”
She pauses, something I will learn is a tell that she’s veering off topic, before saying, “I felt like I learned more about language acquisition from my own daughters than the researchers we will read this semester…”
The Nancy in front of me becomes white noise as I daydream about the Nancy I know better. In this scene, she dons a pair of belted khaki shorts and the errantly permed curls she has since smoothed into a sensible shoulder length cut. She holds an infant me close and watches my mouth try to form the words I want to say. She whispers “mama” in a tone softer than the one I know from memory, gently willing me through the movements.
Tap tap. I snap back to the present.
“….to learn to speak, children must understand six complex systems. Phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. All of you in this room finished this process and if you go home and ask your parents, I’m sure they’ll have stories and insights that rival the reading assignment for this week: pages 33 through 45 of chapter one.”
I scribble the assignment and begin to pack my things.
“One more thing before you go, shoot me an e-mail before next class and tell me what your first word was. Since none of us remember much, it might be time to call your moms and ask. I’m sure they’d love to hear from you.”
I call my mom on the way back from class and begin the ritual of our conversation.
“Hey ma, what’s up?”
“Hey Al. Not much. Driving home. What’s up?”
“Not much. Walking home.”
This back and forth incantation gives us a chance to suss out, by the tone of the other’s voice, if it is a good time to talk, if there’s important information we need to discuss, if the other is in a mood that requires the adjustment of our own mood to match. In this case it is a: yes, no, no. A green light for the purpose of my call.
“My Linguistics professor, you know Nancy, wants to know what everyone’s first words were.”
I hear my voice coming through the speakers of her car.
“Okay. Like the first thing you ever said?”
Her voice is picked up by the microphone built into the rearview mirror. I hear her blinker come on. She makes a noise that sounds both like a thinking “umm” and a driving maneuver grunt before saying, “I don’t know. Probably mama or dada or something like that.”
My cheeks grow hot for a second. I prick of pain, a paper cut feeling, a contraction of the muscle in my shoulder that carries a continual knot.
“Oh, yeah. Cool. Thank you.”
“What else did you need?”
“That’s it. That’s perfect. I’ll be able to e-mail her when I get home and then I’ll be done with homework for the weekend.”
“Nice. Ok, I’m about to pull into the garage.”
“Ok. I’m almost home, too. I’ll talk to you soon.”
“Love you”
“Love you, mom.”
I send an e-mail as soon as I am home. My mom said I either said “mama” or “dada” first. She didn’t really remember. Hope that works!
I am early to the next class. Dr. Shankle boots up the computer while I take my seat and poke through my tote bag for a chapstick.
“How are we today, Allison?”
Startled from my search, I squeak out a too-loud, “Good!”
I give up on the chapstick and regain a little composure, “I hope my e-mail was okay. I mean, I hope that answered your question. My mom didn’t really know.”
My professor clicks the keyboard a few times, obviously not remembering my response to the assignment, and assures me, “There were no wrong answers.”
Her clicks produce a slide with the date and course number as the rest of the class materializes. I return to my chapstick search while she dims the lights.
“I hope you all had a restful weekend. Let’s jump right in with your fun little assignment.”
Click. Click.
A slide with a computer generated bar graph appears measuring the number of responses to “mama”, “dada”, and “other.” The bars for “mama” and “dada” are nearly dead even. The “other” responses are a sliver. I draw a tiny circle on my page and begin to fill it with ink.
“Now, our class was split pretty evenly, but broader data shows—to many mothers’ dismay—that most infants get to the word ‘dada’ first.”
I burrow into the tiny black dot. I can feel the paper dissolving into wet.
“If we think about how we produce these speech sounds, we can get closer to the theory on this.”
She clicks to a slide labelled Phonetics.
“Phonetics is the study of speech sounds. The basic buildings blocks of any verbal communication. Phonetically, some linguists argue, that dada is an easier sound to make than mama. Mama requires a connection and release of the lips…”
I write connect/release—mama in my notes. I fill in the ‘o’ of connect to make another black dot.
My professor goes on about bilabials, fricatives, and the iterations of phonetically acknowledged noise making. I follow along half-heartedly, wondering if my answer was alone in being counted as “other.”
I call my mom again on the way home. I’m not sure what it is I want to say. Maybe I want to giver her a chance to change her answer. Maybe I want her to tell me how babies learn to talk instead of learning it from a professor-mother-serrogate. Maybe I want to turn my embarrassment into conflict.
After our opening ritual (yes. no. no. green light.) I tell her what I learned.
“…It’s wild, actually. Did you know most babies say ‘dada’ before they say ‘mama’?”
My mom laughs, road noise and a couple hundred miles of distance between us. She is far away again and a conflict feels useless in the face of a choppy connection. The paper cut feeling is now a tightness turning itself in my throat as I ask again, “do you remember if I said ‘dada’ before I said ‘mama’?”
There is only a beat of silence. I hear a fire truck passing in the background.
“That sounds about right. I don’t really remember.”
The tightness spreads to my gut. The image of her holding me close, listening to me coo, her permed and present, fades.
I see the joke like a scrap of paper on the sidewalk, a rip cord on a parachute, an avoidance trick I learned from her.
“Well, I don’t remember either! Was a little too young…a little too young.”
We laugh and move on to the routine conversation where we are most comfortable until the end our commutes home.
When I get to my room my body finds a fetal position on my bed. I pull the ends of my bedspread around me in a swaddle. I mouth the words “mama” and “dada” until the words sound like a foreign language and a nap pulls me under. There were no wrong answers.