I watched little EC do something interesting the other day. She was sitting in her swinging chair, kicking furiously as she likes to do. Then she would stop, open her mouth wide, and slowly move her fist to her mouth. Suck for a while. Put the fist down, and start kicking again. Then she’d repeat the process, very deliberately going through each step. She was practicing. She had learned that she could suck on her fist if she could get it to her mouth, and she had learned that a concentrated effort could get the fist to her mouth in a non-random way. And once she had figured it out, she kept doing it again, and again, and again.

Just about a week later, the fist goes into her mouth without even a thought…she had practiced enough for the process to be completely effortless. Her performance here conforms to my intuition about how this learning process works. First, having no idea what she’s doing, she flails about randomly, like when she was a newborn, biting her fist when she happened to get it to her mouth, and her mouth happened to be open. After the random flailings work a few times, she begins to catch on, and progresses to the deliberate practice stage. A few days of that, for these simple tasks, and she’s off to the races.

Now, she’s working on the rolling over part. She’s managed to roll over front-to-back a few times, in more or less random fashion…she can’t duplicate it on command. But I can watch her getting most of the way when she tries, and she’s clearly figured out the first half of the maneuver. She doesn’t get there deliberately yet because her arm is always in the way—the hand is in the mouth, of course—but once that moment comes when she randomly puts her arm in the right place, and she makes it, the whole thing should make sense, and there will probably be no stopping her. I think we’re on the threshold there.

She’s doing the same thing with language. She’s making all sorts of interesting sounds. But whereas flipping or sucking a fist is a macroscopic maneuver—arms and legs in generally the right place will achieve generally the right results—language is such a vast combination of small muscle movements and tongue-ear coordination that it’s no wonder that it takes a long time for them to figure it out.

It seemed to me the other day, while I was out walking with her, that it is a good thing it takes so long for them to learn things. There could be real problems if they learn too fast. But more on that another time.