BOLD explores… Children's language learning

So my name is Sho and I work on young children’s language development, and specifically I focus on the role of the social and linguistic environment, on how children learn language, and the role of the variation therein. What I mean by that is that all children learn language, and actually still by many measures, much better than any machine. We think that the use of linguistic and social cues from the input supports this learning, and I try to find out about some ways that happens. Another aspect is that these kinds of cues vary vastly between different languages, and I try to understand how this variation manifests in learning.

Language actually is an incredibly complex system. To illustrate that, just think about how you or all of us learnt a foreign language. There are so many ways in which we can get it wrong, or rather, differently from how a native speaker communicates. So, for instance, if you listen to me now, the pronunciation of certain words, or your intonations, so for instance, your sentence melody, or your lack of vocabulary in some senses or grammatical errors. This shows that language is a multi-level system with interacting layers, and little native speakers or signers tend to get most of them right during the first three years of their life. So, several mechanisms are at play when babies learn language. Babies learn language through a combination of built in brain abilities, social interaction, and patterns in the speech around them. So, it’s a very smart system tuned by evolution to pick up human communication. So, first of all, they’re born ready, for instance, when they’re born, they already prefer human speech sounds over other sounds, and they can tell apart many, many speech sounds that adults later can no longer hear A second, they learn through social interactions. So, they really learn best from real people. They pay more attention, and they can get very early on cues from facial expressions or eye gaze and pointing directions. And then they’re also really good statistical learners. So, they can detect patterns in speech. So, for instance, which sounds often go together like “baby” right, “be” comes after “ba”, and that’s something they can pick up. Then they can link words to meaning in everyday contexts. So, if they hear banana every morning and they see this yellow thing every morning, then this can help them to link these two together. So, that’s another kind of statistical learning. So, these are all ways in which babies and young children learn language.

Children pass through many milestones in their first 2 to 3 years of life. So, already they learn about language in the womb, so, they can hear from around the 25th week of gestations, but through many, many layers after the womb. They hear about general patterns in speech, speech rhythm, vowels, etc. So, already when they come out of the womb, they might have a preference for their native over learned language, or a preference for their mother’s voice. Then in the first few months of life, they already learn about statistical patterns of language, So, for instance, “which speech sounds exist in their language?” and, “which ones are not?” They start producing some sounds like cooing. We call that vowel like sounds. Then from 6 to 12 months of age, they continue learning about the speech sounds, but also about broader patterns, like, for instance, what kind of speech sounds coexist together and form words, and they start babbling, which is doing consonant vowel combinations, “baba” or “dada”, which then slowly transition into combinations like, “ba-do” etc. which are precursors of words. Then between 12 and 18 months, usually the first produce words emerge, a bit earlier already we have evidence of them understanding words like when we show them a banana, they can actually look at the right word, the banana and not the apple, etc. Then after they produce their first words from 18 month old, they really have this vocabulary explosion, where they really learn to understand and also produce words like, “exponentially”. This then leads into early sentences. So, for instance, two word combination, and also more understanding of grammatical structures. So, for instance, how words combine where nouns and verbs are in their native language. So, this is a little overview of our development in the first 2 to 3 years of age. So, caregivers can support language learning in babies, both in the way they speak and in the way they interact with them. So, in terms of speaking, the quantities of how much you speak to the child and the quality, how you speak to the child are important. A lot of research supports that children that are talked to more tend to have better language outcomes later. Of course, they get more learning opportunities by that. They hear more words, they hear more sound structures, etc. But of course, it’s not only about quantity. You can’t just repeat “Hi baby” the whole day long and think that the baby learns. But higher quality is also important. That means linguistic quality. So, repeating words but also expanding and use new words that children might not have heard so much, and also conceptual quality like abstracting away from a certain subject, or introducing diverse topics. Then there’s the social interactive dimension. So, the interactive quality of caregiver chat interaction is really important, which boils down to parents being responsive. So, paying attention to where the child’s attention is directed to, but also where they might not direct their attention to. So, redirecting it, taking turns with a child in a timely manner. So, not waiting too long to respond so, the child feels attended to. Also, initiating new conversations. What is important to keep in mind in all of that, especially with very young babies, is that children listen and see and absorb, even if they don’t react very much in the early months of life.

There’s no one single answer for the best way to bring up a bilingual child, because bilingual children’s contexts really, largely differ. For instance, a child that is bilingual because they have one parent that speaks a different language than the other parent, and the community language is different from a child, that instance, immigrated into a country where both parents speak one language, but the community language is different. But there are some general things that we can say as guidelines. So, one thing is that in general, the earlier someone learns a language the better. This is because there are sensitive periods for language learning. So, we think of early in life, and that is mostly for, mastering native like pronunciations. Then a bit later in life, before around puberty, we think that grammar learning, the capacity to learn grammar in native life drops. This doesn’t mean that you can’t learn the language very, very well later on in life, but it is general statistics and probabilities that we know from research. This is both because our brain has sensitive periods in these two periods, I just elaborated on, but also because the kind of input you get early on in life, might be more naturalistic and immersive than you’ll get later on. So, these two factors explain why we in general see this earlier the better pattern. Another thing is that exposure needs to be sufficient. Sufficient is always a hard word to explain, “how much language does a child need to hear?” Just as a guideline in research, we often use a 25% cut off of minimum exposure to define someone as a bilingual.

A last practical question that parents often have as well, “should I really speak one language consistently, and the other partner speaks the other language consistently?” “Should I not mix?” The first answer is that in reality, we see that most families mix a lot of language also within one person, and this is often based on practical reasons. It’s just often very hard to not mix. We know that in general the more consistent input in one language a child get, be it from one parent or be it in certain situation. The easier it is, of course, for a child to distinguish the two languages and pass them apart, but that mixing in general is not really a blocking factor for acquiring two languages, but it is really about the fact that if you start mixing, then often, you tend to kind of default to one language, right? Which is often the community language. So this is something that often rather blocks the second language acquisition. So, this is something for families to keep in mind. It can be good to have routines in place. For instance saying like when we eat, we always talk the other language that we otherwise don’t speak so much.

Language learning can differ a lot across cultures, not in terms of baby’s biological capacity to learn, but because of the different environments that they grew up in. And they’re actually amazingly different. For instance, in Western cultures we often emphasise to talk to babies a lot and that this is good for learning. But there’s other cultures where caregivers speak less directly to babies and more around them. So, they do get a lot of input, but maybe not directed speech, or they might actually get directed speech, but more from other children than from parents. So, this is something that researchers are still trying to figure out. And then, for instance, there’s also different social interaction patterns. So, in some places adults are very responsive and follow the babies lead closely. But other, elsewhere adults more expect children to adapt to group routines and may respond less immediately to the child and the child’s needs. And another factor is that, of course, there’s very different linguistic structures to learn. So, language vary dramatically, for instance, some have complex tones like Mandarin others don’t have very, rich verb forms, or others rely heavily on context rather than explicit words like Japanese or Korean and all of the subtleties babies have to learn.

Then, of course, there’s different communicative norms, later for children. So, when is it appropriate to speak? Some cultures really encourage children to speak up a lot, to say their opinion, while others rather want them to stay quiet in certain environments? So, all of these factors are very, very different, between languages, but language and children and all of these cultures learn their native language, to an adult level very early on, and this is really still something that we try to figure out. How does that happen and how can children learn despite these very, very different environments?

So, the short answer to the question of whether children can language through screen time is yes, but it depends. One on their age, second on the type of screen content, and the third thing that is very important is that they can, but never as good as some human interaction. So, human interaction is important because it’s engaging, it’s really responsive to what the child needs in that moment, and yes, basically is something that is really important for learning. So, in terms of screen time, in a sense, one can think a little bit of it, like reading a book with a child. So, having a child read a book alone especially if they’re very small, I mean, they can’t read, but looking at the pictures alone is, less helpful for the child than if the parent is next to them and actually engages with them with the content. So, I think one big difference with screens is that we tend to let the baby even sit alone in front of a screen where we read a book together with them. And so, we know from research that if parents engage with the children on the screen, it actually can lead to better learning than if they do that alone.

And then if the content, for instance, we know that babies, also from my research, that babies can learn better from interactive screens than non-interactive screens. So, a lot of research that was very negative about screen time was based on passive screens like TV, and interactive screens. can lead to better learning that. But they of course also have a lot of side effects that children really, really love it. It’s so engaging. So, setting limits and balance is really important. So, in general, one can think of children that look at a screen a lot during the day, often just miss a lot of other learning opportunities, and this is why, we see differences in language development and also this addiction, that screens can create, can make it really hard for caregivers to let children disengage from screens, which kind of creates a little bit this vicious cycle. I would say it’s not necessarily about the screens itself that are the villain here, but about the context they create, and screens actually do offer a lot of interesting, opportunities of interactive and adaptive learning that other media can’t. So, with measure and scientifically guided screens can be a learning device. So, caregivers can support children’s language, before they start school, pretty much as they do earlier in life, because good oral or sign language is the most important base for literacy. I guess if we think about school transition, literacy is a big key word. So, really getting children aware of print, of phonology, etc. to facilitate this. And of course, we do not need as caregivers to teach them letters. But reading together daily, of course, is a good routine to get them closer to the habit of doing that.

Then while reading, we can talk about print naturally so we can, you know, we can teach them some letters that are the letters of their name and have them search them, which is really a fun game. Look for letters in the environment, and that really creates this awareness of print. Similar to that, even doing kind of some really simple graphical drawings of lines horizontal, vertically, etc., and combining them is really a very great preparation for learning to write. Then another factor of that is really phonological awareness. So, playing with sounds and words like rhyming games, cat-hat, tree-bee, can be really, really good for children to really get aware of the fact that there are these structures in language. So, these are things that parents can do quite easily to, prepare children for school and literacy.