summary: A new study, including a large-scale international sample of 1,001 children across 43 languages, provides groundbreaking insights into how infants and young children learn language.
The research used full-day audio recordings and machine learning analysis. Key findings suggest that age, clinical factors and the amount of speech heard by adult children are primary drivers of language development, challenging previous beliefs about the influence of gender, multilingualism, and socioeconomics.
This comprehensive study provides a more nuanced understanding of language acquisition in early childhood.
Key facts:
- The study analyzed the language development of children from 12 countries, speaking 43 languages.
- Major predictors of language development include age, clinical factors, and exposure to adult speech, but not gender or socioeconomic status.
- For every 100 adult sounds heard per hour, children produce an additional 27, and this effect increases with age.
source: Harvard
Elika Bergelson, an associate professor of psychology at Harvard University, studies how infants and young children learn language from the world around them. Specifically, the developmental psychologist seeks to analyze the various theories that explain the onset and mastery of language comprehension and production.
Bergelson’s latest paper, published this month in Proceedings of the National Academy of SciencesIt represents a more global approach to developing and testing such theories.
Co-written with Alejandrina Cristea at the École Normale Supérieure de PSL and 11 others, the research is based on a very large sample of children aged 2 to 48 months. The all-day audio recordings recorded the babble and baby talk of 1,001 children representing 12 countries and 43 languages. The analysis was completed with the help of machine learning.
The results show that the main predictors of language development are age, clinical factors such as prematurity or dyslexia, and the extent of speech children receive from the world around them. In contrast to previous research, no effects related to gender, multilingualism, or socioeconomics were found.
The study was able to simultaneously look at several variables that are usually considered separately while also taking into account their influence.
“It’s worth noting that it’s not just child factors such as age or risk of language delay that matter, but a key environmental factor as well: the amount of speech children hear from adults,” Bergelson said.
“For every 100 adult sounds children hear per hour, they produce an additional 27 sounds themselves, and this effect grows with age.”
The work also addresses outdated criticisms of low-income parents and caregivers.
“There has been a lot of controversy and debate in the literature in recent years about how socioeconomic status is or is not related to language input and output,” Bergelson noted.
“We looked in many, many, many different ways… and we found in no way evidence that mothers with more education have children who produce more speech in these tens of thousands of hours of recordings from everyday life.”
Financing: Financial support for the study was provided by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among others.
News about neurodevelopment and language research
author: Christy DeSmith
source: Harvard
communication: Christy DeSmith – Harvard
picture: Image credited to Neuroscience News
Original search: Closed access.
“Everyday language input and production in 1,001 children from six continents” by Alejandrina Cristea et al. With people
a summary
Everyday language input and production among 1,001 children from six continents
Language is a universal human ability, easily acquired by young children, who struggle to obtain many of the basics of survival. However, language ability varies between individuals. Naturalistic and experimental observations indicate that children’s language skills vary depending on factors such as socioeconomic status and gender.
But what factors really influence children’s daily use of language?
Here, we leverage speech technology in a big data approach to report on a unique, diverse, and multicultural dataset: > 2,500 days’ worth of child-centered audio recordings of 1,001 children between 2 and 48 months of age from 12 countries spanning six continents across urban contexts, farmers , and subsistence agriculture.
As expected, age and language-related clinical risks and diagnoses predicted the amount of speech (and speech-like articulation) that children produced. Importantly, adult speech also affected children’s environments: children who heard more speech from adults produced more speech.
In contrast to previous findings based on more limited sampling methods and a different set of linguistic proxies, socioeconomic status (operationalized as maternal education) was not significantly associated with child production during the first four years of life, nor was gender or multiplicity. Languages.
These findings from large-scale naturalistic data advance our understanding of the factors that strongly predict variation in young learners’ speech behaviors in a wide range of everyday contexts.
Early language learning is a crucial part of a child’s development and lays the foundation for their future communication skills. While it may seem like a daunting task for both parents and educators, there are universal secrets to making this process easier and more effective. By understanding these key principles, we can create a supportive environment for children to naturally and effortlessly acquire language skills. From the importance of immersion to the power of storytelling, unlocking the secrets of early language learning can truly set children up for success in their linguistic journey.