This is actually really good for babies’ brain development. You’re laying the groundwork for conversation, teaching them through example that people take turns talking and listening.
Did you know that babies from affluent families hear an average of thirty MILLION more words before age 5 than babies in families below the poverty line? For context, Les Miserables is about 650,000 words and it looks like this:
So it’s like reading this book 46 times.* And that’s not the total number of spoken words, that’s the GAP between affluent and poor babies. And these are the years in which the brain undergoes the most development. It’s mind-boggling.
So what I’m saying is: keep doing the thing. Do it to all babies, all the time. Narrate your day. Ask them for opinions. (“Should we buy the large bag of potatoes or the small bag?” “Gaabooglagje.” “Yes, just as I thought.”) Point out colors and shapes and letters. Let them scribble outside the lines and treat their babble like talk. Sing them nursery rhymes and Raffi songs and songs from the radio. All of these things are going to build their brains to prepare them for kindergarten and beyond.
*Please do not read Les Mis 46 times to an infant. They don’t even care about the Parisian sewer system.
Even before infants understand their first words, they have already begun to link language and thought. Listening to language boosts infant cognition. New evidence provides even greater insight into the crucial role of language exposure in infants’ first months of life, according to Northwestern University research.
Prior research has found that infants come into the world equipped with an initially broad link, one that encompasses the communicative signals of both humans and nonhuman primates. At 3 months old, listening to both human and nonhuman primate (lemur) vocalizations supports infants’ ability to form categories, a building block of cognition. But by 6 months, the link has narrowed, with only human vocalizations supporting categorization. Infants’ initially broad link to cognition is sculpted by their experience.
Northwestern researchers sought to understand what mechanisms underlie this rapid tuning process and document in a new study the crucial role of experience as infants tune this link specifically to human language.
In the experiments, the researchers found that merely exposing 6-month-old infants to nonhuman primate vocalizations permits them to preserve, rather than sever, their early link between these signals and categorization. Exposing infants to backward human speech – a signal that fails to support categorization in the first year of life – does not have this advantage.
“This new evidence illuminates the central role of early experience as infants specify which signals, from an initially broad set, they will continue to link to core cognitive capacities,” said
Danielle R. Perszyk, lead author of the study and a doctoral candidate in cognitive psychology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern.
The research, which underscores the importance of language exposure in the first months of life, also has far-reaching implications for early language and cognitive development.
“It provides a unique vantage point from which to consider the intricate interface between capacities inherent in the human infant and the shaping force of experience,” said Sandra Waxman, senior author of the study, director of the Project on Child Development, faculty fellow in Northwestern’s Institute for Policy Research and the Louis W. Menk Chair in Psychology at Northwestern.
“Although experience may play little, if any role, in picking out the broad set of signals that infants first link to cognition, here we show that experience is essential in guiding infants, with increasing precision, to single out which signals from the initially privileged set they will continue to link to meaning and which they will tune out,” Waxman said.
That hearing infants come with the potential to distinguish/produce all sorts of language sounds, and then their brains start paring down to the ones they’ll need as they hear more speech around them. For example, babies born to people who don’t have contrastive aspirated vs. unaspirated [p] in their language can differentiate /pʰ/ from /p/, but by the time they’re toddlers they’ll start losing that skill as their brains prioritize relevance of speech sounds.
ALSO, the paradigms of “how you should talk to your kids for their best language development” are based a lot on white Western individualism. Throughout the world, there are various attitudes toward children and language, and all of them produce successful speakers/signers! In some cultures, babies are spoken to in simplified baby talk; in others, they are spoken to as adults; in others, children are not directly addressed until they can speak in return so they pick up ambient language. Some cultures expect children to speak in simple but concrete phrases; some expect children to learn oral traditions first; and some expect children to speak in indirect metaphorical language and gain concreteness as they grow.
All of these methods are successful, and it’s harmful to shame non-USian caregivers for not obeying the school curriculum, or to shame working/busy caregivers for not reading a book to their kid every night and teaching them a Pimsleur course every morning.
When children learn their native language(s), they receive very little in the way of explicit instruction if any at all. The utterances a child is exposed to are not perfect - they contain false starts, repetitions, and various other mistakes and errors. Furthermore, children are not told what is grammatical and what is not. This latter point is especially important because it means that there is no negative evidence. Yet somehow a child is able to glean from such data the grammatical rules of their language(s). Consider the following:
(1) What did you say that Bill thought that John saw?
(2) *What did you say that Bill met the man who saw?
Despite perhaps never coming across utterances like (1) or (2), English speakers know that (1) is a grammatical sentence of English whilst (2) is not. But where did this knowledge come from? Another way of putting this question is to ask how we can know so much given how little we have to learn from. This is Plato’s Problem.
In modern linguistics, the solution to Plato’s Problem is to say that humans come equipped (i.e. it is in our genetics) with certain bits of knowledge, e.g. we instinctively/innately know how to analyse certain types of data in our environment. If we believe that any of these certain bits of knowledge that we make use of in language acquisition is specific to language, we arrive at the idea of Universal Grammar (UG).
I have just finished reading Lenneberg’s 1967 seminal book The Biological Foundations of Language. It was, and still is, an incredibly insightful attempt to bring linguistics and biology closer together into what is currently called biolinguistics. It was also way ahead of its time in terms of the conceptual framework which underpins the biological theory of language proposed in the book. By amassing and integrating evidence from anatomy, neurology, cognitive science, evolutionary theory, developmental biology, child language acquisition, semantics, phonology and syntax, Lenneberg creates a theory of language based on a few far-reaching principles.
First, language is viewed as a species-specific behaviour. Every species is different in terms of how they develop and mature. To the extent that behaviour is based on neurophysiological properties of the organism and that neurophysiology is a product of species-specific paths of development and maturation, language can be considered a species-specific behaviour resulting from the human-specific ontogenetic process. Evidence for this includes well-documented and universal milestones in language development, sometimes even in the absence of appropriate linguistic stimuli.
Second, there does not appear to be any part of the brain dedicated to language. Certainly, there are regions of the brain (and particularly of the left hemisphere) which play a more significant role in language, but in general language is well-integrated into the cerebral structure as a whole. This makes it likely that language evolved from the outset as a complex integration of many parts; it is unlikely that the subcomponents of language evolved separately and only recently became unified.
Third, language structure exhibits evidence of three basic processes: (1) categorisation, (2) differentiation, and (3) transformation. Categorisation involves generalising over stimuli, i.e. creating an abstract representation. Differentiation involves splitting categories in various ways. Transformation involves being able to identify similarities between categories, i.e. being able to identify how one category is related to another in a systematic way. Lenneberg argues that these are cognitive skills which have been integrated into the structure of language. Furthermore, because every infant effectively creates language anew, these are the processes involved in language acquisition, for example, early child utterances go through a one-word stage, followed by a two-word stage, then simple sentences etc. This potentially shows differentiation in that one-word utterances are whole child sentences. As the child differentiates the earliest syntactic category into two (say, head and modifier), we begin to observe two-word utterances etc.
Fourth, environmental triggers are necessary for the proper actualisation of one’s innate potential for language. These triggers must be available during maturation otherwise the behaviour will not develop properly, i.e. there is a critical period for (first) language acquisition. The acquisition of language is thus a matter of nature and nurture, innateness andlearning.
There are other principles which Lenneberg summarises in the final chapter, but these give a flavour of the framework in which his theory is set. Language is at its foundations a biological phenomenon, and biolinguistics can help us formulate and pursue questions to understand it in a more insightful and informed way.
Happy New Year and good news - I passed my dissertation proposal defense and should now have some time to keep posting articles (as I’ll be teaching an undergrad sociolinguistic course in the spring and may need to brush up on some classics). I hope your 2018 ended with a bit of joy for the new year, and here’s a great article by Gretchen McCullochaboutemojis teaching young children to learn language to hold you over in the meantime! Happy Holidays!
Much as this article goes over the steps children take to acquire language, this recipe gives you nice and easy steps to turn artichoke hearts into delicious tangy goodness! The rosemary, lemon zest, and whipping cream add a special touch to this dish, just as the article’s addition of an explanation of how adults text in emoji charades or to create art while kids tend to stop sending strings of emojis when they learn to read is what sets this article apart. Bon Appétit!
Sorry about the few article reviews in the last few weeks- just began my first post-coursework semester as a Teaching Associate (whoo got my first mis-titled email addressing me as “Professor…”) and I’m about to head to Budapest to present a paper at the Second International Conference on Sociolinguistics! I’ll be back to reviewing articles in late September, but in the meantime here’s an interesting article about hyper-polyglots (people who speak crazy many languages),and a recipe comparison, of course. Enjoy and wish me luck presenting in Pest!
Much as this article describes a language skill we all wish we could have (i.e. picking up a dozen languages, and being semi-fluent in more dozens), this recipe is a wish-list of decadence: unusual chocolate linguine, chalky goat cheese, and sweet cherries result in a savory-sweet delight. While we may envy hyper-polyglots for their amazing faculty in 11-plus languages, you will be the envy of all who behold you nomming on this pasta. Good Cooking!
Not even just by observing language learning, but by actually creating a program that has no innate knowledge of language, and then demonstrating that it can learn syntactic structures regardless:
Until recently, the computational requirements of language have been used to argue that learning is impossible without a highly constrained hypothesis space. Here, we describe a learning system that is maximally unconstrained, operating over the space of all computations, and is able to acquire many of the key structures present in natural language from positive evidence alone. We demonstrate this by providing the same learning model with data from 74 distinct formal languages (…) The model is able to successfully induce the latent system generating the observed strings from small amounts of evidence in almost all cases (…) These results show that relatively small amounts of positive evidence can support learning of rich classes of generative computations over structures.
Developed in response to known Chomsky Defenders (Norbert “Chomsky is never wrong” Hornstein was mentioned in “release notes” on Twitter) claiming that earlier studies that show learning choosing between different models would only show humans to innately know a whole selection of models and have the ability to pick between them.
If we, however, have the ability to consider any possible model, then the ability to learn a language is just a corollary of the general human ability to learn stuff:
More broadly, there are many domains outside of language where learners must essentially acquire entirely new algorithms — some of them describable with similar machinery to language. It is ordinary for children to come to know new computational processes in learning tasks like driving, cooking, programming, or playing games. (…) Children simply must have the ability to learn over a rich class of computational processes, an observation that draws on well-developed theories in artificial intelligence about how search and induction can work over spaces of computations
— Hence, as per anthropological linguists, language must be considered a social technology, and not its own hard-wired “module”. The basic feature that allows humans (but not any random monkeys or birds etc.) to learn a language is not anything at all specific to language, but the “social instinct” that we should learn something from others and not just rely on our own intuition. Brings to my mind the important observation from studies on language learning attempts by parrots, corvids or apes, that they might very well learn to produce statementsorrequests; but they never learn to ask questions.
Please make sure to reblog this with the explanation you guys:
The toddler doesn’t know Alexa is a name; as far as they’re concerned it’s a word that makes things happen. If the kid was saying “please play baby shark” it would mean literally the same thing to them because they don’t really understand language yet.
The toddler is mimicking adult behavior because they have seen adults say things that start with “Alexa” and have learned that starting a request with “Alexa” makes it more likely to be fulfilled. This kid has learned something about how their world works purely through observation! This isn’t a bad thing! It’s just been misapplied and it’s up to the parents to correct their speech as they grow enough to understand the difference.
There’s a reason lots of good parents say to babies stuff like
“You’reexcited to go to the park!”
“Oh, it makes you mad that we can’t go outside.”
And then when the babies get a little bit older the parents can say
“You seem upset. Are you sad?”
“Are you excited that gramma is coming over today?”
Which lets the kid (who is learning to utilize speech) respond with yes or no, which may prompt more questions, like
“So you aren’t sad, are you angry?”
“Yes, does it make you happy when gramma is here?”
And then, finally, when the child is learning to use language in a more complex way, the parents can say,
“How does it make you feel?”
“Why are you feeling like that?”
And it’s all about teaching emotional awareness. I really reccomend using the process on yourself. Learn to ask, “am I happy?” “Am I sad?” “Am I anxious?”
Then practice identifying, out loud or on paper if you can, “I’m happy.” “I’m upset.” “I’m sad.” “I’m anxious.”
Final step: “Why am I feeling anxious? I’m still thinking about that awkward conversation earlier.” “Why am I happy? It’s such a beautiful day outside.” “Why am I sad? None of my friends are responding to my messages.”
It really helps you notice patterns (“I’m more likely to be happy when I’m around this person.” “When I haven’t eaten, I often feel angry.” “If I don’t plan ahead, I get anxious.”) which is the first step in avoiding things and people that are bad for you and encouraging things and people that are good.
Basically don’t forget that you’re just a baby who got more complicated.
Not sure how to articulate what you are feeling? Try starting at the middle and working your way out to the more specific feelings!
Learning numbers in a European language has probably affected your early maths ability.
(…) And in English, words like “twelve” or “eleven” don’t give many clues as to the structure of the number itself (these names actually come from the Old Saxon words ellevanandtwelif, meaning “one left” and “two left”, after 10 has been subtracted).
