The Power of Babble

"Ma-ma, ba-ba, da-da" - you probably associate sounds such as these with babies, in particular the babbling that babies make when they're first acquiring language. But what do these sounds do? And why do babies babble? This is a question that some recent research has addressed.

In their recent research report, Elminger, Schwade and Goldstein examined the function of babbling in infants’ language development.  They explored the idea that a caregiver’s response to their child’s vocalizations is key to the beginnings of communication and found that infants themselves may actually be in charge of this process.  By 5 months old, babies will babble and expect their adult caregiver to reply and by 9 months, they will begin to produce more speech-like noise once the adult responds to them.  Previous research has suggested that parents’ speech will match the child’s current age, changing as the child grows.  A baby’s most varied ‘pre-speech’ repertoire of sounds is between 9-10 months and this is when a parent’s speech is most sensitive to their child’s vocalizations.

The researchers focused on this age group and were interested in further investigating the relationship between the adults’ and infants’ vocalizations by closely examining adult speech in response to infant babble. They used three measures to assess the type of speech parents used to respond to babbling:  Firstly, they counted the number of different types of words that were used; secondly, they counted the average number of words in the responses and thirdly, they calculated how many of these responses were just a single word.  There were thirty mother-infant pairs who participated in the study and they were recorded in a naturalistic environment, as the child played, over two thirty minute sessions.  The researchers split the adult responses into two different categories: ‘contingent’ which were immediate, direct responses to the child’s babble and ‘non-contingent’ which did not occur within two seconds of the babbling.

Overall, the investigation showed that the mothers produced less contingent than non-contingent speech and that the contingent speech consisted of significantly shorter utterances with simpler words.  They also found that there were more single-word contingent utterances than non-contingent. So, in general, it seems that parents may simplify the whole structure of their speech in response to their child’s babble, suggesting that infant babbling really does influence the adult response. It may be that this immature, pre-speech babble is actually engineered by the child to create language learning opportunities through eliciting simplified, easy-to-learn responses from their caregiver.  In fact, it seems that infant babbling in general is indicative that learning is happening:  It has previously been found that infants more accurately remember the features of objects at which they have babbled than those that have been looked at and handled but not babbled at.  So, when an adult responds vocally to babbling, the already alert child will quickly learn the patterns of their speech. 

Overall, these results show that children learn to recognise language much more quickly when the information they need to do so is presented immediately on babbling.  During the first year of their life, infants associate their babbling with a response from their caregiver which will guide their learning and speech development.  So, unlike the Tower of Babel,  fabled to have been built to divide people linguistically, in this study the power of babble is shown to rely on infant and caregiver closely working together.

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Elmlinger S.L.; J.A. Schwade & M.H. Goldstein. 2019. The Ecology of prelinguistic vocal learning: parents simplify the structure of their speech in response to babbling. Journal of Child Language. 16:1-14.

This summary was written by Gemma Stoyle

doi: 10.1017/S0305000919000291

‘Has anybody seen the, uh, child genius around here?’

 Children use uh and um to help them acquire language.  

A young child’s world is full of obstacles that they need to negotiate, not least in language.  Imagine constantly listening to lots of gobbledegook and having to work out what the speaker is talking about.  There may be some words you recognise, or even lots, depending on your age, but there are many others that you don’t.  A child will use many different clues to help them understand what the speaker is referring to, including watching to see where a speaker is looking or where they are pointing, and checking to see what objects are in the vicinity to work out if any of them are what is being referred to.

Celeste Kidd, Katherine White and Richard Aslin believe that children call on an additional resource..  They investigated what children infer from speech ‘disfluencies’, which are the uh and um sounds speakers use to fill pauses in speech.  

These often occur before unfamiliar or infrequent words, often those that have not been mentioned before in the conversation, as in this example:

CHILD:                     Telephone?

MOTHER:                  No, that wasn’t the telephone, honey. 

                              That was the, uh, timer.

Here the mother fills a pause with uh as she has difficulty trying to remember an infrequently used word that is, in addition, a new topic in this conversation with her child. 

The researchers decided to find out just how far children used these speech disfluencies to predict that  a new, unfamiliar word was about to occur in conversation.  They did this by ‘eye-tracking’ the children to see where they looked when they were shown pictures of two objects on a screen, one familiar such as a ball and one unfamiliar, totally made up object with an invented name[1].  They showed the children both objects whilst they listened to three different phrases. Firstly, they heard I see the ball, next ooh what a nice ball and lastly, either look at the ball/wug or look at the, uh, ball/wug! Each time they watched to see where the child’s eyes looked in the moment before they heard the name of the object.  This experiment was conducted on three different age-groups of children spanning from 16 months to 2 ½ years old.

Their results show that children do indeed use the speech disfluencies uh and um to predict that a new or unfamiliar word is about to be heard for a new or unfamiliar object.  The children consistently looked at the unfamiliar object when the word referring to the object was preceded by uh and um, even when it was in fact a familiar object that was subsequently named, suggesting that they were anticipating hearing a word they were unfamiliar with.  Even more interestingly, this ability seems to be learned through experience as the incidence of it happening increased with the age of the child.  So, children may be subconsciously learning that often disfluencies in speech (like uh and um) signal that the speaker is having difficulties and they therefore look for the object that is causing the difficulties, usually an object that seems new and different.

This is a fascinating discovery and one that again proves the sophisticated and astoundingly intelligent way that children learn and use language.   

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Kidd, Celeste, White, Katherine and Aslin, Richard (2011) Toddlers use speech disfluencies to predict speakers’ referential intentions. Developmental Science 14 (4): 925-934

DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2011.01049.x

This summary was written by Gemma Stoyle

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[1] For a list of these objects and the pictures that the children were shown visit http://babylab.bc.rochester.edu/stim/disfluency/.

Children acquiring verbs and gestures

do children use gestures before words to convey actions?

Research has shown that young children use gesture to communicate before they produce their first words. Typically, children from around the age of 10 months use gestures such as pointing to refer to objects before they have acquired the words for those objects. Once a child has pointed to an object (e.g. a dog) it is likely that the child will learn the word for that object (“dog”) within the next few months, either because using gestures provides the child with the opportunity to practice referring to objects before they are verbally able to do so, or because the child is likely to receive verbal input at the time of pointing (e.g. an adult says ‘yes, it’s a dog’), exposing the child to the word “dog” just when the child sees and is thinking about a dog. Gestures, then, appear to pave the way for children’s first nouns.

Young children also use what is known as iconic gestures and these are gestures that either convey actions, such as flapping arms to represent a bird flying, or to convey attributes associated with objects, such as holding cupped hands together to depict the roundness of a ball. Researchers Şeyda Özçalişkan, Dedre Gentner and Susan Goldin-Meadow were interested in finding out whether these types of gestures pave the way for children’s early verbs in the same way that pointing gestures pave the way for children’s early nouns.

They videotaped 40 North American children (22 girls, 18 boys) at home with their parents every 4 months from age 14 to 34 months and collected around 540 minutes of observation in total for each individual child. The children’s families came from a range of backgrounds in terms of income and ethnicity but all the children were being raised as monolingual English. The researchers transcribed all the communicative words and gestures that the children produced. Given the researchers’ interest on actions and verbs, they analysed only the children’s use of iconic gestures to depict actions.

They found that iconic gestures do not serve the same function as, for example, pointing gestures do for nouns. Unlike pointing gestures, which precede and predict children’s first nouns, the results of this study showed that children do not produce iconic gestures until around 6 months later than they produced their first verbs. Instead, the children relied almost exclusively on speech to convey their early action meanings. On average, the children produced their first spoken verb at around the age of 18 months but they did not produce their first iconic gesture until the age of around 25 months.

The researchers suggest four possible reasons why children produce so few iconic gestures in their early development. The first is that the gestures may be physically difficult to produce. However, as they point out themselves, some iconic gestures only involve moving a finger across space - to indicate something moving downwards for example – yet even these simple movements do not occur much before the age of 26 months. Secondly, perhaps the frequency of iconic gestures in parental input is low so that children are not often exposed to models of iconic gestures. Thirdly, the researchers suggest that iconic gestures are likely to impose a greater cognitive load than pointing gestures because there are conceptual difficulties in producing the gesture itself; in other words, children have to work out an action (gesture) which is representative of the action they want to convey, for example the action of hopping two fingers up and down to represent a rabbit hopping. Finally, iconic gestures may be more difficult for children to acquire because actions (and thus verbs) are associated with concepts rather than objects. Verbs express relations between things, and relational concepts are generally learned later than object concepts.

An interesting area for future development that the researchers identify would be to manipulate the input of iconic gestures to determine whether early exposure to iconic gestures has an impact on children’s production of iconic gestures and whether those gestures in turn play a role in children’s later acquisition of verbs. We await the results of such a study with interest.

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Özçalişkan, Ş., Gentner, D. and Goldin-Meadow, S. (2013). Do iconic gestures pave the way for children’s early verbs? Applied Psycholinguistics, 1-20.

doi: 10.1017/S0142716412000720

This summary was written by Sue Fox

And we went to get some fish 'n’ chips

Fish, chips 'n' lemon

We probably say and more often than any other English word, but how often do we notice that sometimes we pronounce it as and, with the full vowel, and sometimes as n, with no vowel at all?  Sometimes too, we pronounce and as en or end, with a reduced vowel and, perhaps, no /d/.

Dagmar Barth-Weingarten points out that although English speakers happily substitute one pronunciation of and for another we are rarely aware of the fine phonetic details of our pronunciation. She also comments that although researchers have analysed variation in the pronunciation of and as well as variation in its different linguistic functions, the two kinds of variation haven’t yet been considered together.  She therefore did exactly this for and as used in the CallHome English corpus of telephone conversations between American friends and family members.  Her analysis revealed a strong relationship between how the speakers pronounced and and its function.

When and was linking two words related in their meaning, it was more likely to be reduced in form. So, speakers were more likely to say n or en in compound nouns like bed and breakfast (we slept in the bed and breakfast), or fish and chips  (let’s have fish and chips for dinner). On the other hand, they were more likely to give and its full pronunciation when it connected two separate clauses, as in we slept in the bed and we didn’t notice the lumps.

Barth-Weingarten found that the pronunciation of and can also help to organise turn-taking. For example, compare the two ands in A’s last turn in the example below, where B is asking how A spent the night on her holiday:

                        B:            you slept in the shed huh?

                        A:            no.  but when my cousins came up

                        B:            yeah

                        A:            they all slept out in the shed

                        B:            all? oh

                        A:            an of course see Ella couldn’t be left out so                                        she went n slept in the shed with them

The first and in the last part of A’s speech is relatively unreduced, (with only the [d] deleted), as turns out to be usual when and connects two separate events in a story (here, they all slept in the shed and Ella couldn’t be left out).  But the pronunciation of and here not only connects the story events. In addition, it acts as a turn-taking cue for speaker B, who realises that A is going to say more and so does not take a turn until later.  In contrast, the fully reduced n form of and connects the two verbs went and slept which are not only next to each other in the discourse but also cognitively connected, referring to a single event. 

Barth-Weingarten concludes that it is cognitive distance (and sometimes physical distance) which influences variation in the pronunciation of and.  She also notes the special status of and in and-um sequences, as these are unlikely to be reduced through either /d/ deletion or vowel weakening.  Even though she cautions that other factors come into play to affect the pronunciation of and (such as emphasis and the speed at which an utterance is spoken), and that the different pronunciations of and need to be seen in their context (situational, interactional and phonetic) she suggests that research like this shows that variation in the pronunciation of a word can make a difference.

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Barth-Weingarten, D. (2012) Of Ens ‘n’ Ands: Observations on the Phonetic Make-up of a Coordinator and its Uses in Talk-in-Interaction; Language and Speech 55:35-56

doi: 10.1177/0023830911428868

This summary was written by Jenny Amos

Um, are you telling the truth?

Finding truth among  the lies?

You might suspect that someone is not telling the truth, but is there any way that you can be certain? Most people rely on intuition or they look for changes in body behaviour, such as fidgeting or breaking eye contact, but it seems that humans are not very efficient lie detectors and even those who have to make judgments about truth and deception as part of their professional role only perform at the level of chance. Some researchers have therefore turned their attention to more quantifiable cues that distinguish truth from deception and which do not rely on the human observer.

Researchers Gina Villar, Joanne Arciuli and David Mallard analysed the use of ‘um’ in the truthful and deceptive speech of a convicted murderer which he produced in two different contexts: when he was speaking in a formal media interview and when he was speaking in a (secretly taped) telephone conversation with his mistress. There are two hypotheses with regard to the use of ‘um’. One suggests that there would be an increased use of ‘um’ during deceptive speech because it reflects increased emotional and cognitive effort while telling a lie. The other hypothesis suggests that there would be a decreased use of ‘um’ during deceptive speech because deceivers might deliberately control their use of ‘um’ in order to appear more fluent and hence more credible. The researchers had found in a previous study that in laboratory elicited lies (where the lies were considered to be low-stake) participants had revealed a significantly decreased use of ‘um’ during deception and they wanted to see whether these results would be corroborated in real life data and where the lies were more high-stake.  

The researchers analysed the transcripts of four televised media interviews (each 20-30 mins long) and around 11 hours of secretly taped telephone conversations between the convicted murderer and his mistress (who had agreed to the conversations being taped). The transcripts were then carefully read in order to isolate all the utterances that could be verified as being either truthful or deceptive. Each sample was then coded for the presence of ‘um’ which was calculated as a percentage of the total number of words per sample.

The results clearly showed that ‘um’ was used less frequently in the deceptive speech compared to the truthful speech. The result held in both production contexts of the formal media interviews and the informal telephone conversations. The results, then, were in line with the researchers’ earlier findings with regard to low-stake laboratory elicited lies. While a single case study may not be generalizable to other persons, there is nevertheless some evidence from these results to suggest that a word such as ‘um’, which is often considered to be a ‘filler’ or unplanned error in speech, may be under the strategic control of the speaker.  The findings suggest that, in an attempt to successfully deceive, people can manipulate their linguistic behaviour and that ‘um’ may have a more important role in speech than many people realise.

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Villar, G., Arciuli, J. and Mallard, D. (2011). Use of “um” in the deceptive speech of a convicted murderer. Applied Psycholinguistics. 1-13.

doi:10.1017/S0142716411000117

This summary was written by Sue Fox

I sang the song or I sung the song? What do YOU say?

 

What do the verbs hang, spin, sling, sting, dig and slink all have in common? Answer: they all form their past tense and past participle by changing their vowel to <u>, so that I spin the wheel becomes I spun the wheel in the past tense and I’ve spun the wheel in the present perfect tense (using the past participle). So, what happens with verbs like begin, sing, drink, ring, shrink, spring, sling, stink and swim? On the face of it, these verbs look very similar to the first group of verbs but they behave differently.  In standard English these verbs have a past tense form with <a> and a different past participle form with <u>, resulting in three-part paradigms like begin - began- begun and sing - sang - sung.

However, it soon becomes clear – as researcher Lieselotte Anderwald has discovered – that there is frequently variation between two past tense forms in the second group of verbs. This variation is quite often reflected in the entries of some dictionaries, which permit an either/or past tense form for these verbs. For example, the Longman Advanced Dictionary of Contemporary English Use gives the past tense of shrink as shrank or shrunk and the past tense of sink as sank or sunk, with, in this dictionary, the second of the two past tense forms being attributed to American English usage (though this is not always the case in other dictionaries).

Anderwald investigated the use of <a> vs <u> forms among traditional dialect speakers in the Freiburg English Dialect Corpus (FRED), a corpus of traditional dialect data by speakers born (mainly) pre-1920 from across the UK. All instances of past tense forms of the most frequently occurring verbs that have the three-part paradigm - sink, drink, ring, sing, begin – were extracted from all dialect areas and each use was classified as being standard (e.g. sang) or non-standard (e.g. sung). From a total of 218 past tense uses she found that the non-standard forms were used in 91 (42%) cases. She then compared the traditional dialect speakers with young working class urban speakers from the Corpus of London Teenage Speech (COLT) and found that they used the non-standard forms almost 67% of the time (although we should add a cautionary note that there were only 12 instances of use in the corpus for this social group). Despite pressure from prescriptive norms, the results show that the use of non-standard forms for these verbs is as robust today as it has been in the past.

Anderwald explains this persistence in two ways. Firstly, the non-standard forms can be traced back historically to Old English so they are a long-standing feature of vernacular English. More importantly, though, she points out that the majority of verbs in English have the same form for past tense and past participle (not only those listed in the beginning of this article but also all regular verbs, which simply add -ed to both past forms) and therefore using the non-standard form in verbs like sing and drink is more ‘natural’ than their standard English counterparts because it conforms to the dominant pattern in English and thus eases the cognitive load of the language user. So if you say I sung the song – don’t worry, you’re in good company!

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Anderwald, L. 2011. Norm vs variation in British English irregular verbs: the case of past tense sang vs sung. English Language and Linguistics 15.1: 85-112.

doi:10.1017/S1360674310000298

This summary was written by Sue Fox

Image by ~bdavila on deviantART

Does early oral vocabulary predict literacy competence?

 

Oral vocabulary has been found to play a direct role in reading and to predict later reading comprehension competence

Studies have shown that children who are less skilled in oral language at age 3 years and older have been found to be at a disadvantage in acquiring speaking, listening, and reading skills during formal schooling. In fact, many studies have shown that oral language and reading abilities are closely related.  Joanne Lee  takes this a step further and investigates the relationship between oral language ability at the earlier age of 2 and literacy development up to age 11 using a large longitudinal data set of typically developing children from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (SECCYD).

The study, carried out in the USA, calculated the vocabulary size of 1,071 children (549 boys, 522 girls) aged 2, based on a checklist used to assess the receptive and productive vocabularies of children between ages 16 and 30 months and also between 30 and 37 months. The primary purpose of the study was to test whether early words measured at age 2 would significantly and uniquely predict subsequent language and reading skills of typically developing children. Three measures of early vocabulary were used to test which was the better predictor for later language and literacy development, (1) total vocabulary size (2) total number of verbs and (3) the proportion of verbs as function of total words.  The children were put into large or small vocabulary groups if they fell in the top or bottom one-third of the list respectively. This was done for each predictor so that there were two distinct categories of children (those with large vocabularies and those with small vocabularies) for each predictor. The scores were then compared to sixteen language and literacy measures taken for the children at various stages between the ages of 3 and 11. These consisted of such things as verbal comprehension, expressive language, picture vocabulary and different aspects of literacy such as decoding skills, word recognition and reading comprehension.

After controlling for individual differences in terms of socio-economic group, gender, birth order (whether the child was first-born, second-born etc. in a family) and ethnicity, the findings of this study show that early expressive vocabulary can significantly predict language and literacy outcomes such as letter identification, phonological awareness, vocabulary and reading comprehension over the span of 9 years. The best predictor was the total vocabulary size followed by the total number of verbs which was also a good predictor. The proportion of verbs as a function of total words did not turn out to be a good predictor. Thus, children with a larger vocabulary size (or even total verb size) at age 2 continued to be on an advanced language and literacy development trajectory than their peers with a smaller vocabulary size.

One limitation of this study, acknowledged by the researcher, is that although early expressive vocabulary appears to predict subsequent language and literacy competence, the analysis does not explore the causal relationship between the two. Furthermore, measures of lexical composition other than the number of verbs produced, such as mean length of utterance or grammatical markers, could also be used to see whether these are better predictors of subsequent language and literacy than total vocabulary size.

However, despite these limitations, the results indicate that there is a continuum between early oral development and literacy development and the work underscores the importance of starting work on literacy development with children as young as two years old. The researcher concludes by urging parents, caregivers and early educators to provide a language-rich environment for children in the earliest years in order to lay a solid foundation for their language and literacy outcome later in life.

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Lee. J. (2011). Size matters: Early vocabulary as a predictor of language and literacy competence. Applied Psycholinguistics 32: 69–92. doi:10.1017/S0142716410000299

This summary was written by Sue Fox