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

Like it's teenage talk – or is it?

People often think that using like  as a discourse marker is typical of teenage talk. Christopher V. Odato’s research, though, finds that children as young as 4 use like in this way.

            Odato recorded children playing together, choosing one pair of girls and one pair of boys in seven age groups – 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 10. He identified three stages in their use of like as a discourse marker. At first (stage 1), children use like infrequently and in only a few syntactic positions – mainly in front of a determiner phrase (beginning with a word like a or the,  as in she had like a part right here) or at the beginning of a clause (like you deserve to get a spanking). As their language matures, they reach stage 2. At this point they use like more often and in a greater number of positions, though still more often before a determiner phrase. By stage 3 their overall frequency of like has continued to increase and they now use it more frequently in other positions, such as before a prepositional phrase (look at how mine landed like in the crack of the chair).

Although boys and girls follow similar developmental trajectories, Odato found that girls become more sophisticated users of like at an earlier age than boys. All the girls in the 4-6 year old pairs used like, but only half the boys of the same age used it; and those boys who did use like did so infrequently. The girls moved from stage 1 to stage 2 at about the age of 5, but the boys did not move on to stage 2 until they were 7. Girls showed a dramatic increase in their use of like between the ages of 4 and 6, but for boys a comparable increase in frequency was not seen until the ages of 7 and 8. Finally, boys aged 7 and 8 were still preferring to use like before a determiner phrase, whereas the girls were using it less often in this position and more often in a range of other positions.

Odato points out that research on other discourse markers has also found that 4-7 year old girls use these forms more frequently and with more global pragmatic functions than boys of the same age. It’s been suggested that this is related to gender differences in play: boys tend to prefer active games that do not require so much speech whereas girls more often plot and act out pretend play situations.

Intriguingly, the different syntactic positions in which children use like as their ages increase follow approximately the same order as the historical development of like as a discourse marker in English. Odato points out, though, that the frequency with which adults use like also coincides with the history of the form. Children probably wait to hear enough evidence that like can be used in a certain syntactic position before they start to use it that way themselves, and obviously this will take longer for the less frequent positions. However what we know about adults’ use of like is based on adults talking to adults, and we can’t assume that this is how adults use like when they are speaking to children. As so often, more research is needed!

Odato, Christopher V. (2013) The development of children’s use of discourse like in peer interaction. American Speech 88(2): 117-143.

doi:10.1215/00031283-2346825

This summary was written by Jenny Cheshire

For  English Language teaching resources and a suggested English A level language investigation related to this topic click here

‘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/.

Do children hearing two languages acquire language at a slower rate?

It is often assumed that children who are exposed to two languages from birth will acquire language at a slower rate compared to children who only hear one language. But is there any evidence to confirm that this is actually the case?

Annick de Houwer, Marc Bornstein and Diane Putnick have investigated this topic and have compared the comprehension and production vocabularies of bilingual and monolingual children in their second year of life. They collected data for 31 middle-class bilingual children with Dutch and French input from birth and 30 children from similar backgrounds with only Dutch input from birth. In the bilingual families, all but one family reported that they used the “one person, one language” principle of speaking to the child and that this language pattern started from birth. In 14 of the bilingual families, the mothers spoke Dutch and the fathers spoke French to the child and in 16 families, the mothers spoke French and the fathers spoke Dutch to the child; in all cases both parents knew Dutch and French. Children in the monolingual group heard just Dutch, spoken to them by their parents and other caregivers from birth.  The children were studied at ages 13 months and again at 20 months using research methods that allowed the researchers to examine the children’s vocabulary sizes for both word comprehension and word production.

The comprehension results showed that at 13 months old, the bilingual infants understood as many Dutch words as the monolingual infants. However, the overall word comprehension for the bilinguals (i.e. Dutch and French combined) showed that, on average, the bilinguals understood 71% more words than the monolinguals, a significant difference. At age 20 months, the children were only compared for their Dutch comprehension and the results showed that the monolingual children understood similar numbers of Dutch words as the bilingual children.

As one might expect, the number of words actually produced at age 13 months was low for both the monolingual and bilingual children but nevertheless the number was similar for each group, regardless of whether the words were Dutch only or whether they were French and Dutch combined. The researchers also point out that there was a lot of variation between the individual children in the number of words that each child could produce. When the researchers compared the children at 20 months, they again found that, on average, the bilinguals produced similar numbers of words as the monolinguals, although again there was a great of interindividual variation.

In sum, these separate measures of comprehension and production show that there were no bilingual-monolingual differences for Dutch at ages 13 or 20 months. There was, however, one difference; when the bilinguals’ languages were combined at 13 months, the bilinguals outperformed the monolinguals in terms of word comprehension. The results of the study support the researchers' conclusions that exposing children to two languages from birth does not slow down lexical development. Some of the bilingual children in their study understood and produced more words than some of the best performing monolinguals. The researchers argue that if a bilingual child is showing signs of slow lexical development then parents and speech professionals should try to understand what is causing the delay rather than attribute it to bilingualism.

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Houwer, A., Bornstein, M. and Putnick, D. (2013). A bilingual-monolingual comparison of young children’s vocabulary size: Evidence from comprehension and production. Applied Psycholinguistics, 1-23.

Doi: 10.1017/S0142716412000744

This summary was written by Sue Fox

‘What did you see? I didn’t quite hair you...’

                                 
                               even toddlers can understand a foreign accent 

We all know how difficult it can be to understand somebody who is speaking in a different accent to our own.  This is hard enough as an adult at times, but imagine what it must be like for a child who is just in the process of learning language and pronunciation.  Rachel Schmale, Alejandrina Cristia and Amanda Seidl set out to investigate whether unfamiliar accents completely impede young children’s word recognition.  They were working on the premise that being exposed to an unfamiliar accent, even for as short a time as a minute, makes it easier to understand.  The idea behind this is that the listener picks up on patterns in the accent and then ‘maps’ them onto what they hear.  One previous test showed toddlers a picture of a dog whilst they heard ⁄dæg/ (dag) rather than the expected pronunciation and, similarly, a picture of a ball whilst they heard ⁄bæl ⁄ (bal). The toddlers were then found to ‘generalise’ this sound change when it came to other objects; so, for example, they looked at a sock when hearing /sæk/ (sak) but, interestingly, not when hearing /sɪk/ (sik) – showing that they had learnt that specific pattern. 

However, Schmale, Cristis and Seidl were aware that, in real life, children are not going to encounter a speaker with a different accent which only has one specific feature that is unfamiliar; they are much more likely to hear a foreign accent with many different features from their own.  The researchers wanted to face toddlers with exposure to a natural accent in the context of fluent speech and to do this they tested monolingual 2 year olds’ ability to recognise a newly learned word when it was spoken in a foreign accent.  Firstly some of the children listened to a passage of text, either in their own American English accent or in a Spanish accent.  After that they were tested with names of objects in the foreign Spanish accent to see if they could identify them.  The researchers tested this by tracking which objects the children’s eyes looked towards when they heard it being referred to*. It was found that the children who had been briefly exposed to the foreign accent beforehand were much more successful in this word learning task whereas the children who had not been exposed to the foreign accent were unable to do it. This suggests that even a few minutes of exposure to a different accent is sufficient to ‘tune’ our ears and help us understand it.

The researchers propose that we adopt two strategies when faced with an unfamiliar accent.  Firstly, we will shift our sound boundaries to accommodate to another’s accent – just as the children did in the example of dog and dag above. We will try to take a pattern and impose it onto other words to help us to understand them.  However, unfortunately, language is more complicated than this!  So, secondly, they propose that when listeners are faced with an accent that seems to differ dramatically from their own, the linguistic brain will relax its rules about pronunciation and accept a certain degree of deviation from its norms.   They admit that this could lead to misunderstandings as listeners will not only accept dag for ‘dog’ but may also start to accept things like beg for ‘peg’ and sit for ‘seat’, leading to lots of confusion!  They also propose the idea that a speaker’s ability to adapt to a new unfamiliar accent may literally improve with age – as we get older our vocabulary expands and, therefore, we have more resources to draw on when faced with a new accent.  What is certain is that this is a fascinating area that needs further investigation.

* This is easier to understand if you view the Youtube video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYnaZkMyKtY&feature=youtu.be

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Schmale, Rachel, Cristia, Alejandrina and Seidl, Amanda (2012) Toddlers recognize words in an unfamiliar accent after brief exposure. Developmental Science 15 (6): 732-738.

doi. 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2012.01175.x

This summary was written by Gemma Stoyle