How Babies Learn Language
New insights
New insights
For first-time parents, the journey of their baby’s language development can seem mysterious and even baffling at times. Why do some babies start talking earlier than others? What skills and factors contribute to this critical milestone?
Elika Bergelson, a newly appointed associate professor of psychology at Harvard University, has dedicated her career to unravelling the mysteries of language acquisition in infants and young children. Her latest research, published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, offers fresh insights into the key predictors of language development on a global scale.
Growing up in a multilingual household, Bergelson witnessed first-hand the intricate process of language learning. “What is it about language acquisition that makes younger minds — which are usually less good at everything — actually better at this particular process?” she wondered.
Challenging conventional wisdom
Bergelson’s research challenges some long-held assumptions about language development, particularly regarding the role of socio-economic status. “Our results question some of the received wisdom, certainly in the American policy space, that families in certain socio-economic circumstances are providing less or less ‘good’ language input to their kids,” she explains.
In a groundbreaking study involving 1,001 children from 12 countries and 43 languages, Bergelson and her colleagues analysed day-long audio recordings capturing the babbling and baby talk of infants and toddlers aged 2 to 48 months. Leveraging machine learning techniques, they examined the speech patterns and language input received by these children.
The findings were eye-opening. Contrary to popular belief, factors such as gender, multilingualism, or socio-economic status did not significantly impact language development. Instead, the study identified three key predictors: age, clinical factors (like prematurity or dyslexia), and the amount of speech children received from their surroundings.
“We looked in many, many, many different ways … In no form did we ever find evidence that moms with more education had kids who produced more speech in these tens of thousands of hours of recordings from daily life,” Bergelson explains.
Unravelling the mysteries of early language learning
Bergelson’s research journey has been marked by groundbreaking discoveries that have challenged long-held assumptions about language acquisition. As a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, her experiments on early word learning revealed that comprehension begins at a far younger age than previously thought.
“Around 6 or 7 months, babies are starting to understand some really common nouns,” she says. This finding contradicted the notion that language comprehension emerged later, around the time when children start producing their first words, typically around 18 months.
Bergelson’s subsequent investigations at the University of Rochester aimed to understand the factors driving this comprehension tipping point. Surprisingly, her research showed that parents and caregivers did not significantly alter their interactions or speech patterns when addressing younger versus older infants.
The “better learner models” of language acquisition
With a grant from the National Institutes of Health, Bergelson’s new Harvard lab is now focused on testing what she calls the “better learner models” of language acquisition. These theories attribute the comprehension tipping point to the baby’s growing social, cognitive, or linguistic abilities, rather than merely accumulating more input from caregivers.
Bergelson and her team plan to explore comprehension indicators that appear earlier than talking itself, such as pointing or looking in the direction of a mentioned object. This research holds the potential to improve early interventions for children who struggle with language acquisition.
Expanding the field’s horizons
In addition to her groundbreaking research, Bergelson is committed to broadening the diversity of children studied in language sciences. “One really important shift in the field recently has been a much more serious reckoning with the fact that we tend to study white, middle-class Americans,” she notes.
Her recent PNAS paper, with its global sample of children from diverse backgrounds, is a significant step in this direction. Bergelson is also pursuing new research on language development in children who are deaf or blind, challenging theories that rely on children’s ability to see or hear others refer to objects in the world.
Elika Bergelson’s work is shedding light on the intricate process of language acquisition, challenging long-held assumptions, and paving the way for a more inclusive and comprehensive understanding of how children learn to communicate.
Her findings have the potential to inform early interventions and support parents and caregivers as they navigate this fascinating journey with their little ones.
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