2.1 Early language development
Infant language
For most adults, the concept that newborns have language abilities at all is a very new idea. In fact, newborns have quite complex language abilities. Dr. Janet Werker’s research at the University of British Columbia looks at this complexity. One research method she uses takes advantage of babies’ sucking reflex to study their preferences and perceptual sensitivities.
In the following two videos, Werker describes how she conducts this research with such young babies and then some findings regarding how babies are tuned to the properties of their native language(s), how this develops in the first year, and what it means for later language development.
Were you aware that newborns have these capacities that Werker describes? What did you find most interesting about this research?
Janet Werker and her colleagues research many aspects of language development in infancy, including the roots of bilingualism. For more information on Werker’s research, explore the UBC Infant Studies Centre website.
Page 1.1 of this module discusses that adults seem to naturally speak to infants and young children in a way that they prefer. The characteristics of infant- or child-directed speech include things like higher pitch, elongated vowel sounds, and a happy, musical quality – all clearly evident in the video example above of the mother and son “conversation”. Watch the first video that follows to see how researchers study infant language preferences in the Baby Language Lab run by Dr. Melanie Soderstrom at the University of Manitoba. In the second video, Soderstrom explains that infant language labs around the world are collaborating to increase our understanding of infant language development and to expand the research related to languages other than English.
Earlier on this page, Werker describes studies that measure a baby’s sucking response and in the videos above, Soderstrom describes the “head turn preference procedure”. In the next video, Melanie Soderstrom explains how technology advancements, such as visual measures that look at eye-tracking, are impacting the way that researchers study infant development.
Adult’s role
Some American research indicates one factor that seems to make a big difference in children’s language capacity is how often adults talk with them. Apparently, quantity counts. That is, children who hear more and richer language develop greater vocabularies and, in turn, have a better foundation for literacy. Children who hear less language and fewer words still learn to speak normally, but have a more restricted vocabulary and are more likely to have more difficulty learning to read and write.
In Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experiences of Young American Children, Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley (1995) present fascinating, ground breaking findings regarding children and their language development. They conducted a longitudinal study of parents and children (1-3-years of age) in their homes. Families were observed each month for two and a half years and conversations between parent and child were recorded. Their sample included 42 families who were classified as either professional, working class or welfare.
What differences did Hart and Risley (1995) find?
It was not so much the kind of experiences parents in these three groups offered their children, but the amount of these experiences. Their analysis of recorded data showed a large gap between the quantity of language heard in a year by a child in a professional family (11.2 million words) and a child in a working-class family (6.5 million) and a child in a welfare family (3.2 million).
Parents in all three groups engaged in similar necessary communications (e.g., giving directions, managing behavior). It was the “extra talk” beyond that; the language that was more varied and responsive, that differed.
The way that parents talked to their children when they were toddlers was strongly predictive of children’s verbal ability when they were 9-10 years old.
The number of words children hear isn’t just a poverty issue. There are fantastic parents who rear kids in their own bedrooms while living in poverty and actually parent better than some wealthy families. Positive language experience is about parenting” (Clinton, 2020, p. 61).
Dr. Jean Clinton (2020) points out that “…in more recent studies, it wasn’t just being poor that left children with fewer words” (p. 60). Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and her colleagues found that it is not just the number of words children hear, but that the quality of interactions between parents and children also make a difference (Hirsh-Pasek et al., 2015). By watching and analyzing video recordings of mothers and children playing, researchers were able to identify joint engagement and connectedness as particularly important. The following Hanen Centre article provides a summary of this research, along with specific ways adults can increase the quality of their conversations and interactions with children.
A recent research study by Gilkerson et al. (2018) adds further evidence to support the importance of adult’s communication with young children, particularly those 18-24 months of age. The turn-taking interactions of 2 to 36 month-old children and parents were recorded and analyzed using sophisticated automated technology. Conversational turn-taking was correlated with language and cognitive outcomes measured up to ten years later.
In the next video of a parent and 11-month-old, watch for examples of connectedness, joint engagement and conversational turn-taking.
In the next video, Soderstrom explains how recording studies were done in the past and some technology updates that make it easier to record and process the recordings.
Read the full Hirsh-Pasek et al. (2015) research article below.
Learn more about the findings of the Gilkerson et al. (2018) research in the reading below.
There is no doubt that the Hart and Risley findings were ground-breaking. It is also clear that as research techniques become more refined, researchers continue to study and learn more about children’s language. Listen to Soderstrom for an interesting perspective.
What do you think about the cultural aspects identified by Soderstrom? Can you think of examples of how this relates to your experiences?
How do you think these findings can be applied to early childhood programs? What are some strategies or practices that staff could easily use?
How might you share this information when working with parents?
It is rare that there are such clear, potentially very effective and cost-free implications of research. Frequency of communication between adults and children is something that can be influenced. Talking with children is an important part of their early experiences, both at home and in early childhood programs.
Research shows that teachers, like parents, with higher levels of education use more words and more complex language when talking with children. Most studies about the impact of early childhood programs on language development are limited to one program in the United States. The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) Preprimary Project was a longitudinal, cross-national study of early childhood care and education programs in ten countries. The purpose of this longitudinal study was to identify how characteristics of preprimary settings, such as teaching practices and structural features, are related to children’s language and cognitive development at age seven.
The ten countries studied were Finland, Greece, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Poland, Spain, Thailand and United States. The level of teacher education predicted better language performance at age seven but, interestingly, group size was NOT related to children’s age-seven language scores.
Find out more about the study in the following summary.
This study identified some important early childhood teaching practices. Are these practices being implemented in programs in your community?
If not, what are some things that you can do to promote meaningful changes?
Researchers continue to help us better understand children’s language development. Perhaps more importantly, their research provides evidence to identify strategies adults should use to promote optimal language development. Try this quiz to review some of key messages from videos and readings on this page.
