Why do children learn a new language faster?

Learning a new language is never easy. Yet children seem to achieve this at a much faster rate than adolescents or adults. In a new study, published on July 2 in the journal Psychological Science, American researchers suggest that this is explained by the way in which parents use what they know of their children’s language when talking to them. Parents are said to have extremely accurate models of their children’s language knowledge and use these models to adjust the language they use when speaking to them.

Adapt to the knowledge of the child

Adapting your speech to the linguistic level of your interlocutor would therefore be the key to learning a new language more quickly. “We’ve known for years that parents speak to children differently than other adults, for example by simplifying their speech, duplicating words and stretching vowels.assures Daniel Yurovsky, assistant professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University and co-author of the study. This stuff helps young children get to grips with the language, but we don’t know if parents change the way they speak as children pick up the language, giving children ‘just’ language input for learn the next thing.”

Adults tend to address children in a slower manner. They also use more exaggerated enunciation, repetition, and simplified linguistic structure. They also pepper their communication with questions to assess the child’s understanding. As a child’s fluency in language increases, the structure and complexity of sentences used by adults increase. “This is comparable to the progression a student takes when learning math in school.believes Daniel Yurovsky. When you go to school, you start with algebra and then move on to geometry. People talk to children using the same type of structure without thinking about it. They measure what their child knows about language and change the way they speak so children understand them.”

Descriptive elements specific to the child’s knowledge

Scientists dissected the elements of language to understand how parents adapt their interactions to their child’s speech development. For this, they recruited 41 child-adult pairs and developed a game where parents help their offspring choose a specific animal from a set of three, a game that toddlers (aged 15-23 months) and their parents play regularly in their daily lives. Half of the animals in the matching game were animals that children typically learn before age 2 (e.g., a cat, a cow), and the other half were animals that are typically learned later ( for example, a peacock, a leopard).

The researchers noticed that when the parents had to describe the second category of animals, unknown to the child, they used additional descriptive elements familiar to the child. “Parents have an incredibly accurate knowledge of their child’s language because they’ve watched them grow and learnbelieves Daniel Yurovsky. These results show that parents leverage their knowledge of their children’s language development to refine the linguistic information they provide..”

Better Think Machine Learning Language Systems

These results could have some relevance for researchers working in the field of machine learning. “’These findings could help us understand how to think about machine learning language systemsconcluded Daniel Yurovsky. Currently, we train language models by giving them all the linguistic data we can get our hands on at once. But we could do better if we could give them the right data at the right time, keeping it at the right level of complexity they’re ready for..”