By Robert Roy Britt, LiveScience Managing Editor
Like teenagers, babies don't much care what their parents say.
Though they are learning words at 10 months old, infants tend to grasp the names of objects that interest them rather than whatever the speaker thinks is important, a new study finds.
And they do it quickly.
The infants were able to learn two new words in five minutes with just five presentations for each word and object, said study leader Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a professor of psychology at Temple University. Importantly, the babies paired a new word to the object they liked best, regardless of what object the speaker referred to.
"The baby naturally assumes that the word you're speaking goes with the object that they think is interesting, not the object that you show an interest in," Hirsh-Pasek said.
The result is not too surprising, Hirsh-Pasek said in a telephone interview. She says interest drives learning for older children, too, and even adults.
She cites six-year-olds she's heard talking knowledgably about baseball players' batting averages. "How in the world do they get it? They're not going to do decimals until 7th or 8th grade."
"Ten-month-olds simply 'glue' a label onto the most interesting object they see," said Shannon Pruden, a Temple doctoral student in psychology and lead author of a report on the findings in the March/April issue of the journal Child Development.
Later, around 18 months, children learn to use the speaker's interest—such as where the eyes gaze—as a guide to learning, the researchers say.
Still, Hirsh-Pasek thinks there is a lesson for parents and educators of children at all ages: "Sometimes we fail to take notice of what our learners are doing and what they're interested in," she said. "We all learn best when things are meaningful."
Showing posts with label Vocabulary. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Vocabulary. Show all posts
Secret to Toddler Vocabulary Explosion Revealed
By Andrea Thompson, LiveScience Staff Writer
Learning 10 new words a day may seem daunting, but it's actually fairly simple for toddlers, who must tackle this vocabulary milestone to eventually talk like the rest of us, a new study suggests.
At about the age of 18 months, children experience a "vocabulary explosion" that suddenly involves learning new words, left and right. Many parents likely remember being amazed by how smart their child seemed during this stretch.
Researchers have previously thought complex mechanisms must govern this voracious rate of word-learning.
"The field of developmental psychology and language development has always assumed that something happens at that point to account for this word spurt: kids discover things have names, they switch to using more efficient mechanisms and they use their first words to help discover new ones," said study author Bob McMurray of the University of Iowa. "Many such mechanisms have been proposed."
But these mechanisms aren’t necessary, according to McMurray, whose study of a mathematical model to describe the vocabulary explosion is detailed in the Aug. 3 issue of the journal Science.
While children may engage those types of specialized mechanisms to help them learn new words, McMurray says, computational simulations he conducted suggest that simpler mechanisms—such as word repetition and learning multiple words at once—can explain the vocabulary explosion.
"Children are going to get that word spurt guaranteed, mathematically, as long as a couple of conditions hold," McMurray said. "They have to be learning more than one word at a time, and they must be learning a greater number of difficult or moderate words than easy words. Using computer simulations and mathematical analysis, I found that if these two conditions are true, you always get a vocabulary explosion."
McMurray likens the word-learning process to filling up jars, with jar size increasing with the difficulty of the word.
Experts previously suggested that when a child learned a word, it was easier for him or her to learn more words, analogous to shrinking the jar size. But McMurray's model found that even if jar size is increased, the vocabulary explosion still occurs.
The key is the relative number of small jars to big jars (or easy words to difficult words)—as long as there are more difficult words than easy words, which is generally the case with languages, the vocabulary explosion will happen.
"Clearly, the specialized mechanisms aren't necessary," McMurray said. "Our general abilities can take us a lot farther than we thought."
Learning 10 new words a day may seem daunting, but it's actually fairly simple for toddlers, who must tackle this vocabulary milestone to eventually talk like the rest of us, a new study suggests.
At about the age of 18 months, children experience a "vocabulary explosion" that suddenly involves learning new words, left and right. Many parents likely remember being amazed by how smart their child seemed during this stretch.
Researchers have previously thought complex mechanisms must govern this voracious rate of word-learning.
"The field of developmental psychology and language development has always assumed that something happens at that point to account for this word spurt: kids discover things have names, they switch to using more efficient mechanisms and they use their first words to help discover new ones," said study author Bob McMurray of the University of Iowa. "Many such mechanisms have been proposed."
But these mechanisms aren’t necessary, according to McMurray, whose study of a mathematical model to describe the vocabulary explosion is detailed in the Aug. 3 issue of the journal Science.
While children may engage those types of specialized mechanisms to help them learn new words, McMurray says, computational simulations he conducted suggest that simpler mechanisms—such as word repetition and learning multiple words at once—can explain the vocabulary explosion.
"Children are going to get that word spurt guaranteed, mathematically, as long as a couple of conditions hold," McMurray said. "They have to be learning more than one word at a time, and they must be learning a greater number of difficult or moderate words than easy words. Using computer simulations and mathematical analysis, I found that if these two conditions are true, you always get a vocabulary explosion."
McMurray likens the word-learning process to filling up jars, with jar size increasing with the difficulty of the word.
Experts previously suggested that when a child learned a word, it was easier for him or her to learn more words, analogous to shrinking the jar size. But McMurray's model found that even if jar size is increased, the vocabulary explosion still occurs.
The key is the relative number of small jars to big jars (or easy words to difficult words)—as long as there are more difficult words than easy words, which is generally the case with languages, the vocabulary explosion will happen.
"Clearly, the specialized mechanisms aren't necessary," McMurray said. "Our general abilities can take us a lot farther than we thought."
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