Your Baby can Read Your Mind

Have you ever wondered how your baby learns the meanings of words? For most people, the answer will probably be ‘no: Because word-learning comes so naturally to children, few of us ever stop to think just how difficult it is. To get an idea, think back to the last time you were in a country where you didn’t speak the language. How many words did you manage to learn by listening to the natives? One? Two? None? This is exactly the scenario faced by children. In fact, at least as an adult you have the advantage of knowing something about how words work. For example, you know that the word for “car” doesn’t change depending on the colour of the car. Babies don’t.

Why is word-learning so easy for children when it is so difficult for us? You might imagine that children’s advantage comes from the fact that parents deliberately teach them words. However, this idea quickly breaks down. For example, suppose you point to a cup of juice and say “this is a cup”. How does the child know that the object is called a “cup” as opposed to a “this” or an “is a”? Even if you just say “cup”, how does the child know that “cup” means “cup” as opposed to “look”, “juice”, “finish your drink”, “orange”, and so on? An even if this teaching method did work for object names like “cup”, it wouldn’t work for most other types of word. How would you teach children the meaning of “idea”, “noisy”, “the”, “this”, or “a”? In fact, this idea of “teaching” words to children is pretty much the preserve of middle-class westerners; in some cultures, adults rarely speak to children at all.

So how do children figure out what word goes with what? Research suggests that they do so by using some pretty impressive “mind reading” abilities. Thinking back to the cup example, the way children seem to solve the puzzle is by figuring out what the adult is trying to do with her language. If the adult’s intention is to make the child finish the drink (e.g.., she picks up the cup and holds it to the child’s mouth), then whatever she says probably means something like “drink it!”. If the cup is empty and one of a series of objects that the adult picks up whilst producing a word, then her intention is probably to label the object, and whatever she says probably means “cup”.

These mind-reading abilities have been demonstrated in a number of ingenious experiments. Children hear a new (made up) word such as blicket, and have to figure out what it refers to, out of a number of possible options. In one study, for example the child was given one toy play with whilst the experimenter looked into a bucket containing a different toy. The experimenter then looked into the bucket and said “modi”. The question is, which object did the child think was the modi: the object that the child had been playing with when she heard the word modi, or the object that the speaker had been looking at as she produced the word? From around the age of 18 months, children were able to figure out that the speaker’s intention was to label the object that she herself had been looking at, not the child’s object. Interestingly, children with autism – who are known to struggle particularly with understanding the intentions of others – perform poorly at this task, and sometimes associate the word with their own toy. There is anecdotal evidence of this happening in real life. One child apparently called saucepans “Peter eaters” because his mother had been reciting the nursery rhyme Peter Peter Pumpkin eater whilst handling a pan.

In another study, two-year-old learned a game that involved a new toy (for which they didn’t already have a name) and a new action (spinning this toy using a turntable). After a few runs through the game, the experimenter said simply to the child “Widgit, Jason” (or whatever the child’s name was). The question was whether the child would interpret the experimenter’s utterance as a label for the toy (i.e., give me the widgit) or the new spinning action (i.e., widge it! using the turntable). The answer is that children used their mind-reading abilities to figure it out. If the experimenter looked back and forth at the child and the toy, children assumed that her intention was to label the object, and so picked up the “widgit” and handed it to the experimenter. If the experimenter looked back and forth at the child and the turntable, children assumed that her intention was to request the action, and so proceeded to “widge it”.

Many parents get the feeling that their children somehow know what they’re thinking. These studies demonstrate that – in a sense – they do, and that it is this incredible ability that helps children take their first few steps in word-learning.

What’s the past-tense of “to text”?

Imagine that you have agreed to send your friend a text message with the directions to a party, and she phones to ask why they haven’t arrived. You sent them an hour ago but obviously – for some reason or other – they haven’t arrived. Which of the following do you say:

a) I texted you an hour ago.

b) I text you an hour ago.

If your answer is “neither, because text is a noun, not a verb”, then nice try, but no marks. Although self-appointed guardians of “correct grammar” often argue that transforming a noun into a verb (e.g., “I like to party“) is some kind of crime against English, nobody raises an eyebrow at “chairing a meeting”, “saddling a horse” or “polishing the furniture”. The only difference is that to text is a relatively new coinage, whilst the others are older. To chair, to saddle and to polish were once equally new and probably met with similar resistance, before being quietly accepted.

If you feel strongly that it has to be texted, you might justify this intuition with the argument that English past-tense forms end in -ed. But actually, -t is a perfectly good ending for an English past-tense form, as in sent (not sended), went (not goed), or hit (not hitted). Neither is there any rule stating that the past-tense form has to be different to the present tense form (e.g., “Every day I hit/cut someone. In fact, I hit/cut someone an hour ago”); nor that verbs that come from nouns require an -ed past-tense (e.g., if a blacksmith has put a shoe on a horse, we say that he shod him, not shoed him, which means something quite different).

So, in fact, there’s no real reason why you can’t use either text or texted as the past-tense of to text. But what has all this got to do with children’s language learning? The answer is that the same reasoning that gives us the “no-change” past-tense form text – if a verb already ends in -t, there’s no need to add anything – leads to errors in children. In the last blog, we saw that if a noun already ends in a -s sound (like horse or dress), it already sounds like a plural. Consequently, children often mistakenly think there’s no need to an -s, and say things like “two horse“. In exactly the same way, if a verb already ends in a -t sound (e.g, want, start, twist), it already sounds like a past-tense form (like walked, talked, missed or kissed, all of which end in a -t sound, albeit one that is spelt “ed” when written down). So when children are attempting to produce the past-tense of these verbs, they often mistakenly think that a “no-change” form is perfectly good. This leads to errors like “Yesterday I want a biscuit so much that I start crying. In the end, I twist my mum’s arm”.

As with the missing -s errors we talked about last time, these errors tend to slip under the radar because, just like text, they sound like pretty good past-tense forms to us too. But listen out when your children are trying to produce the past-tense of -t verbs, especially rarer ones like collect, sort and twist. Even 7-year-olds, who are – relatively speaking – old-age pensioners when it comes to the past-tense, make mistakes with these pretty often.

This is a box. These are two…

Steven Fry’s recent documentary series, Fry’s Planet Word, included a segment where Jean Berko-Gleason, who published a landmark research paper way back in 1958, ran the same test with a modern-day child. A couple of people that I spoke to about the programme mentioned that they weren’t quite clear exactly what the point of the test was. So I thought for today’s blog it might be interesting to explore this classic study, its findings, and what it tells us about children’s language.

The test goes something like this. The researcher shows the picture a child of a funny-looking creature and says “this is a wug“. The word wug, like the creature itself, is completely made-up; invented for the purposes of the experiment. The experimenter then brings out a new picture that shows two of these creatures and says to the child “so these are two…”. Even young children (the youngest in this study were 4 years old) are generally able to correctly answer “wugs”.

What’s the point of this study? One of the most fundamental rules of English is that to make the plural of a noun (which, for our purposes, we can think of as simply a word that names a person, animal or thing) we add an -s. Whilst, from an adult perspective, this rule seems almost too obvious to be worth discussing, it’s actually quite remarkable how quickly children pick this up. No parent goes around saying “now Johnny, to form the plural of a noun, simply add -s to the singular form”; not that children would understand if they did. Somehow, children work this out all by themselves, many years before they are taught about “nouns” and “plurals” (indeed, many people are never taught explicitly about these things).

But what’s the point of all this wug business? Why didn’t Berko (as she was back then) simply ask children for the plural of cat, dog, chair, table etc? The reason is that if a child is able to say “two cats”, this doesn’t actually provide any evidence that she’s learned the ‘add -s’ rule at all. She may simply have learned, by listening to adults, that cats is the word we use when there’s more than one. In contrast, the child cannot possibly have learned the plural form wugs by listening to adults, as we can say with complete confidence that no adult has ever uttered this word in her presence; it was invented solely for the purposes of the experiment. So if the child can correctly produce wugs, we can tell that she has – somehow -arrived at the ‘add -s‘ rule.

As you have probably noticed by listening to your own children, once they have acquired this rule, they tend to go overboard, adding -s to all kinds of words that actually have different plural forms (e.g., childs, foots and mouses instead of children, feet and mice). These types of errors have been studied extensively in child language research, and it is no exaggeration to say that they could easily fill a book on their own. However, we’ll save these for another blog, as today I want to focus on errors where children go underboard, failing to add -s in cases where they should do, despite the fact that they seem to know the rule perfectly well.

At the point where children are quite happily adding -s to words like cat, dog, chair and table, they systematically fail to do so for words like box, horse, dress and lace. In fact, even four-year olds, most of whom will have acquired this rule somewhere between one and two years earlier, fall down on these words over half of the time. That is, more often that not, they say two box, two horse, two dress or two lace. What do these words have in common? The irregular nature of English spelling hides the fact that all of them already end in an -s sound in singular form (a more regular language might spell them boks, hors, drehs and laes). But four-year-olds don’t know or care about adult spellings; to them, all these words already end in -s. And since they already end in -s, there’s no need to add another one. When you think about it, this point of view is pretty logical in its own way, it just happens to be one that is not shared by adults.

Whilst errors where children add an extra -s (like childs or foots) stick out like a sore thumb, errors where children miss off an -s (two boxs) tend to slip under the radar (possibly because, at some level, hearing the -s tricks us into thinking that a plural form was actually produced). But now you’ve read this, you’ll hear them turning up in loads of different place.

…s

Your baby’s first word

What was your baby’s first word? How old was she?

When we talk about a baby’s first word, we normally mean the first word that she produced, in which case the answers are most likely Mama/Dada and somewhere between 6 and 12 months. As you’ve probably noticed yourself, though, children often seem to show an understanding of certain words before they are able to produce themselves. So what was the first word your child understood?

This isn’t always easy to tell in everyday life. However, researchers have come up with some simple yet ingenious techniques for finding out which words even very young babies know. One method involves a pair of loudspeakers, each of which plays a loop of recorded speech for as long as the baby looks at that speaker. This allows babies to choose how long to listen to each of two recordings. If the study is set up so that one speaker continually plays the baby’s own name whilst the other plays a different name, 4-month-olds choose to listen longer to their own name. Other studies using the same technique have shown that, from around 6 months, babies recognize other common words such as baby, hands and feet.

Although these studies can tell us which words 6-month-olds recognize, they don’t tell us which words they understand. To answer this question, we need to use a method where babies hear a word (e.g., mummy) and are shown two videos on adjacent screens (e.g., their mum on one, their dad on the other). If children look longer at the matching screen than the non-matching screen, this suggests they know which person the word refers to. Researchers based in Baltimore used this technique to show that 6-month-olds understand the words mummy and daddy and don’t mistakenly extend these to other adults.

So just because your baby can’t talk yet, don’t assume that she isn’t listening. Most likely, she’s already begun to learn not only the sounds of words but their meanings too.

Does a carpenter carpent?

Over Christmas I read an interesting book called The Etymologicon, based on Mark Forsythe’s Inky Fool blog. The book and blog outline the processes by which new words are formed, one of which is known as back-formation. This happens when speakers incorrectly view one word as having been formed from another, according a pattern that is common in the language. One example discussed is the verb to sidle. According to the Inky Fool, a sideling was originally “a little fellow who stands to one’s side”, but people misanalysed the word as having been formed from the verb sidle+ing, just like hide+ing, glide+ing etc. This is a misanalysis, as the verb to sidle had never existed in the first place. But once it had been invented, speakers assigned it a suitable meaning, and a new word was born.

Children do exactly the same thing when learning language, although their coinages rarely stick. One famous example in the child-language literature is as follows:

Dad: Why can’t you behave?

Son: But Dad, I am being have

The child has “back-formed” have (pronounced to rhyme with grave) from the verb behave on analogy with pairs like quiet/be quiet, noisy/be noisy etc. (this example is often thought to be apocryphal, but one attested source is listed in the links section). Here’s another example, recorded by linguists at Stanford University:

Child: What’s that called?

Mother:  A typewriter.

Child:  No, you’re the typewriter; that’s a typewrite.

If a writer is someone who writes, what does a carpenter do? The answer, according to one of the children studied by these authors (see links section above) is that he carpents.  Similar examples from the same paper include to ham (hit with a hammer), to dag (stab with a dagger) and to hoove (use a popular brand of vacuum cleaner).

Perhaps your own children have come up with similar examples (if so, please feel free to share them in the comments section below). Although children’s coinages rarely make it into the language, they are important in that they demonstrate an ability to recognize patterns in the incoming language, and to use these patterns to produce new words and sentences. As we will see in more detail in future blogs, this is perhaps the single most important ability in language learning.

Language learning in the womb

Let’s start off by asking just how much your newborn child knew about language in her first few days of life. The answer will probably surprise you.

Amazingly, babies who are just two days old have already learned the basic sounds and rhythms of their own language. To demonstrate this, researchers in New York offered newborns a dummy (or, as they would have called it, a pacifier) hooked up to a computer that plays recordings of speech whenever sucking reaches a certain rate. This allows the babies to control how much recorded speech they want to listen to (by increasing or decreasing the rate at which they suck). The twist is that half of the recordings were of English speech and half of Spanish speech. Babies born to English-speaking mothers increased their sucking rate (and hence the amount of speech they heard) when English was on offer, but not Spanish. Babies born to Spanish-speaking mothers did the opposite. (By the way, all the experiments that I refer to in this blog will be listed in the “links” section at the top of the page, in case you want to check my sources). What’s really cute is that another study using the same method showed that babies at this age already prefer the sound of their mother’s voice to another female’s.

So two-day-olds have learned to tell the difference between different languages and different speakers. How did they manage to learn all this in just 48 hours? The answer is that they didn’t; they learned it in the womb. If infants can suck to hear (a) a recording of their mother’s voice as it would sound to you or me or (b) a version modified to mimic the way it sounds to a baby in the womb, they overwhelmingly prefer the second option. Other studies monitor the kicking-rate of babies still in the womb using ultrasound scans. As you have probably noticed yourself, babies often start kicking faster – showing excitement – in response to their mother’s voice.

Another study looked at what the researchers called “foetal soap addiction”. From around 37 weeks, babies whose mothers watched Neighbours (an Australian soap popular in the UK) increased their kicking rate when played the theme tune via a loudspeaker pressed against the bump. Babies whose mothers didn’t watch the show did not. This study might strike you as a bit silly, not to mention a waste of taxpayers’ money. But it’s actually pretty important as it demonstrates  that unborn babies can not only hear what’s going on in the outside world, but can actually learn.

So the message is this: Don’t be shy to talk to your unborn baby. She can hear you, and has already begun to learn the basics of the language that she will soon master.