Learning language is the premier cognitive accomplishment of early childhood. Two-year-olds use short, telegraphic sentences (“Want cookie,” “Where Daddy go?”), omitting adjectives, adverbs, and articles. By contrast, 5-year-olds seem able to say almost anything (see At About This Time).

291

Brain maturation, myelination, scaffolding, and social interaction make early childhood ideal for learning language. As you remember from Chapter 1, scientists once thought that early childhood was a critical period for language learning—the only time when a first language could be mastered and the best time to learn a second or third one.

It is easy to understand why they thought so. Young children have powerful motivation and ability to sort words and sounds into meaning (theory-theory), which makes them impressive language learners. For that reason, teachers and parents should converse with children many hours each day. However, the critical-period hypothesis is false: Many people learn a new language after age 6.

Instead, early childhood is a sensitive period for language learning—for rapidly and easily mastering vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation. Young children are language sponges; they soak up every verbal drop they encounter.

Exactly how sensitive the preschool years are is still disputed (DeKeyser, 2013). There is no doubt that it is easier to learn a first or second language earlier than later, nor is there any doubt that some people learn a second language in adulthood. Adult language learning is harder, but not impossible.

Preoperational thinking—which is not logical—helps with language. For example, in a conversation I had with Asa, he said a toy lion was a mother. I said it couldn’t be a mother because it had a mane. Rather than realizing that I might know something about male and female lions, and rather than asking about the new word (mane), he confidently insisted that this particular lion was a mother with a mane.

292

Asa is not alone. One of the valuable (and sometimes frustrating) traits of young children is that they talk about many things to adults, to each other, to themselves, to their toys—unfazed by misuse, mispronunciation, ignorance, stuttering, and so on (Marazita & Merriman, 2010). Language comes easily partly because preoperational children are not self-critical about what they say. Egocentrism has advantages; this is one of them.

The average child knows about 500 words at age 2 and more than 10,000 at age 6 (Herschensohn, 2007). That’s more than six new words a day. These are averages. Estimates of vocabulary size at age 6 vary from 5,000 to 30,000: Some children learn six times as many words as others. Always, however, vocabulary builds quickly, and comprehension is more extensive than speech.

It is not always easy to know how many words a child understands, in part because some tests of vocabulary are more stringent than others (Hoffman et al., 2013). For example, after children listened to a book about a raccoon that saw its reflection in the water, they were asked what “reflection” means. Here are five answers:

Which of these five children knows the vocabulary word? The correct answer to that question could be none, all, or some number in between.

In another example, when a story included “a chill ran down his spine,” children were asked what chill meant. One child answered, “When you want to lay down and watch TV—and eat nachos” (Hoffman et al., 2013, p. 15). Correct?

After painstakingly learning one word at a time between 12 and 18 months of age, children develop interconnected categories for words, a kind of grid or mental map that makes speedy vocabulary acquisition possible. Each of the children above answered the question: They thought they knew the word, and they sort of did.

Learning a word after one exposure is called fast-mapping (Woodward & Markman, 1998). Rather than figuring out the exact definition after hearing it in several contexts, children hear a word once and quickly stick it into a category in their mental language grid. They think they understand it.

Language mapping is not precise. For example, children rapidly connect new animal names close to already-known animal names, without knowing all the details. Thus, tiger is easy to map if you know lion, but a leopard might be called a tiger. A trip to the zoo facilitates fast-mapping of animal names because zoos scaffold learning by placing similar animals near each other.

All preschoolers can fast map words, but some children are quicker than others, and some words are easier than others. A study that tested young children’s ability to fast-map two made-up words (koob and tade) found that it was easier to remember the unusual word (koob) because it was less likely to be confused with other similar-sounding words (Weismer et al., 2013).

293

Picture books offer many opportunities to advance vocabulary through scaffolding and fast-mapping. A mentor might encourage the next steps in the child’s zone of proximal development, such as that tigers have stripes and leopards spots, or, for an older child, that calico cats are almost always female and that lions with manes are always male.

This process explains children’s learning of color words. Generally, 2-year-olds already know some color words, but they fast-map them (K. Wagner et al., 2013). For instance, “blue” could be used for some greens or grays. It is not that children cannot see the hues. Instead, they apply words they know to broad categories, and they have not yet learned the boundaries that adults use.

Thus, all women may be called mothers, all cats can be kitties, and all bright colors red. As one team of scientists explains, adult color words are the result of slow-mapping (K. Wagner et al., 2013), which is not what young children do.

Closely related to fast-mapping is a phenomenon called logical extension: After learning a word, children use it to describe other objects in the same category. One child told her father she had seen some “Dalmatian cows” on a school trip to a farm. Instead of criticizing her foolishness, he remembered the Dalmatian dog she had petted the weekend before and realized that she saw Holstein cows, not Jersey ones.

Bilingual children who don’t know a word in the language they are speaking often insert a word from the other language, code-switching in the middle of a sentence instead of the usual code-switching that occurs when the context changes. That mid-sentence switch may be considered wrong, but actually that is evidence of the child’s drive to communicate.

To call it “Spanglish” when a Spanish-speaking person uses some English words deprecates a logical way to explain something (Otheguy & Stern, 2010). Soon, children realize who understands which language, and they avoid substitutions when speaking to a monolingual person. That illustrates theory of mind.

Some English words are particularly difficult for every child to use correctly—who/whom, have been/had been, here/there, yesterday/tomorrow. More than one child has awakened on Christmas morning and asked, “Is it tomorrow yet?” A child told to “stay there” or “come here” may not follow instructions because the terms are confusing. It might be better to say, “Stay there on that bench” or “Come here to hold my hand.” Every language has difficult concepts that are expressed in words; children everywhere learn them eventually.

Extensive study of children’s language abilities finds that fast-mapping is only one of many techniques that children use to learn language. When a word does not refer to an object on the mental map, children find other ways to master it (Carey, 2010). If a word does not refer to anything the child can see or otherwise sense or act on, it may be ignored. Always, however, action helps. A hole is to dig; love is hugging; hearts beat.

Remember from Chapter 6 that grammar includes structures, techniques, and rules that communicate meaning. Knowledge of grammar is essential for learning to speak, read, and write. A large vocabulary is useless unless a person knows how to put words together. Each language has its own grammar rules; that’s one reason children speak in one-word sentences first.

294

By age 2, children understand the basics. For example, English-speaking children know word order (subject/verb/object), saying, “I eat apple,” rather than any of the five other possible sequences of those three words. They use plurals, tenses (past, present, and future), and nominative, objective, and possessive pronouns (I, me, and mine or my).

Children apply rules of grammar as soon as they figure them out, using their own theories about how language works and their experience regarding when and how often various rules apply (Meltzoff & Gopnik, 2013). For example, English-speaking children quickly learn to add an s to form the plural: Toddlers follow that rule when they ask for two cookies or more blocks.

Soon they add an s to make the plural of words they have never heard before, even nonsense words. If preschoolers are shown a drawing of an abstract shape, told it is called a wug, and are then shown two of these shapes, they say there are two wugs. Children realize words have a singular and a plural before they use that grammar form themselves (Zapf & Smith, 2007).

One reason for variation in particulars of language learning is that several parts of the brain are involved, each myelinating at a distinct rate. Furthermore, many genes and alleles affect comprehension and expression. In general, genes affect expressive (spoken or written) language more than receptive (heard or read) language. Thus, some children are relatively talkative or quiet because they inherit that tendency, but experience (not genes) determines what they understand. For that, parents and teachers are crucial.

Sometimes children apply the rules of grammar when they should not. This error is called overregularization. By age 4, many children overregularize that final s, talking about foots, tooths, and mouses. This signifies knowledge, not stupidity: Many children first say words correctly (feet, teeth, mice), repeating what they have heard. Later, they are smart enough to apply the rules of grammar, and overregularize, assuming that all constructions follow the rules (Ramscar & Dye, 2011). The child who says, “I goed to the store” needs to hear, “Oh, you went to the store?” rather than criticism.

More difficult to learn is an aspect of language called pragmatics—knowing which words, tones, and grammatical forms to use with whom (Siegal & Surian, 2012). In some languages, it is essential to know which set of words to use when a person is older or not a close friend or family member.

For example, French children learn the difference between tu and vous in early childhood. Although both words mean “you,” tu is used with familiar people, while vous is the more formal expression (as well as the plural expression). In other languages, children learn that there are two words for grandmother, depending on whose mother she is.

English does not make those distinctions, but pragmatics is important for early-childhood learning nonetheless. Children learn that there are many practical differences in vocabulary and tone depending on the context and, once theory of mind is established, on the audience.

Knowledge of pragmatics is evident when a 4-year-old pretends to be a doctor, a teacher, or a parent. Each role requires different speech. On the other hand, children often blurt out questions that embarrass their parents (“Why is that lady so fat?” or “I don’t want to kiss grandpa because his breath smells”): The pragmatics of polite speech require more social understanding than many young children possess.

295

Language-minority people (those who speak a language that is not their nation’s dominant one) suffer if they do not also speak the majority language. In the United States, those who are not proficient in English have lower school achievement, diminished self-esteem, and inadequate employment, as well as many other problems. Fluency in English can erase these liabilities; fluency in another language then becomes an asset.

In the United States in 2011, 22 percent of schoolchildren spoke a language other than English at home, with most of them (77 percent) also speaking English well, according to their parents (U.S. Census Bureau, 2011) (see Figure 9.3). The percentage of bilingual children is higher in many other nations. In many African, Asian, and European nations, by sixth grade most schoolchildren are bilingual, and some are trilingual.

Unlike a century ago, everyone now seeking U.S. citizenship must be able to speak English. Some people believe that national unity is threatened by language-minority speakers. By contrast, other people emphasize that international understanding is crucial and that ideally, everyone should speak several languages.

Should a nation have one official language, several, or none? Individuals and nations have divergent answers. Switzerland has three official languages; Canada has two; India has one national language (Hindi), but many states of India also have their own, for a total of 28 official languages; the United States has none.

Some adults fear that young children who are taught two languages might become semilingual, not bilingual, “at risk for delayed, incomplete, and possibly even impaired language development” (Genesee, 2008, p. 17). Others have used their own experience to argue the opposite, that “there is absolutely no evidence that children get confused if they learn two languages” (Genesee, 2008, p. 18).

This second position has much more research support. Soon after the vocabulary explosion, children who have heard two languages since birth usually master two distinct sets of words and grammar, along with each language’s pauses, pronunciations, intonations, and gestures. Proficiency is directly related to how much language they hear (Hoff et al., 2012).

Early childhood is the best time to learn languages. Neuroscience finds that for adults who mastered two languages when they were young, both languages are located in the same areas of the brain with no impact on the cortex structure (Klein et al., 2014). They manage to keep the two languages separate, activating one and temporarily inhibiting the other when speaking to a monolingual person. They may be a millisecond slower to respond when they must switch languages, but their brains function better overall. Being bilingual benefits the brain lifelong, further evidence for plasticity. Indeed, the bilingual brain may provide some resistance to Alzheimer’s dementia in old age (Costa & Sebastián-Gallés, 2014).

296

Learning a “foreign” language in high school or college, as required of most U.S. children, is too late for fluency. After childhood, the logic of language is possible to grasp, so adults can learn the rules of forming the past tense, for instance. However, pronunciation, idioms, and exceptions to the rules are confusing and rarely mastered after puberty. The human brain is designed to learn language best in childhood.

Do not equate pronunciation and spoken fluency with comprehension and reading ability. Many adults who speak the majority language with an accent are nonetheless proficient in the language and culture (difference is not deficit). From infancy on, hearing is more acute than vocalization. Almost all young children mispronounce whatever language they speak, blithely unaware of their mistakes.

For example, almost all young children transpose sounds (magazine becomes mazagine), drop consonants (truck becomes ruck), convert difficult sounds to easier ones (father becomes fadder), and drop complex sounds (cherry become terry). Mispronunciation does not impair fluency primarily because young children are more receptive than expressive—they hear better than they talk. For instance, when 4-year-old Rachel asked for a “yeyo yayipop,” her father repeated, “You want a yeyo yayipop?” She replied, “Daddy, sometimes you talk funny.”

Schools in all nations stress the dominant language, sometimes exclusively. Consequently, language-minority parents fear that their children will make a language shift, becoming more fluent in the school language than in their home language, which might be forgotten. Language shift occurs everywhere if theory-theory leads children to conclude that their first language is inferior to the new one (Bhatia & Ritchie, 2013).

Some language-minority children in Mexico shift to Spanish, some children of Canada’s First Nations (as native peoples are called there) shift to French, some children in the United States shift to English. In China, all speak some form of Chinese, but some shift occurs from Mandarin, Cantonese, and so on to another.

No shift is inevitable: The attitudes and practices of parents and the community are crucial. Another crucial aspect is cohort, as shown by a multi-faceted study of children who switched from Bangla to English when they entered primary school in London. Those children, now adult, often no longer teach their children the language and the customs of their parents (Rasinger et al., 2013).

Remember that young children are preoperational: They center on the immediate status of their language (not on future usefulness or past glory), on appearance more than substance. No wonder many shift toward the language of the dominant culture.

Since language is integral to culture, if a child is to become fluently bilingual, everyone who speaks with the child should show appreciation of both cultures, and children need to hear twice as much talk as usual (Hoff et al., 2012). If the parents do not speak the majority language, they benefit their child’s learning by talking, listening, and playing with the child extensively in the home language. Learning one language well makes it easier to learn another (Hoff et al., 2014).

297

The same practices can make a child fluently trilingual, as some 5-year-olds are. One parent might spend hours each day talking and reading to a child in French, for instance, the other parent in English, and that child might play with friends and learn from teachers at a Spanish-speaking preschool.

The extent of exposure is crucial: Unfortunately it is typical for one parent to speak with the child much less than the other, and the child’s language learning reflects that deficit (MacLeod et al., 2013). If a young child is immersed in three languages, he or she may speak all three without an accent—except whatever accent their mother, father, and friends have.

Because understanding the printed word is crucial, a meta-analysis of about 300 studies analyzed which activities in early childhood aided reading later on. Both vocabulary and phonics (precise awareness of the sounds of words) predicted literacy (Shanahan & Lonigan, 2010). Five specific strategies and experiences were particularly effective for children of all income levels, languages, and ethnicities.

298