5.4 Language Learning

Language is the premier cognitive accomplishment of early childhood. Two-year-olds use short, telegraphic sentences (“Want cookie,” “Where Daddy go?”), but 6-year-olds seem able to understand and discuss almost anything (see At About This Time).

A Sensitive Time

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 for learning a second or third language. It is true that in early childhood, children organize words and sounds into meaning (theory-theory), and for that reason teachers and parents should speak and listen to children many hours each day. However, many people learn languages after age 6; the critical-period hypothesis is false (Singleton & Muñoz, 2011). Instead, early childhood is a sensitive period for language learning—for rapidly and easily mastering vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation. Young children are called “language sponges” because they soak up every drop of language they encounter.

Language learning is an example of dynamic systems, in that every part of the developmental process influences every other part. To be specific, there are “multiple sensitive periods…auditory, phonological, semantic, syntactic, and motor systems, along with the developmental interactions among these components” (Thomas & Johnson, 2008), all of which facilitate language learning.

One of the valuable (and sometimes frustrating) traits of young children is that they talk a lot—to adults, to each other, to themselves, to their toys—unfazed by misuse, mispronunciation, stuttering, or other impediments to fluency. Language comes easily for young children partly because they are not self-critical about what they say. Egocentrism has advantages; this is one of them. Children believe they know more than they do (Marazita & Merriman, 2011), and they readily and confidently talk about it. For example, one 3-year-old said that a toy lion was a mother. Even when told by an adult that a lion can’t be a mother because it has a mane, the three-year-old insisted that this one was a mother with a mane.

The Vocabulary Explosion

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. Precise estimates of vocabulary size vary; some children learn four times as many words as others. However, vocabulary always builds quickly and comprehension is more extensive than speech.

Fast-MappingAfter painstakingly learning one word at a time between 12 and 18 months of age, children develop an interconnected set of categories for words, a kind of filing cabinet or mental map, which makes speedy vocabulary acquisition possible. The process is called fast-mapping (Woodward & Markman, 1998). Rather than figuring out the exact definition after hearing a word used in several contexts, children hear a word once and quickly stick it into a category (like a folder) in their mental language filing cabinet. That quick-sticking is fast-mapping.

Language mapping is not precise. For example, children quickly map new animal names close to animal names they already know, without having 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, if zoos scaffold learning by placing similar animals near each other. So does a picture book, if a mentor points to the tiger’s stripes and the leopard’s spots.

Fast-mapping begins even before age 2, and it accelerates over childhood, as each new word makes it easier to map other words (Gershkoff-Stowe & Hahn, 2007). Generally, the more linguistic clues children have, the better their fast-mapping is (Mintz, 2005).

An experiment in teaching the names of parts of objects (e.g., the spigot of a faucet) found that children learned much better if the adults named the object that had the part and then spoke of the object in the possessive (e.g., “See this butterfly? Look, this is the butterfly’s thorax”) (Saylor & Sabbagh, 2004). It is easier to map a new word when it is connected to a familiar one.

Horse or Camel? These children might fast-map and call it a horse since it is horse-sized, horse-coloured, and has a horselike head and legs. However, as in this example, fast-mapping can be misleading.

DEA/DIEGO MROSSI/AGE FOTOSTOCK

Words and The Limits of LogicClosely 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. He remembered that she had petted a Dalmatian dog the weekend before.

Bilingual children who do not know a word in the language they are speaking often insert a word from the other language. Soon they know who understands which language—and make no substitutions when speaking to a monolingual person.

Some words are particularly difficult—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 on that bench” or “Come hold my hand.”

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 use 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.

Listening, Talking, and ReadingLiteracy is crucial for children. As a result, researchers have conducted studies to discover what activities and practices promote literacy. A meta-analysis of about 300 studies analyzed which activities in early childhood aided reading a few years later in elementary school. Both vocabulary and attention to the sounds of words (phonics) predicted fluent reading a few years later (Shanahan & Lonigan, 2010). Five specific strategies and experiences were particularly effective for young children of all incomes and ethnicities:

1. Code-focused teaching. In order for children to learn to read, they must “break the code” from spoken to written words. It is helpful for children to learn the letters and sounds of the alphabet (e.g., “A, Alligators all around” or “C is for cat”).
2. Book-reading. Vocabulary as well as familiarity with print increase when adults read to children, allowing questions and conversation.
3. Parent education. When teachers and other professionals teach parents how to stimulate cognition (as in the book-reading above), children become better readers.
4. Language enhancement. Within each child’s zone of proximal development, mentors can expand vocabulary and grammar, based on what the child knows and experiences.
5. Preschool programs. Children learn from teachers and other children.

Acquiring Basic GrammarWe noted in Chapter 3 that the grammar of language includes the structures, techniques, and rules that are used to communicate meaning. By age 3, children understand the basics. English-speaking children know word order (subject/verb/object), saying, “I eat apple,” not any of the other possible sequences of those three words. They use plurals; tenses (past, present, and future); and nominative, objective, and possessive pronouns (I/me/mine or my). Some 3-year-olds even use articles (the, a, an) correctly, although proper article use in English is bewilderingly complex. Every language has both easy and difficult aspects that native speakers eventually learn. Learning each aspect of language (grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, etc.) follows a particular developmental path.

One reason for variation in language learning is that several parts of the brain are involved, each myelinating at a different rate. Further, 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 (Kovas et al., 2005).

Sometimes children apply the rules of grammar when they should not, an error called overregularization. For example, English-speaking children quickly learn to add s to form the plural: Toddlers follow that rule when they ask for two cookies or more blocks. Soon they apply this to nonsense words. If preschoolers are shown a drawing of an abstract shape, are told it is called a wug, and are then shown two of these shapes, they say there are two wugs. In keeping with the distinction between reception and expression, very young children realize words have a singular and a plural before they produce the words (Zapf & Smith, 2007). By age 4, many children overregularize that final s, talking about foots, tooths, and mouses. This is evidence of increasing knowledge. Many children first say words correctly, repeating what they have heard. Later, when they grasp the grammar and try to apply it, they overregularize, assuming that all constructions follow the regular path (Ramscar & Dye, 2011).

Learning Two Languages

Canada is a bilingual country with two official languages: English and French. About 58 percent of the total population is anglophone, while about 22 percent is francophone (Corbeil & Blaser, 2009). While most children learn one of the country’s official languages, some receive a bilingual education.

Although there are no official national records on the number of bilingual schools in Canada, it is estimated that about 357 000 students participate in French immersion programs (Allen, 2009). Nationwide, fewer than 10 percent of eligible students are enrolled in French-immersion programs, with the highest enrolment rates being in Quebec and New Brunswick (37 and 26 percent, respectively) (Canadian Council on Learning, 2007).

Data from the Canadian Youth in Transition Survey, a longitudinal survey designed to study the transitions that youth make between education, training, and work, indicated that by age 21, 29 percent of the participants were bilingual (able to have a conversation in both English and French). However, this differs significantly by mother tongue. Specifically, bilingualism accounts for 65 percent of francophone youth, whereas only 18 percent of non-francophones are bilingual.

Learning two languages is also apparent with language-minority children. These children speak a language that is not their nation’s dominant one but often learn English or French in school. The mother tongue of 20 percent of Canadians is not English or French or one of the Aboriginal languages. Chinese is now the third largest mother-tongue group in Canada, at 3.3 percent of the population. It is a mark of Canada’s cultural diversity that the country is now home to people who speak about 200 different languages as their native tongue (Corbeil & Blaser, 2009). These children learn English or French

Some immigrant school-age children are immersed in a language that is neither there mother tongue nor the language most commonly spoken in their new community, thus learning a third language. For example, immigrant school-age children make up more than 25 percent of French immersion students in urban areas like Toronto and Vancouver (McMullen, 2004). Even though newcomer children are less likely to be enrolled in French-immersion schools than non-immigrant children, some findings report that immigrant English as Second Language (ESL) students enrolled in French immersion perform as well as their anglophone classmates. Also, those immigrant children who have already developed literacy in their native language often perform even better than Anglophone students in French-immersion schools (Hurd, 1993; Swain et al., 1990).

How and WhySome worry that young children taught two languages might become only semi-lingual, not bilingual, and “at risk for delayed, incomplete, and possibly even impaired language development” (Genesee, 2008). Others argue that “there is absolutely no evidence that children get confused if they learn two languages” (Genesee, 2008). This second position has 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 (Genesee & Nicoladis, 2007).

No doubt early childhood is the best time to learn a language or languages. Neuroscience finds that in young bilingual children, both languages exist in the same areas of their brains, yet they manage to keep them separate in practice. This separation allows them to activate one language and temporarily inhibit the other, experiencing no confusion when they speak to a monolingual person (Crinion et al., 2006). They may be a millisecond slower to respond if they must switch languages, but Canadian researchers have consistently found that their brains function better overall and may even have some resistance to Alzheimer’s disease in old age (Bialystok et al., 2009; Gold et al., 2013).

Another factor that supports young children learning a second language is that it is easier for children to learn the pronunciation of a new language than it is for adults. Although almost all children have pronunciation difficulties even in their first language, they are usually unaware of their mistakes and gradually echo precisely whatever accent they hear. Mispronunciation does not impair fluency since children understand what they are hearing even if they cannot yet pronounce it.

In early childhood, children transpose sounds (magazine becomes mazagine), drop consonants (truck becomes ruck), and convert difficult sounds to easier ones (father becomes fadder). When I was a student teacher for a kindergarten class, the librarian was reading an alphabet book to the class. For each letter, she asked the class to think of other words. When she got to “W,” there was a very long pause. Then a child raised his hand, and said with great excitement, “Wobot!” The whole class cheered and clapped at the excellent answer. Although the answer was wrong (robot), the adults all cheered with the class, too.

To speak well, young children need to be “bathed in language,” as some early childhood educators express it. They need to listen and speak in every situation, just as a person taking a bath is surrounded by water. Television is a poor teacher because children need personalized, responsive instruction in the zone of proximal development. In fact, young children who watch the most television tend to be delayed in language learning (Harrison & McLeod, 2010).

Smiling Faces Everyone in this group is an immigrant, born far from their current home in North America. Jean Luc Dushime escaped the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, central Africa, when he was 14. He eventually adapted to his new language, climate, surroundings, and culture. Today, he helps immigrant children make the same transition.

MARY KNOX MERRILL/THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR/GETTY IMAGES

Language Loss and GainsSchools in all nations stress the dominant language, and language-minority parents fear that their children will make a language shift, becoming more fluent in the school language than in their home language. Language shift occurs everywhere—some First Nations children in Canada shift to English (Allen, 2007), as do some Chinese-speaking children in Canada and the United States—but not always (Zhang, 2010). The attitudes and practices of parents and the community are crucial.

Remember that young children are preoperational: They centre on the immediate status of their language (not on its global usefulness or past traditions) and 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 evident appreciation of both cultures (Pearson, 2008; Snow & Kang, 2006).

Becoming a balanced bilingual, speaking two languages so well that no audible hint suggests the other language, is accomplished by millions of young children in many nations, to their cognitive and linguistic benefit (Bialystok & Viswanathan, 2009; Pearson, 2008).Yet language loss is a valid fear. Millions of children either abandon their first language or do not learn the second as well as they might. Although skills in one language can be transferred to benefit the acquisition of another, transfer is not automatic or inevitable (Snow & Kang, 2006). Scaffolding is needed.

The basics of language learning—the naming and vocabulary explosions, fast-mapping, overregularization, extensive practice—apply to every language a young child learns. Young children’s vocabulary in two languages is directly connected to how much they hear. If a child is to become a balanced bilingual, that child needs to hear twice as much talk as usual (Hammer et al., 2011). The same practices can make a child fluently trilingual, as some 5-year-olds are. One parent might talk and read to a child in French, for instance, another in English, while the child plays with Chinese-speaking friends at preschool.

Bilingual children and adults are advanced in theory of mind and executive functioning, probably because they need to be more reflective and strategic when they speak. However, sheer linguistic proficiency does not necessarily lead to cognitive advances (Bialystock & Barac, 2012). Simply learning new words and grammar (many preschools teach songs in a second language) does not guarantee a child will learn to understand and appreciate other cultures.