Understand How a Child Learns a Language Faster

Learning a new language is always faster in small children than teenagers or adults. The difference in this learning arrives from the way people talk to children as per a study at the Carnegie Mellon University, published in the journal of Psychological Science.

The study team devised a game to experimentally evaluate parent's language usage with children in 41 child-adult pairs. The parents were asked to help their children to pick a specific animal from a set of three (a routine game).

‘Learning a new language is always faster in small children than teenagers or adults. The difference in this learning arrives from the way parents modulate their language when talking to their children. This method can be utilized in machine learning for effective learning. ’

Language Learning in a Child

It is found that parents spoke to their children in a tuned language based on precise models of their children's language they have witnessed through their development. The caregivers used a variety of techniques like additional descriptors to convey the 'unknown' animal to the child.

"We have known for years that parents talk to children differently than to other adults in a lot of ways, for example simplifying their speech, reduplicating words and stretching out vowel sounds. This stuff helps young kids get a toehold into language," says Daniel Yurovsky, assistant professor in psychology at Carnegie Mellon University.

However, if these language modulations are sufficient enough for the children to learn further is unclear. However, the present study portrays the western parenting perspective as well as caregivers with a higher educational background than is represented in the country.

"These results could help us understand how to think about machine learning language systems. Right now we train language models by giving them all of the language data we can get our hands on all at once. But we might do better if we could give them the right data at the right time, keeping it at just the right level of complexity that they are ready for," says Yurovsky.

Source: Medindia