New research has found that understanding grammar helps young children acquire new words. A study conducted at the MIT Language Acquisition Lab discovered that sentences contain subtle hints in their grammar that tell kids about the meaning of new words, allowing them to learn and understand even unfamiliar terms.
New Research Shows Grammar Helps Young Children Acquire New Words
New research shows that a grasp of grammar helps even very young children figure out when they must acquire new words.
How Do We Build Our Vocabulary?
As young children, how do we build our vocabulary? Even by age 1, many infants seem to think that if they hear a new word, it means something different from the words they already know. But why they think so has remained subject to inquiry among scholars for the last 40 years.
A New Study Offers a Novel Insight
A new study carried out at the MIT Language Acquisition Lab offers a novel insight into the matter: Sentences contain subtle hints in their grammar that tell young children about the meaning of new words. The finding, based on experiments with 2-year-olds, suggests that even very young kids are capable of absorbing grammatical cues from language and leveraging that information to acquire new words.
Kids Have Sophisticated Knowledge of Grammar
“Even at a surprisingly young age, kids have sophisticated knowledge of the grammar of sentences and can use that to learn the meanings of new words,” says Athulya Aravind, an associate professor of linguistics at MIT.
Focus is Key in Language Acquisition
The researchers’ experiments manipulated focus in three experiments with a total of 106 children. The participants watched videos of a cartoon fox who asked them to point to different objects, like a “toy” or “blicket.”
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In the first version, “blicket” and “toy” plausibly refer to the same object.
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But in the second version, the added focus, through intonation, implies that “toy” contrasts with the previously discussed “blicket.”
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Without focus, only 24 percent of the respondents thought the words were mutually exclusive, whereas with the focus created by emphasizing “toy,” 89 percent of participants thought “blicket” and “toy” referred to different objects.
Focus Affects Interpretation of New Words
The second and third experiments showed that focus is not just key when it comes to words like “toy,” but it also affects the interpretation of new words children have never encountered before, like “wug” or “dax.” If a new word was said without focus, children thought the word meant the previously named object 71 percent of the time. But when hearing the new word spoken with focus, they thought it must refer to a new object 87 percent of the time.
Focus Communicates Presence of Contrasting Alternative
“Even though they know nothing about this new word, when it was focused, that still told them something: Focus communicated to children the presence of a contrasting alternative, and they correspondingly understood the noun to refer to an object that had not previously been labeled,” Aravind explains.
Implications for Language Acquisition
The researchers’ findings have implications for language acquisition. The study suggests that young children are capable of absorbing grammatical cues from language and leveraging that information to acquire new words.
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The research was supported, in part, by a Jacobs Foundation Fellowship awarded to Feiman.
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The paper is titled, “Why Do Children Think Words Are Mutually Exclusive?” It is published in advance online form in Psychological Science.
