Babies recognise phrases before they can talk, study finds
Nicole Weinstein
Thursday, April 8, 2021
One-year-olds can recognise combinations of words, such as ‘clap your hands’, before they have uttered their first word, new research from the University of Edinburgh has revealed.
The study, which involved assessments of 36 11- to- 12 month-olds on the cusp of talking, found that the infants were able to understand multi-word phrases.
Linguists from the University of Edinburgh said that their study is the first to provide evidence that young children can pick up and understand multiword sequences before they can talk, or begin producing such combinations themselves.
Dr Barbora Skarabela, one of the authors of the report from the university’s school of philosophy, psychology and language sciences, said, ‘Previous research has shown that young infants recognise many common words. But this is the first study that shows that infants extract and store more than just single words from everyday speech.
'This suggests that when children learn language, they build on linguistic units of varying sizes, including multiword sequences, and not just single words as we often assume. This may explain why adults learning a second language, who tend to rely on individual words, often fall short of reaching native-like proficiency in the way they string words together into phrases and sentences.’
The assessments looked at infants’ language learning behaviour in a series of attention tests using recorded adult speech. It looked at how the babies responded to multiword combinations of three-word sequences used in parent-child conversations.
Researchers compared the infants’ responses using a testing method called central fixation, which measures infants’ looking behaviour in response to sounds. They assessed if the babies could distinguish more frequently used three-word sequences such as ‘clap your hands’, from similar but less common phrases such as ‘take your hands’.
On average, fixation times were longer for the frequently used phrases. This pattern was found in 23 of the 36 infants.
Researchers say this suggests babies who are still learning their first words are simultaneously learning word combinations. This development happens months before parents hear their children’s first attempts at sequences of words, the experts say.
- The study, ‘Clap your hands’ or ‘take your hands’? One-year-olds distinguish between frequent and infrequent multiword phrases, is published in Cognition https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1cYnj2Hx2luLz
