New study unravels the puzzle of how children learn language

A new study from The University of Manchester has thrown a ‘fascinating new light’ on how young children begin to understand the meaning of words. 

Recently published in the journal Child Development the researchers found that when children are learning new words and ‘storing’ them in their brains, they will add a new word to their mental dictionary when they have some, but not all, of its meaning, slowly refining and reshaping their definition as they hear more language. 

Children begin this coding and storing process around their first birthday, rapidly building their vocabulary during their second year. 

To show how children do this, the researchers set up a study in Manchester Museum, working with a group of three to eight-year olds.

A researcher would build either four blocks stacked up, or four blocks lined up flat on a table, before asking the children to respond to different size words by building a bigger, smaller or taller version.

The researchers compared how their structure differed from the experimenters in each dimension,using mathematical modelling to describe what types of changes children made, and how patterns varied with age.

Three and four-year-olds tended to treat bigger, smaller, and taller with the same meaning: they built things that were bigger in all directions.

“It seems that when children first learn words, they pick up a general idea of what they mean- in this case, that the words mean a size change”, co- author Dr Alissa Ferry,  a lecturer at The University of Manchester explained.

“This seems to be how we end up with children calling a cow a dog, or all round fruit apples, even though they’ve never heard an adult do that. But with more experience they fine tune their word meanings.”

“We do think all children go through this process of fine-tuning word meanings, but which words are fine-tuned and when depends on what they hear around them.”

Size words, fellow researcher and co-author Dr Katherine Twomey explained, are more complex for children to learn because they describe relations between all different kinds of objects, which makes it harder to find what is common.

“That makes it easier for us to see how the meaning changes with age development,” she added. 

At approximately five years of age the children generally worked out that ‘smaller’ meant they should use fewer blocks. It wasn’t until the age of around seven years, however, that children reliably worked out that ‘taller’ really means bigger but specifically in the ‘up’ direction.

Most of the 3-year-olds built bigger things when the researchers asked for smaller ones, though some of them seemed to work it out faster than others.

However some 3- and 4-year-olds already seemed to know that taller meant ‘up’, probably because they had exposure to those words more frequently in conversations with their caregivers.

“Learning a language is a uniquely human experience; children just pick it up from being exposed to it,” Dr Ferry added. 

“Yet, we don’t quite know how that happens, which is why we carried out this study.”

The paper Bigger Versus Smaller: Children’s Understanding of Size Comparison Words Becomes More Precise With Age is published here