How Do Children Start to Learn Language?

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  Transcript Jen:    [00:37] Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. I’m very excited today to welcome my guest, Dr Erika Hoff, who is Professor and the head of the Language Development Lab at Florida Atlantic University. Several of my listeners have emailed over the last few months and I’ve asked questions about raising bilingual children, but I was having a hard time finding someone with expertise in this area. One listener has been particularly insistent with his questions on this topic; you know who you are. So when a friend of mine forwarded in New York Times article about raising bilingual children that quoted Dr. Hoff, I reached out that very same evening to ask her to be a guest on the show and I was delighted when she wrote back immediately and agreed to speak with us. Dr Hoff obtained her Ph.D from the University of Michigan on the topic of Developmental Psychology with a thesis that focused on the influence of maternal speech on children’s language development. Her Language Development Lab studies, the human abilities and experiences that contribute to language development. Jen:  [01:31] Our main focus is a longitudinal study of English monolingual and Spanish English bilingual children from two and a half to 10 years of age and she’s looking for evidence of factors in children’s early language experiences and early language development that predict successful oral language and literacy outcomes. Welcome Dr Hoff. Dr. Hoff:    [01:50] Thank you very much. Jen:    [01:51] So I guess let’s kind of start down in the weeds here a little bit. I want to ask it a bit of a methodological question because I know a lot of the research on dual language learners is on individuals who are perhaps the children of immigrants and who are learning English as a second language, maybe out of necessity as part of living in an English speaking country and I’m curious as to how much of the research is on those kinds of bilingual children and how much is on native English speakers who are interested in exposing their child to a second language that maybe is not quite necessary, not quite as necessary as learning English. Does the research transfer back and forth easily? Or are there some findings that are applicable to one of those populations and not the other? Dr. Hoff:  [02:31] Well, to answer that question, I have to tell you a little bit about the different populations who are bilingual and the different fields that study bilingualism. There is a big field of second language acquisition. Most of that looks at older children and adults and studies foreign language instruction, and you’re not talking about that. If you’re talking about young children acquiring a second language or even more to the point of your question, if you’re talking about babies becoming bilingual by being exposed to two languages, then really none of the systematic research is about the group that you’re talking about. It’s not about middle class children born in the United States whose parents try to organize a bilingual experience for them and the reason is that there is no common experience that these children have. There are books written by parents who have done this with their children. Dr. Hoff:     [03:44] There are books written about other people’s experience with this, but they are really a collection of anecdotes. The systematic research is either on immigrant populations because there are enough people in the same circumstance that you can do a study. There are also studies of bilingual development in more bilingual parts of the world. So in Wales where there are many Welsh-English bilinguals; in Spain where there are Spanish-Cataln bilinguals; in Canada where there are French-English bilinguals. So the research is not just about immigrant populations, but in the United States. The people who are bilingual are either immigrants, children of immigrants, or are these one off kinds of circumstances that don’t admit of systematic research very well. We just have stories of what’s possible and what works. But in terms of a study with large numbers of children, it simply doesn’t work. Jen:    [04:54] Yeah. Anecdata is my favorite kind of data. So then how can we extrapolate from the kind of research that you do on immigrant bilingual children and it, is it possible to extrapolate that to a middle class audience is looking to give their child a different experience? Dr. Hoff:   [05:11] Well, I think there are some findings that should inform the effort to raise a child that’s bilingual. So one of the findings from the children I study, and these are children who are exposed to two languages from the time they are born and some people might think and some people even say, well, if you’re exposed to two languages from birth, then of course you will become a bilingual because babies have this amazing ability to acquire language. Now, I don’t disagree about the amazingness of babies, but it turns out from my research and other people’s research agrees with this, that just because you’re exposed to two languages from birth doesn’t mean you’re going to end up speaking two languages as a bilingual adult. You really have to have an environment that supports both languages and that continues to support both languages over the course of development. A little bit from birth, doesn’t result in adult kinds of proficiencies in two languages. Dr. Hoff:   [06:26] And what we see and children who come from Spanish, English bilingual homes is they started out much more bilingual than they end up. A very, a very common pattern is for the children’s Spanish to be pretty minimal by the time they are adults. Even among people who you would call bilinguals, that is they use both languages. There are many people here in south Florida who use both languages on a regular basis, but if they only heard Spanish at home, they never went to school in Spanish, their Spanish skills are not at the same level as their English skills. They’re not at the same level as a person who’s been educated in a Spanish speaking country. Jen:   [07:08] Because you never picked up that vocabulary around all the topics. You were educated in; is that right? Dr. Hoff:   [07:14] Yes. That’s certainly one component of it, but we also see before children are five. We see them becoming less bilingual than they were when they were two, simply because the amount of English they hear starts too overwhelmed with the amount of Spanish they here because the children know that English is sorta cooler, more prestigious event Spanish and so the children would prefer to speak English and all these things contribute to English, kind of swamping a Spanish and there are other environments where this doesn’t happen so much. If you look in Wales or in Canada where the difference between the two languages in terms of prestige is not quite as stark as the Spanish-English contrast is here. You see that to kind of environment that seems to support bilingual development better, but but it’s always the case that to acquire a language, you need a great deal of exposure to that language. You need to use that language and you need to do so on a continuing basis. Jen:   [08:29] Okay. All right. Well thank you for that helpful overview. I wonder if we can kind of go back and start at the beginning now. So how do children start to learn language? Because I read that infants can essentially perceive sounds from all languages, but by around a year or so, they’ve kind of tuned out the languages that they don’t hear around them and I’m wondering if if a non-native speaker speak to second language to a child, does the child grew up with pronunciation errors? Does it matter what language do siblings use to speak to each other? How does that come together in very young children? Dr. Hoff:    [08:59] Oh, okay. You’ve asked many questions there, so let me try to tackle them. How could children start to learn the language? Well, they start to learn a language to the extent that we understand the process by hearing it and by analyzing the patterns in it. Okay. To take a huge body of research and summarize it in one sentence: children learn patterns. They learn patterns of sounds that are different sounds that are tied to different circumstances, which means the different towns have different meanings and those are the building blocks. Now, in order to do that, you have to be able to tell sounds apart. If all sound sounded the same, there would be no language and we all know when we hear accent, someone who speaks with an accent, a foreign accent, that different languages make use of different sound contrasts. Dr. Hoff:    [09:53] So probably the most famous and hilarious example in the movie Lost in Translation is Japanese speakers who learned English as an adult have a hard time with the contrast between the L sound and the R sound. Because in Japanese there are no words that differ just in terms of that sound. This is the kind of thing that babies learn to to now. So babies do not learn to tune out a whole language, but they do learn to ignore little differences that don’t matter for their language. And of course that’s very important. That is the differences between speakers. So when your father says baby and when your mother says, baby, the sounds are a teeny bit different and it’s crucial that babies learn to ignore those differences. So babies are very good at picking up the differences that matter and the differences that don’t matter. And if a difference doesn’t matter in your language, you sort of learned to not hear it, but you don’t tune out the whole language at all. Dr. Hoff:   [10:59] Now in terms of non native speakers, it’s interesting. I think we don’t really know how a non-native accent effects early speech sound learning. It could, but children of immigrants do not end up speaking with accents. Children who are bilingual have a little bit of a bilingual accent. I mean it’s a subtle thing, but children sound like their peers and that’s an interesting phenomenon right there. Jen:  [11:30] My daughter asked me the other day, a Mama, is it tomato or tomato? Yes. Well she must. She’s hearing tomato all day at school. New Speaker:   [11:39] Yeah. Right. So. So she must be small. Jen:    [11:43] Yeah, she’s three. Dr. Hoff:   [11:44] Okay. Well, when she’s a teenager she won’t ask you. She will tell you that you’re saying it wrong. Jen:    [11:49] I know, yes, I’m. I’m ready for that day. Dr. Hoff:    [11:54] Perhaps even a little bit sooner, but to go back to the topic of non native speakers, one of the things that we have learned from our research is that it’s very important to hear a language from native speakers. If you asked the question, what are the circumstances that promote language development? Hearing a lot of the language is important, but hearing it from a native speaker is also important and it’s not just because of the accent. I don’t know if the accent is that important to tell you the truth, but when someone speaks a language that’s not their native language, they don’t use it in quite the same way. Even talking to a small child, we have research that is has been published and evaluated by outside reviewers that shows that hearing the language from native speakers is important and now what we’re working on right now is looking at what are the characteristics of native and non-native speech to children that explain this difference and it’s really interesting. Dr. Hoff:    [13:03] We find even in fairly proficient non native speakers, the grammar is not quite as complex. The vocabulary is not quite as diverse. Even talking to a two-year-old, you don’t model as rich a language if it’s not your native language, so, so we think a really important conclusion from this work is that not that you should never speak your non-native language to your child, but that you should speak the language that you’re most comfortable speaking. Often parents – the parents in the research I do who are immigrant parents get told by classroom teachers and by pediatricians that they should...