Distinguished Lecture: Talk to Your Children

By Stephanie V.W. Lucianovic, Author and Bing parent

In the middle of an early heat wave in May, interested listeners gathered near fans at Bing Nursery School to hear Stanford linguistics professor Eve Clark, PhD, deliver this year’s Bing Distinguished Lecture on the subject of language acquisition by children.

Clark, who has been doing research at Bing ever since she was an assistant professor at Stanford, has concentrated her recent research on how children acquire language when they interact with the adults around them. The most intriguing take-away from Clark’s lecture is not that the broad conclusion that the more parents and adults talk to children the better the children’s language skills, it’s Clark’s analysis of what adults are subtly doing in the course of those interactions and how that affects the ways in which children learn to speak and use language. Specifically, the ways in which adults correct their children’s speech.

Non-Verbal Communication

To begin at the beginning, Clark explained that starting at 9-10 months, children initially rely on gesture, gaze and stance to communicate. As an example, Clark talked about one of her colleagues responding to a baby in a highchair who was leaning forward, reaching out and making insistent non-verbal sounds. The colleague picked up several things on the table and showed them to the baby, but the baby continued with his reaching gesture and non-verbal sounds until the colleague retrieved a sponge. At that point, the baby sat back and was able to stop reaching and making his non-verbal sounds, satisfied that his desires had been understood and met. Eventually it dawns on children that this sort of communication can only get them so far, which is one reason, Clark pointed out, children take steps to go beyond that.

Stephanie V.W. Lucianovic, Author and Bing Parent

The Speech Stream

As early as 2 months, children are starting to work on the “speech stream.” Clark explained that as adults speaking our own language, we know where the words begin and end. She called these “the edges” of words and noted that when speaking a language other than our own, it is difficult for us to discern these edges and separate the unfamiliar language out into chunks. So, too, is it difficult for young children who are just learning language. Not only do they have to determine where the edges of the words are, but they have to assign meaning to them as well. By 9-10 months, children begin to recognize recurring chunks of language they hear in adult speech. This also is the time when adults are starting to actively talk to their babies, and by the time the children are between the ages of one and three, parents are working very hard to get their children to understand what is being said to them.

Clark explained that, when speaking to children, adults naturally articulate very clearly. This way of speaking, of course, can only be beneficial to children as they learn language. Moreover, Clark, pointed out, research has also shown that adults make very few speech errors in these interactions. As a point of comparison, when we adults speak to one another, our language is riddled with speech errors. According to Clark, adults can automatically edit these speech errors out as we hear them, but all one has to do is transcribe an interview or conversation between adults to quickly discover just how frequent speech errors are.

Learning from Mistakes

Citing noted cognitive psychologist  Jerome Bruner—“The only way language use can be learned is by using it communicatively”—Clark moved on to the fascinating subject of how adults correct verbal errors children make in the course of their interaction.

In the course of “establishing mutual understanding” between child and adult, Clark said that adults rely on two kinds of “reformulations” (feedback containing corrections) in order to verify meanings without unduly disrupting the flow of interaction. The first of these reformulations Clark discussed is called a “side sequence,” which adults use 70 percent of the time, and the other is an “embedded correction” which accounts for the other 30 percent. In order to help the audience understand how they use reformulations in their daily interactions with other adults, Clark gave examples:

Side Sequence Between Adults:

Person A: “Do you and your husband have a j—car?”

Person B: “Have a car?”

Person A: “Yeah.”

Person B: “No.”

According to Clark’s explanation, the side sequence reformulation happens within the exterior of the original question. Person A almost asks if Person B had a “jeep” but stops and corrects himself midsentence, after which Person B checks to make sure she understood Person A correctly before answering the original question.

Embedded Correction Between Adults:

Person A: “The wales are wider apart than that.”

Person B: “Okay, let me see if I can find one with wider threads. How’s this?”

Person A: “Nope, the threads are even wider than that.”

The initial word, which is represented in bold, is judged to be wrong and is corrected by Person B—the expert in the subject being discussed—without pointing it out. The correct word is then tacitly accepted and adopted by Person A.

Clark then invited us to compare those two forms of adult-adult reformulations with that which happens between an adult and a child:

Side Sequence Between Child and Adult:

Child: “Milk, milk.”

Adult: “You want milk?”

Child: “Uh-huh.”

Adult: “Okay, just a second and I’ll get you some.”

The father adds an interpretation (represented in bold) for the child’s repetition of one word. Clark explained that when side sequence reformulation occurs between a child and an adult, the child offers incorrect or incomplete information, the adult supplies the needed information, the child then either accepts or rejects this supplied information, and the adult moves on from there.

Embedded Correction Between Child and Adult:

Child: “Don’t fall me downstairs!”

Adult: “Oh, I wouldn’t drop you downstairs.”

Child: “Don’t drop me downstairs.”

Just like in the adult-adult embedded correction reformulation, the child recognizes the adult’s expertise in language and therefore accepts and adopts the adult’s proffered word as the correct word.

Clark went on to give additional examples of how child-adult interaction helps the child acquire language—offering a word for an item when a child requests it by pointing, offering information about an item beyond just the name of that object, etc.—as well as the ages when these exchanges can be expected to occur. However, the larger point from Clark’s lecture was that the amount of interaction children engage in before they turn 3 years old plays a critical role in their lifelong language acquisition. Research has shown that the more verbal interaction children have, the larger their vocabulary, the faster they process familiar words and the more readily they learn new words.

However, in order to give nervous parents an idea of what to expect, Clark underscored that learning to understand and use a language takes time. According to Clark, even when children are 4 to 6 years old, they are still learning how to do things like tell a story, negotiate, give instructions, make puns and tell jokes. “These are some of the things that even some adults never learn how to do,” Clark added, grinning.

Now while the critical role adult interaction plays in a child’s language acquisition might seem like an overwhelming responsibility for parents, the good news is that, according to Clark, children naturally seek out that engagement without too much encouragement. They actually want to talk to us, so go on: Talk to your children. With apologies to author and journalist Michael Pollan who once said, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants,” go on and talk to your children. Not too loud. Mostly words.