“Why Talking With Your Children Matters: Parental Feedback and Language Acquisition” by Dr. Eve V. Clark

By Karla Kane, journalist and former Bing parent

In any conversation, the ultimate goal is communication. And though we may not consciously realize it, while we’re conversing, we’re likely engaging in “repairs”—adjusting our word choices and inflections and clarifying our intentions to make sure we’re understood. These repairs help us get our meanings across and, for young children, they are also an important part of language development. Dr. Eve V. Clark discussed the role of repairs when she delivered the 2025 Bing Nursery School Distinguished Lecture “Why Talking With Your Children Matters: Parental Feedback and Language Acquisition.”

Clark, professor emerita in the Department of Linguistics at Stanford University, has performed extensive research on how children learn language and the value of conversation as a learning tool. Much of that work was undertaken at Bing, which she called “the ideal lab for all the questions I wanted to ask about language acquisition.”

At her May 7 lecture, Clark explained that children absorb language information, store it in their memories, and draw on those memories when engaging in conversation with adults. It takes interaction with expert speakers to hone their skills.

“Children need to hear how language is used,” she said. “And, as with any sort of skill, they need feedback when they make errors, and they need lots of practice.”

Producing sounds correctly and making complex language choices aren’t easy, so children are bound to make errors. Expert speakers naturally offer repairs—usually in a “nice, subtle way,” as Clark put it, as opposed to a direct, didactic correction—modeling correct language usage in their next turn in the conversation. (Repairs happen frequently in conversations between adults too, Clark noted, with one researcher observing that they occur every 1.4 minutes.)

“Repairs in conversation are an important resource as children master the conventional forms and constructions of their first language,” Clark said.

In conversations between parent and child, repairs can be unprompted when the child realizes and attempts to correct the error or prompted by the parent. These prompts can take the form of an open request (when a parent signals a lack of understanding with a questioning word like “Huh?” to elicit more information from the child), a restricted request (querying part of the child’s statement by asking something like “Where?” or “Who?”), or a restricted offer (restating to clarify or confirm, such as asking, “He ran across the road?”).

Clark said that studies show there’s an “organization of repair” involved with children (and adults) showing a preference for self-correcting. When they notice a mismatch between their intended use of language (based on the correct forms they’ve stored in their memory) and what they’ve actually produced (such as saying “bent” when they meant to say “bed”), they often try again.

Children make repairs to every aspect of their language use, including phonology (the sound of the words), morphology (word structure), syntax (grammar), and vocabulary, which they build up throughout their early years.

Though children prefer self-initiated repairs, they are also very attentive to other initiated repair requests and will respond to them a majority of the time—sometimes by simply repeating more loudly what they said before which, as Clark said with a laugh, “is a very reasonable thing to do if you think what you said was clear.”

To illustrate, Clark described a case study of a 2½-year-old child who, in order to request a drink from his father, simply states, “Milk.” The father replies, “You want milk?,” adding a subject pronoun and an agreeing verb, to which the child responds affirmatively. In another example, a child instructs the parent carrying them to “don’t fall me downstairs!” The parent responds, “Oh, I wouldn’t drop you downstairs,” and the child immediately repeats the corrected phrase, using “drop” in place of “fall.”

Clark, who grew up speaking both English and French, also offered case studies involving French- and Hebrew-speaking families to demonstrate that while languages differ in their organization and form, error corrections through conversation are common no matter the language.

Sharing a quote from developmental psycholinguistics pioneer Roger W. Brown, Clark said, “Changes produced in sentences as they move between persons in discourse may be the richest data for the discovery of grammar.” Repairs, she added, “offer children just that.”

During the post-lecture Q&A, the audience asked many questions about children who are raised multilingually. While Clark’s research has focused on monolingual children, she said immersive settings are the best way for a child to acquire a language. (See sidebar.) 

One unknown element, Clark acknowledged, is how a parent’s attentiveness to what their child is trying to say may affect the rate of language acquisition. She also noted that children can become frustrated while struggling to produce language, but that is a natural part of development, and they typically understand far more than they’re able to produce at first.

Clark emphasized that language development is a long, ongoing process—not something requiring an “instant fix.” A child may respond to corrective feedback in the moment only to make the same error in the next conversation, but it’s all part of language learning. What matters most is that children are being regularly spoken and listened to—because, as with any new skill, practice makes progress.

Editor’s note: For more information on Dr. Clark’s research on language acquisition and how to support children, see https://tinyurl.com/evevclark-languageacquisition about a talk she gave at Bing in 2017. Or view a recorded lecture on repairs at https://tinyurl.com/evevclark-feedback.

Delving into Dual-Language Learning

Many children at Bing Nursery School speak a language other than English at home. During the post-lecture Q&A session, there was intense audience interest in the topic of dual-language learners, as reflected in the following questions:

Parent: My son is 2½. We are a bilingual family, speaking both Mandarin and English. I feel like he understands almost everything we say in Mandarin, but his response is not that much. At his age, he’s supposed to speak at least 25 words. He’s probably at 10 to 12-ish. Do you have any suggestions for how can we help him speak more?

Clark: Just go on talking to him, reading to him. You know there’s huge individual variation in how many words children produce, but they typically understand much more than they can say. So I would just continue to give him a whole lot of exposure to both languages and wait.

Parent: My child started with two languages that are not English, and at 4, he switched to English. Now he uses the other languages less frequently. When he’s having a conversation, I try to also explain to him in our language, so I wonder if that affects the repair and grammar process.

Clark: I think that children growing up in bilingual and trilingual homes do very well in the long run, and I would say keep all the languages you can. Just help as much as you can—so, go on talking.

Parent: As a bilingual family, we primarily speak English at home, but I speak Hindi with my parents. The issue is that my husband understands no Hindi. Our daughter is 3 and she’s pretty good with English so far, but I feel like I’m failing her on the Hindi. I ask my parents to speak more Hindi with her, but since my husband doesn’t understand, it’s not very natural for me to do that. Can I start with a combination of the two, where I introduce words in Hindi that she can associate?

Clark: I think one thing that would be good is if you could find some other Hindi speakers who have children and have your child play with them where they are speaking only Hindi. And this would be a setting where it would be natural to start picking up some Hindi. You could also encourage her by reading some very simple books. I think you have to decide how much you want her to learn Hindi at this point and then think about immersive settings where only Hindi is being used, because that is the best setting for children to acquire another language. That’s why they’re getting English at Bing—well, except for all the children who are bilingual [laughs].

Parent: At home, we speak Russian, and at school, and everywhere else, my daughter speaks English. One question: My daughter refuses to speak Russian at home—should I force her to speak up and try to hear her answer? And second: If she speaks Russian now, it’s very bad. Should I repair her and talk in correct Russian or not?

Clark: I would suggest that if you speak Russian at mealtime, say, just go on speaking Russian at mealtime. And if she uses English, just interpret and treat it as though she had spoken Russian. If she does speak Russian and says something that is mispronounced, I would reformulate—and with rising intonation: “Is this what you meant?” I think eventually she will settle on realizing it’s useful to have two languages.

For anyone interested in learning more, Dr. Clark recommends Bilingual Development in Children by Annick De Houwer.

Dr. Eve V. Clark

Dr. Eve V. Clark, Professor Emerita in the Department of Linguistics at Stanford University, has spent many years researching how children acquire language. Her work has transformed our understanding of this crucial developmental process. Professor Clark’s groundbreaking research explores how children learn language, with a focus on word learning, word formation, and the role of conversation in language acquisition. She is the author of Language in Children (2017) and First Language Acquisition (2024), and co-author of Psychology and Language (1977), among her many published works. In 2021, Clark received the Roger Brown Award from the International Association for the Study of Child Language. She is a Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society, the Association for Psychological Science, and the Linguistic Society of America, as well as a Guggenheim Fellow. She is also a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.