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How adults understand what kids are saying
It's not easy to parse young children's words, but adults' beliefs about what
children want to communicate helps make it possible
Date:
October 26, 2023
Source:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Summary:
Adult listening abilities are critical to the ability to
understand children's early linguistic efforts, according to new
research.
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FULL STORY
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When babies first begin to talk, their vocabulary is very limited.
Often one of the first sounds they generate is "da," which may refer to
dad, a dog, a dot, or nothing at all.
How does an adult listener make sense of this limited verbal
repertoire? A new study from MIT and Harvard University researchers has
found that adults' understanding of conversational context and
knowledge of mispronunciations that children commonly make are critical
to the ability to understand children's early linguistic efforts.
Using thousands of hours of transcribed audio recordings of children
and adults interacting, the research team created computational models
that let them start to reverse engineer how adults interpret what small
children are saying. Models based on only the actual sounds children
produced in their speech did a relatively poor job predicting what
adults thought children said. The most successful models made their
predictions based on large swaths of preceding conversations that
provided context for what the children were saying. The models also
performed better when they were retrained on large datasets of adults
and children interacting.
The findings suggest that adults are highly skilled at making these
context-based interpretations, which may provide crucial feedback that
helps babies acquire language, the researchers say.
"An adult with lots of listening experience is bringing to bear
extremely sophisticated mechanisms of language understanding, and that
is clearly what underlies the ability to understand what young children
say," says Roger Levy, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at
MIT. "At this point, we don't have direct evidence that those
mechanisms are directly facilitating the bootstrapping of language
acquisition in young children, but I think it's plausible to
hypothesize that they are making the bootstrapping more effective and
smoothing the path to successful language acquisition by children."
Levy and Elika Bergelson, an associate professor of psychology at
Harvard, are the senior authors of the study, which appears today in
Nature Human Behavior. MIT postdoc Stephan Meylan is the lead author of
the paper.
Adult listening skills are critical
While many studies have investigated how children learn to speak, in
this project, the researchers wanted to flip the question and study how
adults interpret what children say.
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"While people have looked historically at a number of features of the
learner, and what is it about the child that allows them to learn
things from the world, very little has been done to look at how they
are understood and how that might influence the process of language
acquisition," Meylan says.
Previous research has shown that when adults speak to each other, they
use their beliefs about how other people are likely to talk, and what
they're likely to talk about, to help them understand what their
conversational partner is saying. This strategy, known as "noisy
channel listening," makes it easier for adults to handle the complex
task of deciphering the acoustic sounds they're hearing, especially in
environments where voices are muffled or there is a lot of background
noise, or when speakers have different accents.
In this study, the researchers explored whether adults can also apply
this technique to parsing the often seemingly nonsensical utterances
produced by children who are learning to talk.
"This problem of interpreting what we hear is even harder for child
language than ordinary adult language understanding, which is actually
not that easy either, even though we're very good at it," Levy says.
For this study, the researchers made use of datasets originally
generated at Brown University in the early 2000s, which contain
hundreds of hours of transcribed conversations between children ages 1
to 3 and their caregivers. The data include both phonetic
transcriptions of the sounds produced by the children and the text of
what the transcriber believed the child was trying to say.
The researchers used other datasets of child language (which included
about 18 million spoken words) to train computational language models
to predict what words the children were saying in the original dataset,
based on the phonetic transcription. Using neural networks, they
created many different models, which varied in the sophistication of
their knowledge of conversational topics, grammar, and children's
mispronunciations. They also manipulated how much of the conversational
context each model was allowed to analyze before making its predictions
of what the children said. Some models took into account just one or
two words spoken before the target word, while others were allowed to
analyze up to 20 previous utterances in the exchange.
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The researchers found that using the acoustics of what the child said
alone did not lead to models that were particularly accurate at
predicting what adults thought children said. The models that did best
used very rich representations of conversational topics, grammar, and
beliefs about what words children are likely to say (ball, dog or baby,
rather than mortgage, for example). And much like humans, the models'
predictions improved as they were allowed to consider larger chunks of
previous exchanges for context.
A feedback system
The findings suggest that when listening to children, adults base their
interpretation of what a child is saying on previous exchanges that
they have had. For example, if a dog had been mentioned earlier in the
conversation, "da" was more likely to be interpreted by an adult
listener as "dog."
This is an example of a strategy that humans often use in listening to
other adults, which is to base their interpretation on "priors," or
expectations based on prior experience. The findings also suggest that
when listening to children, adult listeners incorporate expectations of
how children commonly mispronounce words, such as "weed" for "read."
The researchers now plan to explore how adults' listening skills, and
their subsequent responses to children, may help to facilitate
children's ability to learn language.
"Most people prefer to talk to others, and I think babies are no
exception to this, especially if there are things that they might want,
either in a tangible way, like milk or to be picked up, but also in an
intangible way in terms of just the spotlight of social attention,"
Bergelson says. "It's a feedback system that might push the kid, with
their burgeoning social skills and cognitive skills and everything
else, to continue down this path of trying to interact and
communicate."
One way the researchers hope to study this interplay between child and
adult is by combining computational models of how children learn
language with the new model of how adults respond to what children say.
"We now have this model of an adult listener that we can plug into
models of child learners, and then those learners can leverage the
feedback provided by the adult model," Meylan says. "The next frontier
is trying to understand how kids are taking the feedback that they get
from these adults and build a model of what these children expect that
an adult would understand."
The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the
National Institutes of Health, and a CONVO grant to MIT's Department of
Brain and Cognitive Sciences from the Simons Center for the Social
Brain.
* RELATED TOPICS
+ Mind & Brain
o Child Development
o Child Psychology
o Language Acquisition
o Literacy
o Learning Disorders
o ADD and ADHD
o Parenting
o Mental Health
* RELATED TERMS
+ Early childhood education
+ Psycholinguistics
+ Hallucination
+ Theory of cognitive development
+ Intellectual giftedness
+ Child prodigy
+ Child abuse
+ Psychology
__________________________________________________________________
Story Source:
Materials provided by Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Original
written by Anne Trafton. Note: Content may be edited for style and
length.
__________________________________________________________________
Journal Reference:
1. Stephan C. Meylan, Ruthe Foushee, Nicole H. Wong, Elika Bergelson,
Roger P. Levy. How adults understand what young children say.
Nature Human Behaviour, 2023; DOI: 10.1038/s41562-023-01698-3
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "How adults understand what kids
are saying." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 26 October 2023.
<www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/10/231026131435.htm>.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (2023, October 26). How adults
understand what kids are saying. ScienceDaily. Retrieved October 27,
2023 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/10/231026131435.htm
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "How adults understand what kids
are saying." ScienceDaily. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/10/
231026131435.htm (accessed October 27, 2023).
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