UD prof. sheds light on language development

Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, H. Rodney Sharp Professor of Education

9:38 a.m., March 15, 2005--Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, H. Rodney Sharp Professor of Education at UD, made a strong case for new discoveries in early language recognition in a lecture she gave Friday afternoon, March 11, in Gore Hall.

Illustrating her lecture, “How Do Babies Learn to Talk,” with footage from lab studies and recent findings on speech development in infants, Golinkoff outlined how young children learn to make sense of that most difficult part of speech, the verb, and explained the methods used in recent studies to gather groundbreaking data.

“It has long been accepted that babies start out by learning nouns, because nouns are visible and concrete and enduring,” Golinkoff told the audience of more than a hundred psychology students, “but learning verbs is much harder because verbs shift. To understand them, children have to coordinate relationships.”

To complicate matters further, Golinkoff said that cultural differences in language and sentence structure make action words even more difficult to pin down for young learners. For example, English-speaking babies are conditioned to sentences that stress the manner in which actions are carried out, while Spanish-speaking babies are conditioned to sentences that stress the direction, or path, of action words.

“Verbs form the architecture of language, and they’re harder to individuate, but babies are pattern-seekers from the start,” Golinkoff said. “What we’ve learned is that there are universal concepts, and kids can make distinctions very early on. Language serves as an invitation to form categories, and early learners are very good at this.”

Explaining that a primary focus of her recent research sought to show how infants matched a verb to an action, Golinkoff discussed how a carefully controlled lab study showed how children extend meanings of verbs.

Shown an animated starfish circling a ball in different ways and varying directions, Golinkoff found that children as young as 2 were able to make distinctions between the manner and path of whatever verb was in question, but required both syntactic and social input for further refinement.

“Verbs can be grasped at a very young age, but verb-learning occurs on a developmental continuum,” Golinkoff said. “At 2, children are perception-based and only later, around preschool, are they able to extend verbs across abstract relationships.”

Concluding her lecture, Golinkoff said that the relational aspect of verbs--and even certain nouns--is a universal stumbling block to early language acquisition, but one that typically smoothes itself out between ages 5 and 7. “When you consider the nature of verbs,” she said, “it makes sense that verb-learning is conservative. Fortunately, babies don’t wait for us to teach them.”

Golinkoff, who has authored many scholarly books and articles and coauthored How Babies Talk with Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a psychology professor at Temple University, invited questions from the audience after her talk. Her plans for future research will focus on metaphoric extension of words, because, she said, no studies currently exist.

Article by Becca Hutchinson

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