Education
A Science-Based Approach to Enhance Infants’, Toddlers’ and Preschoolers’ Language and Reading Skills
“There is an abundance of recent research on language learning that is generally not being used to help infants and toddlers learn language skills at higher levels.” says Dr Robert C. Titzer.
Babies are born ready to be in relationships – they are hungry for love and attention. It is up to us, as parents, to meet their basic needs. To feed them, keep them safe and warm and make sure they get lots of sleep. Babies will survive if we meet these very primitive needs, but we don’t just want them to survive we want them to flourish! As parents we shower them with love, we cuddle them and comfort them because they are the apple of our eye and we adore them.
There is an abundance of recent research on language learning that is generally not being used to help infants and toddlers learn language skills at higher levels. This research could be used to guide decisions made by parents, teachers, preschools, or governments to help infants, toddlers, and preschoolers learn language and reading skills more efficiently. The following principles are applied in the “Your Baby Can Learn” program which is designed to enhance young children’s language learning in multiple languages in a fun, multisensory way
1 PROVIDE INTERSENSORY REDUNDANT INFORMATION WHEN TEACHING LANGUAGE SKILLS.
Babies who see and hear words at the same time will have intersensory redundant information. Having redundant sensory information has been shown to help babies learn more complex tasks (Bahrick, Lickliter, & Flom, 2004). Babies have very good crossmodal perceptual abilities (e.g., Ruff & Rose, 1987), so infants who see and hear individual words can learn what the words look like in a way that is similar to how they learn how the words sound (Titzer, 1998; Massaro, 2012). Even 2-day old babies have learned arbitrary auditory-visual relationships (Slater, Brown, & Badenoch, 1997).
2 ISOLATE WORDS, THEN USE THEM IN FLUENT SPEECH.
Isolating words, then hearing the words in fluent speech helps babies who are new to a language learn word segmentation (Lew-Williams, Pelucchi, & Saffran, 2011) over only hearing words in fluent speech. In addition, the number of times a word was used in isolation, but not the total number of times the word was heard, was a predictor of later word usage (Brent & Siskind, 2001).
3 TEACH THE SHAPE BIAS EARLY IN INFANCY.
The shape bias is the tendency to generalise information about an object by its shape, rather than its colour, material, or texture when learning nouns. For example, the shape of a cup or a chair lets you know that you can drink from the cup or sit on the chair. The cups and chairs can be any colour and they can be made out of numerous materials, but their shapes provide the relevant feature that is more likely to determine the function of the object and its category. Babies who learn shape bias learn new words and categories more quickly (e.g., Landau, Smith, & Jones, 1988; Smith, 2000; Gershkoff-Stowe & Smith, 2004), so learning to pay attention to shape earlier is very important. Smith, Jones, Landau, Gershkoff-Stowe, and Samuelson (2002) showed that 17- month-old infants can be taught to have a stronger shape bias in a laboratory setting in four 15-minute sessions and once they are taught they also learn new words in their home environments at faster rates. The videos, books, and word cards used with this approach intentionally vary the nonrelevant features of written words such as the font colour, background colour, and size while keeping the generalisable shapes of the words relatively constant by varying the fonts in order to teach babies the shape bias.
4 FREQUENCY EFFECTS IN LANGUAGE LEARNING ARE IMPORTANT, SO INCREASE THE INFANTS’ QUANTITY OF RELEVANT LANGUAGE.
The frequency effect states that when other factors are equal, a higher frequency of an aspect of language leads to more language learning. Frequency effects in language learning are found when infants or children are learning single words, simple syntactic constructions, and more advanced syntax as well as in other areas of language learning (Ambridge, Kidd, Rowland, & Theakston, 2015).
5 PROVIDE CLARITY OF LANGUAGE.
In many situations, there are numerous possible meanings when parents say words. For example, if someone says the word cup while drinking from a cup the baby must determine what is meant. Does the word could refer to the person, the action of drinking, the colour, size, or material of the cup, a part of the cup, the entire cup, or many other possibilities. It is very important to provide clear meanings to help babies learn words more efficiently. Cartmill, Armstrong, Gleitman, Goldin-Meadow, Medina, and Trueswell (2013) found that the clarity of the language input from parents predicted vocabulary three years later.
6 PROVIDE VARIOUS REPRESENTATIONS FOR THE SOUNDS, SHAPES, AND MEANINGS OF WORDS.
People say the same words in slightly different ways, so ideally, babies should hear men, women, girls, and boys saying the same words. This helps them generalise the sounds of the words. The same is also true with written language – the non-relevant factors such as colour, size, background colours, etc. should vary. The fonts are more relevant, but they should also vary to help the child’s ability to generalise to other fonts or even handwritten words.
When learning new words, babies are usually learning a category. For example, the word chair does not refer to only one chair. The variability of the exemplars plays a large role in whether children generalise the meaning of the word to a wide variety of chairs. Perry, Samuelson, Malloy, and Schiffer (2010) taught 12 categories to 18-month-old babies using either low or high variability. While both groups learned the exemplars that they were taught, Perry et al. (2010) found that increasing the variability of the exemplars helps babies generalise ordinal category words (such as chair) as well as superordinate categories (such as furniture).
7 THE DIVERSITY OF LANGUAGE IN A CHILD’S ENVIRONMENT SHOULD CHANGE OVER TIME.
Initially, repeating some high frequency words many times helps the baby learn the first words. Once infants have a strong shape bias, then they typically learn new words at a faster rate (e.g., Smith, 2000). Over time, the diversity of language drives the size of the child’s vocabulary, so the number of different words spoken to the child should increase. One of the benefits of reading books on many topics to children is the relatively large number of infrequently used words in children’s books.
8 MAKE LANGUAGE LEARNING INTERACTIVE.
For newborn infants, language learning can be relatively passive. By around 6 months of age, babies should be asked to say words, do physical actions related to the meanings of words, or answer questions about words. As infants learn language and motor skills, then parents and teachers can have early conversations with babies. Recent research shows that the number and quality of conversations becomes increasingly important around 18 months of age. “Conversational turns” between 18-24 months of age predict language scores 10 years later (Gilkerson, Richards, Warren, Oller, Russo, & Vohr, 2018).
9 TEACH MULTIPLE LANGUAGES SIMULTANEOUSLY INSTEAD OF SEQUENTIALLY.
Bilingual infants who learned two languages simultaneously from birth were compared with bilingual infants who learned languages sequentially after mastering the first language (Kousaie, Chai, Sander, & Klein, 2017). Simultaneous bilinguals had more optimal brain development and improved cognitive control. Cognitive control (also called executive control) makes flexible thinking and complex goal-directed thought more likely. The research points in the same direction for language learning that earlier is better and that simultaneous learning of language skills provides for more efficient brain development compared to sequential learning.
Evidence that this comprehensive approach works
The above scientific principles work individually as detailed above. The Your Baby Can Learn programme applies these principles. As new scientific studies are completed, the program adjusts to incorporate new information to improve the approach. A large component of the approach is educating the parents and caregivers about how to talk to babies and toddlers. Studies on this language enrichment program have spanned three decades with numerous researchers collecting data. The general findings are that babies, toddlers, and children who use this program learn additional vocabulary from using this approach and they learn to read words (Titzer, 1998, 2019, Downey, 2002; Perkins, 2009; Hare, Baldwin, & Okoth, 2013; Thompson & Titzer, 2019; Titzer & Thompson, 2019; Thompson, Titzer, Tarver, & Woods, 2019). One study had mixed findings where the parents reported positive results (that the babies learned vocabulary and to read words) and the researchers did not (Newman, Kaefer, Pinklam, & Strouseet, 2014). Additional positive data have been collected in Your Baby Can Learn classes in Hong Kong, the US, India, and other countries. An Anganwadi Project study (Raja & Patil, 2018) in Bangalore showed that the very young children learned English words using the program even though they did not get to use the program very frequently. In Hong Kong, many babies who used the program regularly have scored perfect scores on word reading tests (Titzer, 2019). A case study (Titzer, 1998) found that a baby who started at 3 months and 9 days could read more than 400 words by age 12 months and simple baby books that she had never seen by 18 months including sounding out novel words phonetically. In another study, 260 out of 261 parents with babies who consistently used the series said the program had a “positive” or “very positive” effect and none said it had a “negative” or “very negative” effect (Titzer, 2019). Hare, Baldwin, & Okoth (2013) used families with low SES in a longitudinal study and found 95% of parents said their babies or children learned vocabulary words from the program and 81% said their babies or children learned to read words using it. Downey (2002) found that young children with autism learned to read words from the program even though they only used the video part of the program. Studies show that babies who use the program learned to read an average of 17 out of the 20 words on the word reading test and they scored a full standard deviation above a same-socioeconomic status comparison group on overall language skills (Thompson & Titzer, 2019) and almost a full standard deviation above the comparison group on overall cognition (Titzer & Thompson, 2019).
Robert C Titzer Ph.D. is an American professor and infant researcher who created an approach to teach babies written language that later resulted in the Your Baby Can products. He has been a professor, teacher, and public speaker on human learning, and is founder of the Infant Learning Company, a company that produces learning products for infants.