Nov 07, 2009 | 01:01
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Dec 02, 2008
Insight into language development comes from the mouths of babes
With his eyes wide with anticipation and his wispy hair standing on end, 2 ½-year-old Luke Dubose Harwell could hardly contain his enthusiasm as he arrived
Megha Sundara, an assistant professor in linguistics, works with Luke Harwell in UCLA's Language Acquisition Lab.
on a recent morning at Campbell Hall with his mother.
For all he knew, the hallowed halls of UCLA’s Linguistics Department, the university’s most highly ranked academic department, might as well have been the local Gymboree or a McDonald's play area
“You haven’t said, ‘Hi,’ yet to Princess Megha,” Luke’s mother and longtime UCLA staff member, Reem Hanna-Harwell, told the boy as she guided him down a long hall to Megha Sundara, who joined the faculty in 2007.
Luke grabbed his mother’s leg and smiled shyly at Sundara, an assistant professor in linguistics and a rising star in the field of infant language acquisition and perception.
“Do you want to come into the castle?” Sundara, hunched over, asked Luke, referring to a small room decorated with brightly colored Styrofoam to resemble a castle with a tower and drawbridge.
Ready to play, Luke responded with a vigorous nod.
And just like that, another study subject bounded into the sound-proofed booth that Sundara hopes will shed light on an age-old mystery that has vexed any adult who has tried to pick up a second or third language.
By the time they’re six years old, children know 10,000 words, research has found. By fifth grade, they speak an average of 40,000 words, meaning they've learned five and half words a day. And they accomplish the amazing feat without studying.
So how do infants and toddlers acquire the ability to speak and understand language so effortlessly? In what order does the process of language acquisition take place? And what happens when they learn two languages simultaneously? Does that affect the process?
Aside from the purely scientific benefits, the answers have implications for everything from public policy around bilingual education to improving interventions for those who are speech-impaired and developmentally delayed.
“By studying children who are developing in a typical manner, we can come up with a protocol for kids who are struggling,” Sundara explained.
Just eight months after founding UCLA’s Language Acquisition Lab, Sundara, whose interest focuses on children under two years of age, is running four studies out of the facility, and she is not alone.
The lab’s infrastructure is helping to sustain the work of two other College faculty involved in infant research: Scott P. Johnson, a new psychology professor who looks at perception in infants up to 15 months of age, and Catherine Sandhofer, an assistant professor of psychology who looks at language acquisition in children between 15 and 35 months of age.
Two UCLA senior linguists also use the facilities: Nina M. Hyams and Susan R. Curtiss, who focus on linguistic development between grade school and high
Adrienne Scutellaro (left) lab coordinator, and Sundara watch to see whether Luke can reproduce sentences with verbs in different places.
The lab is also expected to become fly-paper for the best and brightest graduate students.
Chad Vicenik, a fourth-year graduate student in linguistics, is using the facilities to study how infants and adults distinguish their native language from a foreign language, and what types of phonetic information is used in this task.
“There's little known, and, therefore, there is a lot to discover,” Vicenik said of the field of infant language acquisition.“It would be relatively easy to get started on an experiment that would be important and a big splash in the academic community.”
Today, two universities dominate research in infant language acquisition: the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and the University of Washington in Seattle, where Sundara worked as a postdoctoral fellow before coming to UCLA. Only a handful of other infant labs exist in the world, and right now UCLA isn’t even on the radar screen, UCLA faculty frankly acknowledge.
“UCLA really hasn’t had a presence in this field, but with this lab we’re aim to change that,” Sundara said. “I think we can be in the top three universities in this area in the next 10 years. We have the graduate students and the faculty to carry this off.”
If the lab doesn’t live up to the promise, it won’t be for lack of trying. With startup funds from the College, Sundara spent six months on the brick-and-mortar portion of the 250-square-foot lab, which includes three separate bays for experiments. Each is outfitted with hidden video cameras and computers to monitor and precisely tabulate children’s reactions to experiments. ABCs are splashed all over the room’s carpet. Outside, the castle is covered with colored Styrofoam patches carved by Vicenik, who has a background in theater design, to resemble stone-encrusted walls. Inside, the walls are papered with illustrations of Tigger and other Winnie the Pooh characters.
Luke was clearly in his element. “For him, this is a fun thing,” said Luke’s mother. “It’s not like going to the doctor’s office. It’s, ‘I’m going to go play!’”
In the castle, Luke watched a computer screen that showed cartoon characters involved in routine activities, like a little boy sleeping on his side and a girl eating from a bowl. In this particular experiment, Luke heard two different kinds of sentences that describe the activity in the cartoon: one placed the verb in the middle of the sentence. An example: “He sleeps now.” Another put the verb at the end. Example: “There she eats.” Sundara then coaxed Luke to repeat what he had heard.
“That’ll give us a snapshot of his speaking abilities right now,” Sundara said.
The younger the child, the less likely he or she is to remember the grammatical form of the verb when it appears in the middle of the sentence, Sundara has found. Under 2 years of age, they are able to reliably reproduce the sentence only when the verb appears at the end.
True to the theory, Luke struggled with that kind of sentence structure when he first visited the lab at 24 months. On this particular day, however, he was hitting all the marks – faithfully reproducing sentences with verbs in both places.
“What a difference five months makes,” Sundara marveled.
But as they age above 2 years old, children tend to lose interest in the grammatical versions of sentences. The more skilled children become at speaking, the more the ungrammatical sentences, like "There she eat," hold their attention. The transition is what fascinates the researcher.
“At what point do they realize they have to put an “s” at the end of “eat,” and in what sequence do they learn this?” Sundara asked. “Is it that he wakes up one day and knows, ‘He runs’? Or does he gradually learn it? With these tests, we’re trying to understand how kids' ability to understand and produce grammatical statements develops.”
Considerable effort went into building a database of families willing to participate in the experiments. And there's a good reason for that. Typically, a scholarly article reports the findings of four to five experiments simultaneously, and each experiment requires 15 to 20 subjects. So a dearth of subjects can result in real delays in making and publishing findings.
To beat the odds, Sundara, Sandhofer and Johnson last January petitioned the California Department of Health and Human Services for access to birth records. The team now sends a letter to every parent of a child born within a 10-mile radius around UCLA, describing the range of experiments underway at the university and inviting them to participate.
Less than a year after being established, the UCLA Developmental Research Participant Pool includes more than 2,000 families. Now, jokes Johnson, “We have so many babies we can barely stand it.”
Parents like Harwell could not be happier to have a clearer glimpse into the miracle of their children’s development.
“You don’t realize it when you set out to have children, but watching how they learn and their brain develops is the most fun part of having kids,” said Harwell. “It’s just so fascinating to watch.”
Parents interested in volunteering their children for experiments at the UCLA Language Acquisition Lab can e-mail languagelab@ucla.edu or call (310) 825-5788.
