How does playing with other children affect toddlers’ language learning?

Summary: Toddlers who had more exposure to other children were better at associating new words to objects than those who had more exposure to adults alone.

Source: Journal of Experimental Child Psychology.

According to a new study it has been observed that toddlers are surprisingly good at processing the speech of other young children. And toddlers with more exposure to other children groups, such as those in daycare and kindergartens, may be extremely good at certain word learning skills.

Researchers at the University of Waterloo examined the word processing skills of toddlers who spend most of their time with adults compared with those who are in more contact with groups of children. Their focus was on how well the toddlers understood the speech of other children.

In the study, the researchers carried out two experiments with a total of 88 toddlers (and their parents), some of whom spent around eight hours per week with other children, and others who had more weekly exposure in child groups.

Experiment 1 compared their processing of instructions from a seven-year-old child speaker and from an adult speaker pronouncing a familiar or a new object’s name in an usual way. Experiment 2 tested the responsiveness of the toddlers’ speech processing by having the child speaker mispronounce the object names.

Although all of the toddlers were quite good at processing child speech, the study found that toddlers who were more in contact with other children were better at associating a new word to a new object, an integral part of word learning.

Most studies concentrate on how toddlers learn from adult speakers. But we think it’s important to explore and understand how toddlers process the speech of children of various ages and how much they obtain the speech from other children to guide their language learning.