NurtureShock (30 page)

According to Schwade’s research, object labeling is just one of any number of ways that adults scaffold language for toddlers.
Again, these are things parents tend to do naturally, but not equally well. In this section, we’ll cover five of those techniques.

For instance, when adults talk to young children about small objects, they frequently twist the object, or shake it, or move
it around—usually synchronizing the movements to the singsong of parentese. This is called “motionese,” and it’s very helpful
in teaching the name of the object. Moving the object helps attract the infant’s attention, turning the moment into a multisensory
experience. But the window to use motionese closes at fifteen months—by that age, children no longer need the extra motion,
or benefit from it.

Just as multisensory inputs help, so does hearing language from multiple speakers.

University of Iowa researchers recently discovered that fourteen-month-old children failed to learn a novel word if they heard
it spoken by a single person, even if the word was repeated many times. The fact that there was a word they were supposed
to be learning just didn’t seem to register. Then, instead of having the children listen to the same person speaking many
times, they had kids listen to the word spoken by a variety of different people. The kids immediately learned the word. Hearing
multiple speakers gave the children the opportunity to take in how the phonics were the same, even if the voices varied in
pitch and speed. By hearing what was different, they learned what was the same.

A typical two-year-old child hears roughly 7,000 utterances a day. But those aren’t 7,000 unique sayings, each one a challenge
to decode. A lot of that language is already familiar to a child. In fact, 45% of utterances from mothers begin with one of
these 17 words:

what, that, it, you, are/aren’t, I, do/don’t, is, a, would, can/can’t, where, there, who, come, look, and let’s.

With a list of 156 two-and three-word combinations, scholars can account for the beginnings of two-thirds of the sentences
mothers say to their children.

These predictably repeating word combinations—known as “frames”—become the spoken equivalent of highlighting a text. A child
already knows the cadence and phonemes for most of the sentence—only a small part of what’s said is entirely new.

So you might think kids need to acquire a certain number of words in their vocabulary before they learn any sort of grammar—but
it’s the exact opposite. Grammar teaches vocabulary.

One example: for years, scholars believed that children learned nouns before they learned verbs; it was assumed children learn
names for objects before they can comprehend descriptions of actions. Then scholars went to Korea. Unlike European languages,
Korean sentences often end with a verb, not a noun. Twenty-month-olds there with a vocabulary of fewer than 50 words knew
more verbs than nouns. The first words the kids learned were the last ones usually spoken—because they heard them more clearly.

Until children are eighteen months old, they can’t make out nouns located in the middle of a sentence. For instance, a toddler
might know all of the words in the following sentence: “The princess put the toy under her chair.” However, hearing that sentence,
a toddler still won’t be able to figure out what happened to the toy, because “toy” came mid-sentence.

The word frames become vital frames of reference. When a child hears, “Look at the ___,” he quickly learns that ___ is a new
thing to see. Whatever comes after “Don’t” is something he should stop doing—even if he doesn’t yet know the words “touch”
or “light socket.”

Without frames, a kid is just existing within a real-life version of
Mad Libs
—trying to plug the few words he recognizes into a context where they may or may not belong.

This key concept—using some repetition to highlight the variation—also applies to grammatical variation.

The cousin to frames are “variation sets.” In a variation set, the context and meaning of the sentence remain constant over
the course of a
series
of sentences, but the vocabulary and grammatical structure change. For instance, a variation set would thus be: “Rachel,
bring the book to Daddy. Bring him the book. Give it to Daddy. Thank you, Rachel—you gave Daddy the book.”

In this way, Rachel learns that a “book” is also an “it,” and that another word for “Daddy” is “him.” That “bring” and “give”
both involve moving an object. Grammatically, she heard the past tense of “give,” that it’s possible for nouns to switch from
being subjects to being direct objects (and vice versa), and that verbs can be used as an instruction to act (“Give it”) or
a description of action taken (“You gave”).

Variation sets are the expertise of a colleague of Schwade’s at Cornell, Dr. Heidi Waterfall. Simply put, variation sets are
really beneficial at teaching both syntax and words—and the greater the variations (in nouns, verbs, conjugation and placement)
the better.

From motionese to variation sets—each element teaches a child what is signal and what is noise. But the benefits of knowing
what to focus on and what to ignore can hardly be better illustrated than by the research on “shape bias.”

For many of the object nouns kids are trying to learn, the world offers really confusing examples. Common objects like trucks,
dogs, telephones, and jackets come in every imaginable color and size and texture. As early as fifteen months old, kids learn
to make sense of the world by keying off objects’ commonality of shape, avoiding the distraction of other details. But some
kids remain puzzled over what to focus on, and their lack of “shape bias” holds back their language spurt.

However, shape bias is teachable. In one experiment, Drs. Linda Smith and Larissa Samuelson had seventeen-month-old children
come into the lab for seven weeks of “shape training.” The sessions were incredibly minimal—each was just five minutes long
and the kids learned to identify just four novel shapes (“This is a wug. Can you find the wug?”). That’s all it took, but
the effect was amazing. The children’s vocabulary for object names skyrocketed 256%.

A nine-month-old child is typically-developing if he can speak even 1 word. With the benefit of proper scaffolding, he’ll
know 50 to 100 words within just a few months. By two, he will speak around 320 words; a couple months later—over 570. Then
the floodgates open. By three, he’ll likely be speaking in full sentences. By the time he’s off to kindergarten, he may easily
have a vocabulary of over 10,000 words.

It was one thing to learn about these scaffolding techniques from Goldstein and Schwade—but it was another thing to actually
see their power in action.

Ashley had that chance shortly after we returned from Cornell, when she met her best friends, Glenn and Bonnie Summer, and
their twelve-month-old daughter Jenna, for a casual dinner in Westwood, a shopping area in West Los Angeles. Ashley thinks
of Jenna as her niece, and she had brought a tiny, red Cornell sweatshirt for the baby. During dinner, Ashley also couldn’t
help but try some of the scaffolding techniques on Jenna.

Every time Jenna looked at something, Ashley instantly labeled it for her. “Fan,” Ashley pronounced, when Jenna’s gaze landed
on the ceiling fan that beat the air. “Phone,” she chimed, whenever Jenna’s ears led her eyes to the pizza joint’s wall-mounted
telephone, ringing off the hook. Whenever Jenna babbled, Ashley immediately responded with a word or touch. Ashley clearly
noticed the different babble stages in Jenna’s chatter.

Jenna turned to her mother and made the baby sign gesture “More,” tapping her fingertips together. She wanted another piece
of the nectarine Bonnie had brought for her.

After giving the little girl the fruit, Bonnie complained: “It’s the one baby sign she knows—a friend of mine taught it to
her—and now I can’t get Jenna to say ‘More.’ She used to try saying the word out loud, but now she only signs it. I hate it.”

Ashley felt a little guilty; she too was messing with Jenna’s language skills. But her guilt vanished when she realized that
Jenna was babbling noticeably more than before. Jenna was looking straight at Ashley when she talked, using more consonant-vowel
combinations, right on cue. Ash was ecstatic. There, in a Westwood dive, she and her niece had replicated Goldstein’s findings,
even down to the same fifteen-minute time frame.

Emboldened, Ashley asked Jenna’s parents if she could try something. Jenna had about ten words in her spoken vocabulary—“milk,”
“book,” “mama,” and “bye bye,” among others. But her parents had not yet been able to directly teach her a new word, on the
spot. Since Goldstein’s experiment had worked so well, Ashley decided to try Schwade’s lesson on motionese. She took a small
piece of the nectarine and danced it through the air, while saying, “Fr-uu-ii-t, Jen-na, fr-uu-ii-t.” Jenna looked wide-eyed.

“Now, you do it,” Ashley instructed Glenn and Bonnie.

“Froo-oooo-ooottt,” Glenn said, bobbing the next piece of nectarine up and down. His attempt sounded more like a Halloween
ghost than parentese. Ashley coached him—a little more singsong, a little more rhythm in the hand movement. Glenn tried it
a second time: “Fro-ooo-oo-ttt.” He set the nectarine chunk in front of Jenna.

“Oooot!!” piped Jenna, picking the piece up from the table.

Glenn started laughing, turned to Ashley and said, “I didn’t think it was going to work quite that fast.”

Ashley hadn’t expected so either. Jenna kept repeating her new word until the baggie was empty. Needless to say, Jenna’s parents
were doing twice as much object-labeling and motionese by the time dinner was over. The next day, they used motionese to teach
her “sock” and “shoe.” Since then, they’ve increased their responsiveness to Jenna’s babbles, and they’ve seen the difference.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Massachusetts Institute of Technology linguist Dr. Noam Chomsky altered the direction of social science
with his theory of an innate Universal Grammar. He argued that what children hear and see and are taught, in combination,
is just too fractured and pattern-defying to possibly explain how fast kids acquire language. The stream of input couldn’t
account for the output coming from kids’ mouths. Chomsky highlighted the fact that young children can do far more than merely
repeat sentences they’ve heard; without ever having been taught grammar, they can generate unique novel sentences with near-perfect
grammar. Therefore, he deduced that infants must be born with “deep structure,” some underlying sense of syntax and grammar.

By the 1980s, Chomsky was the most quoted living scholar in all of academia, and remained at the top through the millennium.

However, in the intervening decades, each step of language acquisition has been partially decoded and, in turn, dramatically
demystified. Rather than language arising from some innate template, each step of language learning seems to be a function
of auditory and visual inputs, contingent responses, and intuitive scaffolding, all of which steer the child’s attention to
the relevant pattern. Even Chomsky himself has been considering the import of the newly discovered mechanisms of language
learning. In 2005, Chomsky and his colleagues wrote, somewhat cryptically: “Once [the faculty of language] is fractionated
into component mechanisms (a crucial but difficult process) we enter a realm where specific mechanisms can be empirically
interrogated at all levels…. We expect diverse answers as progress is made in this research program.”

This doesn’t rule out the possibility that some portion is still innate, but the portion left inexplicable—and therefore credited
to innate grammar—is shrinking fast.

A similar argument can be applied to the notion held by our society that having better or lesser verbal skills and reading
skills is a function of innate verbal ability. To a parent, these skills
seem
innate, because from the moment their daughter could talk, she was precocious—speaking full sentences by two, reading words
by three and books by four. But the parent’s unaware of his own influence in those first two years.