Queen’s Researchers Found New Discovery On How Children Learn To Speak

Queen's Researchers Found New Discovery On How Children Learn To Speak

Researchers have discovered that children under the age of two control speech using a different strategy than previously thought. During the study at Queen’s University, the researchers changed the vowel sounds that the participants heard over headphones as they talked. They found that while the adults and young children changed their vowel sounds in response to this altered feedback, the toddlers did not.

Ewen MacDonald, a former Queen’s research associate and now associate professor at the Technical University of Denmark, says “We were very surprised to find that the two-year-olds do not monitor their own voice when speaking in the same way as adults do.”

The researchers have proven that toddlers use a different strategy to control speech than adults. They still have not pinpointed the exact method children under two uses when learning to control speech. Future studies are being developed to determine what strategy toddlers are using. “Understanding the development of speech is a complex and challenging problem. Using novel techniques, such as the ones used in this experiment, we can isolate and better understand how the different components of speech develop,” says Dr MacDonald.

One possibility is that toddlers rely on the interaction with the person they are talking to in order to judge the accuracy of their speech sounds. The research was recently published in Current Biology.

Posted by George Daniels on Thursday January 12 2012, 4:27 AM EDT. Ref: Ewen MacDonald, et al. Link. All trademarks acknowledged. Filed under Featured News, Health. Comments and Trackbacks closed. Follow responses: RSS 2.0