5 Caregivers’ role in meaning making
Adults play a key role in structuring their interactions with children in a way that facilitates word learning. Caregivers typically introduce new objects to children with a combination of speech and gesture. They establish joint attention on an object, often using gestures with younger infants to catch their interest. They then introduce a label for it, and then they situate the object conceptually, adding supplementary information that identify the objects labelled, their parts, and their properties (e.g. point, touch, tap) and gestures that depict actions and functions they were describing in words (e.g. turning a truck wheel, opening salad tongs) (Clark and Estigarribia, 2011). When adults notice the focus of a child’s attention is falling on a particular object they will often engage in so-called ‘follow-in’ labelling where they comment on the subject of interest.
Watch Professor Ben Ambridge find out the best strategy to help children learn the meaning of words.
Video 2 Should caregivers lead or follow their babies’ attention?
Young children find it very difficult to pay attention to more than one thing at a time. Given that, the best thing to do for toddlers' language learning is to let them lead – pay attention to the things they are most interested in or playing with already and speak to them about those things as they play. This way they’ll absorb more information about what they’re doing and the object they’re interested in and will learn words more quickly.
Through a series of prompts, adults provide young children with information about how words are related to each other (‘is a part of’, ‘is a kind of’, ‘belongs to’, ‘is used for’) and children use these to make inferences about possible meanings for unfamiliar words (Wong and Clark, 2002). And if the meaning isn’t clear, children as young as 1 year old can point and say something like ‘Wha?’, ‘Tha’, or ‘Eh?’ and 2 year olds can ask, ‘What’s that?’. In a classic study of first words, Nelson (1973) found that most of the children she studied had a word that was used in this enquiring/clarification way before they learned 50 words with some of the children acquiring such a word as part of their first 10 words.