Disentangling Multimodal Scaffolding: An Investigation into the Potential of Social Cues to Bolster Word Learning from Adult-Directed Speech

Abstract

Although language acquisition is a complicated task, infants and toddlers show explosive language growth within the first few years of life. To explain this phenomenon, researchers have highlighted the importance of child-directed speech (CDS) during caregiver-child conversation dynamics. This speech is laced with intricate cues that facilitate learning; such cues include repetition, exaggerated pitch, and other linguistic/prosodic factors. This style of speaking ultimately draws children’s attention and presents language in a more digestible manner. However, developmental psychologists have over-assumed the prevalence of CDS in households, and there is a wide variability in the proportion of CDS used between caregivers and households. In order to better understand how learning proceeds in the absence of these cues, this study examined whether or not social cues could help 2-year-olds learn novel words while listening to speech without the stereotypical features of CDS (i.e., adult-directed speech, or ADS). Forty 2-year-old children were recruited to play a tablet-based game that taught them two pairs of novel word-object labels either with or without social cues that served to guide their attention to the object on the screen. After learning the words, the children were asked to click on the correct target object out of the pair of items they just learned. Children in the social cues (N = 20) and no social cues (N = 20) condition performed equivalently above chance. This means that social cues were not particularly helpful in scaffolding word learning and that children as young as 24-months-old were still able to learn from ADS. While future research needs to be done to understand the nuances of social cues and how children are able to switch between learning from CDS and ADS, this study emphasizes how complex word learning is and how a confluence of demographic and linguistic factors can impact learning.