{"id":48536,"date":"2017-08-29T15:54:50","date_gmt":"2017-08-29T19:54:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sargent\/?page_id=48536"},"modified":"2022-10-20T10:53:47","modified_gmt":"2022-10-20T14:53:47","slug":"magic-words","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sargent\/about-us\/our-publications\/inside-sargent\/inside-sargent-2017-2018\/magic-words\/","title":{"rendered":"Magic Words"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"MagicWordsBanner\"
A study with a game-like format has big implications for speech-language clinicians.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Sudha Arunachalam<\/a> was flying to Berlin for a conference in 2014 when the woman across the aisle began entertaining her two young children. \u201cI spy, with my little eye, something…\u201d she\u2019d begin. Then she\u2019d add a clue about the object she\u2019d picked\u2014a color or other adjective\u2014and the children would look around and start guessing. Arunachalam, an assistant professor of speech, language & hearing sciences, might have forgotten the scene had she not been puzzling over the best way to determine how children process what their parents say. She decided to use a game-like format for her study; the subsequent findings have big implications for speech-language clinicians.<\/p>\n

\"Sudha
Sudha Arunachalam developed a study to determine how children process what their parents say. Photo by Chitose Suzuki<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Arunachalam discovered that parents seem to have an innate sense for constructing sentences to help their children understand and learn language. The study revealed subtle speech nuances\u2014such as where to place an adjective in a phrase\u2014that help children learn but hadn\u2019t been previously measured.<\/p>\n

Arunachalam, who is also the director of BU\u2019s Child Language Lab<\/a>, believes her study is the first to measure children\u2019s comprehension while their parents speak, to see what parents are doing naturally (without researchers\u2019 input) to make language easier for their children to understand.<\/p>\n

In the study, a parent and their typically developing child, aged roughly three to five, looked at images of six objects, three per row, on a computer screen. The researcher privately communicated to the parent which object to help the child find, as quickly as possible. The parent then instructed the child however he or she chose\u2014for example, \u201cFind the striped umbrella\u201d to help the child distinguish that umbrella from one with dots. Eye-tracking technology revealed how quickly the child located the object.<\/p>\n

Arunachalam was surprised that parents instinctively constructed sentences to help their children understand their meaning. When helping a child locate the striped umbrella in a slide that also contained the dotted one, parents usually placed the relevant adjective after the noun (\u201cumbrella with stripes\u201d) instead of before it (\u201cstriped umbrella\u201d). This happened nearly 80 percent of the time, compared to about half the time when viewing a slide with just one umbrella. When children heard \u201cumbrella with stripes,\u201d they looked at the correct umbrella significantly faster than when they heard \u201cstriped umbrella,\u201d says Arunachalam, whose findings were published in the Journal of Memory and Language<\/em><\/a> in 2016.<\/p>\n

This parental instinct seemed almost magical to Arunachalam. She theorizes that parents unconsciously recognize that young children will more easily understand \u201cumbrella\u201d than \u201cstriped,\u201d or that they will understand a noun better than an adjective, and put the simplest word first. \u201cWe think this is really useful, long-term, for supporting children who are struggling with language, such as children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) who don\u2019t necessarily give their parents great feedback about what their language level is and how much they understand,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

\n

\u201c\u0007We think this [research] is really useful, long-term, for supporting children who are struggling with language, such as children with autism spectrum disorder who don\u2019t necessarily give their parents great feedback about what their language level is and how much they understand.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2014Sudha Arunachalam<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Parents also seem to know how to adapt to their child\u2019s needs, according to a related Sargent study by postdoctoral student Angela Xiaoxue He, which is funded through Arunachalam\u2019s $150,000 Charles H. Hood Foundation Child Health Research Award<\/a>. Preliminary data from this study of children ages three and a half to seven who have ASD suggest their parents \u201ctailor their language to the child\u2019s language level rather than the child\u2019s chronological age,\u201d says Arunachalam, whose study with typically developing toddlers was also funded by a grant from the National Institutes of Health<\/a>.<\/p>\n

These studies may give parents and clinicians more detailed information about how to help children understand and learn language, says Arunachalam. This is especially important for people working with children at risk for language disorders\u2014or who have autism spectrum disorder. Children with ASD, says He, face \u201ca major challenge\u201d with social-communicative behaviors like joint attention\u2014paying attention to something at the same time as someone else\u2014that are helpful for learning language. When the research is concluded and the findings are confirmed, clinicians may be able to give parents advice, such as \u201ctalk slower, break up complex ideas into multiple short sentences, repeat the same word,\u201d says Arunachalam.<\/p>\n

The next stage of Arunachalam\u2019s research will focus on children who have ASD. She says she\u2019s seen parents of typically developing children and parents of children with ASD go to great lengths to describe the umbrella when their child doesn\u2019t appear to acknowledge it\u2014yet the eye tracker shows the child is looking right at it.<\/p>\n

Some parents find it difficult to tell if their child is having trouble learning or just being a kid. \u201cWhen you say to a two-year-old, \u2018Go put your shoes on,\u2019 and they do nothing, is it because they don\u2019t know what shoes are, or they don\u2019t feel like it, or they\u2019re distracted by something else?\u201d says Arunachalam. She hopes her work will reveal that all children \u201cunderstand a lot more than they often show.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

Teaching Late Talkers<\/h3>\n

Understanding how children learn the meaning of words\u2014especially verbs\u2014is critical to helping those who struggle with language. \u201cVerbs are particularly important for language development,\u201d says Sabrina Horvath, a speech, language & hearing sciences doctoral student, \u201cbecause they bootstrap children into more advanced language.\u201d Horvath (\u201919) is studying late talkers, whom she describes as otherwise typically developing two-year-olds \u201cwho have small vocabularies and maybe aren\u2019t combining words\u201d at a level appropriate for their age. She hopes her study, which uses videos of objects in motion to test late talkers\u2019 grasp of verbs, will reveal what verbal cues to use when introducing new words, and will help diagnose children with language impairments at an earlier age.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis particular population is so important, because one-quarter of late talkers will have a formal diagnosis of a language disorder by the age of five,\u201d Horvath says. Even those who don\u2019t develop a language disorder have poorer academic outcomes than their peers or demonstrate atypical neural activation during language tasks, she says, and they\u2019re \u201cat greater risk for socioemotional disorders in adulthood.\u201d<\/p>\n

Horvath\u2019s research is funded by the $2,000 American Speech-Language-Hearing Foundation Student Research Grant in Early Childhood Language Development\u2014which is supported by the Noel and Arlene Matkin Memorial Fund\u2014and by Sudha Arunachalam\u2019s $25,000 American Speech-Language-Hearing Foundation New Century Scholars Research Grant.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Read more stories from <\/em>Inside Sargent here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sudha Arunachalam was flying to Berlin for a conference in 2014 when the woman across the aisle began entertaining her two young children. \u201cI spy, with my little eye, something…\u201d she\u2019d begin. Then she\u2019d add a clue about the object she\u2019d picked\u2014a color or other adjective\u2014and the children would look around and start guessing. Arunachalam, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8810,"featured_media":51323,"parent":48474,"menu_order":8,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sargent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/48536"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sargent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sargent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sargent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8810"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sargent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48536"}],"version-history":[{"count":35,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sargent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/48536\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":73506,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sargent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/48536\/revisions\/73506"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sargent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/48474"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sargent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/51323"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sargent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48536"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}