Cognitive scientists conducting a study at the University of Rochester’s Baby Lab suggest that parents who stumble and hesitate — known as disfluences — with words like “um” and “uh” when talking to their toddlers are actually helping them learn language more efficiently.
Scientists found that the disfluences signal to the toddler that something important is trying to be said and they should be more attentive, according to researchers.
Toddlers have a lot of information they have to process while they are listening to an adult talk, including many new words they have never heard before, said Dr. Richard Aslin, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester, and co-author of the study.
If a child’s brain waits until a new word is spoken and then tries to figure out what it means afterward, it becomes a much more difficult task and the child may miss what is said next, according to Aslin.
“The more predictions a listener can make about what is being communicated, the more efficiently the listener can understand it,” he told The Telegraph.
The researchers studied three groups of children between 18 and 30 months old. Each child sat in front of a monitor with an eye-tracking device while on his or her parent’s lap. Two images appeared on the screen: one image of a familiar item and one made-up item with a made-up name.
The researchers found that when a recorded voice talked about the images with simple sentences, the child instinctively looked at the made up image much more often — about 70 percent of the time — than the familiar image after the voice stumbled and said “Look at the, uh”¦”
“We’re not advocating that parents add disfluences to their speech, but I think it’s nice for them to know that using these verbal pauses is okay ““ the “Ëœuhs’ and “Ëœums’ are informative,” said Celeste Kidd, a graduate student at University of Rochester, and lead author of the study.
She said the effect was only significant in children over the age of two.
The researchers believed that younger children had not yet learned the fact that disfluences tend to precede novel or unknown words.
When kids are between the ages of two and three, they are typically at the stage of development where they can construct rudimentary sentences of three or four words and have a vocabulary of around a few hundred words.
An earlier study conducted by Jennifer Arnold, a scientist at the University of North Carolina and a former postdoctoral fellow at Rochester, found that adults can also use “ums” and “uhs” to their advantage in understanding language.
And work by Anne Fernald at Sanford University has shown that the quantity of speech a child is exposed to is most important for learning rather than the quality of the speech.
The current study, which was conducted by Kidd, Aslin, and Katherine White, a former postdoctoral fellow at Rochester who is now at the University of Waterloo, was published online this week in the journal Developmental Science.
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