Why Some Children Learn To Talk Earlier Than Others

The formative years of a child are very important as the habits and traits they pick up at this stage determine the kind of person they would turn into. It is also during this period that the child picks up words and learns to talk. There can be big differences between the time span taken by different children to learn to speak. Most children speak their first words in the first 18 months and then it takes until the age of two to three years to speak sentences. Some children start doing this quickly. New research has made revelations as to why such differences exist among children.

The goal of the study, headed by psychologist Elika Bergelson, was to determine the reasons behind the differences in the amount of time children require to acquire language. International psychologists examined 1001 children up to the age of four who were part of the study. Surprisingly, it was found that the number of years it took for a child to learn to speak had no relation with anything like the time of day they spoke, their gender, their socio-economic environment, exposure to multiple languages, etc. Rather, in every case it was found that the children who learned to speak early heard more from the adults.

While learning a language has little to do with it, the poor economic and social circumstances of one’s parents are typically blamed for late speaking abilities of a child. Studies have shown that a child’s likelihood of learning a language increases with the number of people who talk to him. Parents and anyone who lives close to youngsters should be urged to communicate as much as they can in such circumstances.

In such circumstances, it is important to remember that children in joint families in rural regions have more opportunities to listen than they do to speak, which makes them more inclined to communicate at a young age. Conversely, they get to interact less in a city environment due to less people and hence may pick up the language late.

This study covered 12 countries and 43 languages and included both rural and urban children. In the research, children aged between two months and four years old recorded the sounds around them several times during their development. Forty thousand hours of recording were studied through machine learning and the effect of various factors on the language learning process was investigated, and it was clearly found that children who listen more also start speaking sooner.