How does language experience support language development? Short-term priming and long-term learning.

How we learn and use language is, not surprisingly, related to the language we experience around us: ultimately children who are exposed to English learn English, but more specifically, research shows that children exposed to varied language input (wider vocabularies, diverse sentences) come to develop more extensive language skills than those with narrower input. While we know that children's experience with language is important for shaping their learning of language, it remains unclear precisely how our experience with language influences our language development: what aspects of language experience are important, and how do children make use of them? Our project investigates how children learn from their language experiences, and the underlying learning mechanisms that they use to do so. Understanding the mechanisms that support language learning is theoretically important, because it informs our understanding of a uniquely human ability. But it also has substantial societal implications, because successful language development is critical to later educational and social attainment.

Our project focuses on how language experience affects children's use of particular grammatical or "syntactic" structures - the way words are ordered in a sentence. We know that one way in which both children and adults make use of the language they experience is by re-using it. This re-use occurs not just for specific words (e.g., saying 'sofa' instead of 'settee' because that's what your friend just called it), but also at more abstract levels, including grammar. For instance, you are more likely to say "those pictures were drawn by Quentin Blake" after hearing someone say "this book was written by Roald Dahl". This grammatical repetition is known as "syntactic priming": hearing a word order makes it easier for you to re-use that order, even with different words. When a speaker repeats a structure they have been exposed to, it indicates that they have a mental representation for that structure that they can use when understanding a sentence, and then re-use when planning a new sentence to say. So patterns of syntactic priming effects in children provide evidence about which grammatical structures they know.

More recent research suggests that the influence of such priming lasts longer than the immediate context. In fact, recent models of language processing propose that priming can lead to long-term learning, so that when someone experiences a grammatical structure, it sets in train a persistent change in their language representations. For example, when a child hears "this book was written by Roald Dahl", it does not just help them to re-use that structure immediately, it also strengthens their knowledge of that structure. But it is unclear how this learning occurs: how does children's immediate experience with language translate into longer-term development of adult-like representations? In this research we will conduct psycholinguistic experiments with children at different stages of language development in which we vary which types of structure children hear and say, in different contexts and at different time points. We will examine how likely they are to re-use these structures and how long-lasting such effects are, in order to cast light on the way in which children can learn from different elements of the language they experience. We will address the following questions: When in language development is this type of experience important? To what extent is experience-based learning linked to specific contexts, whether linguistic (experience of particular words) or non-linguistic (experience within a particular conversation or task), and to what extent does it generalise? Does learning occur to the same extent through the act of hearing different word orders and the act of saying them? Answering these questions will ultimately help us understand the mechanisms, conditions and trajectories underlying successful language development.

In addition to the scientific impact and impact on the post-doctoral researcher's career progression outlined in the Academic Beneficiaries section, these findings will have societal impact (1), being immediately relevant to those involved in supporting children's language learning, such as education practitioners and early years staff, and parents of young children. This project will also develop research capacity (2).

(1) Societal impact: Although the focus of this research is scientific, the findings of this project have the potential for societal impact and we therefore plan to include a variety of activities to achieve this (see Pathways to Impact document). Our research seeks to further our understanding of how the immediate interactions that children have with adults have a long-term effect on their language development. Recent reports highlight that good language and communication skills at young ages predict children's educational outcomes in the long-term [publication list:36,37] and pave the way for literacy [38]. With 20% of children not attaining the expected levels of language development by the end of the Foundation Stage of education [8], it is therefore particularly important to understand how language experience supports early language development, and to communicate these findings with early years staff who provide a substantial portion of early language input for many children. Our findings may help to inform how caregivers and practitioners can interact with young children in a way that is beneficial to their language development, particularly in the area of developing syntax, which may in turn ensure that they achieve the important foundations of language and communication that support their later education. For example, we predict that children who regularly hear complex syntactic structures will better understand these structures, and that children who regularly have opportunities to use these complex syntactic structures themselves will more quickly consolidate this understanding and the ability to use it. Such findings would lead to recommendations for early years staff to include more complex language when interacting with young children and to create opportunities for children to repeat it.

(2) Research capacity: The academic community will benefit from the development of research capacity that this project will create. It will employ three members of staff who will receive substantial training in experimental methodology and experience in data collection and management, increasing their research skills. In particular, offering the PGRA and Project Assistant positions on a part-time basis will make available the possibility of gaining valuable research experience to a range of people who normally have limited access to such opportunities. Notably, the Project Assistant will be employed on a part-time basis compatible with school hours which may provide a particularly beneficial opportunity for a parent or caregiver to return to work and gain research experience which may support the development of a research-related career. It will also develop research capacity in both the Warwickshire and Edinburgh local communities by developing the databases of families willing to participate in research for both sites' research laboratories and by strengthening links to local schools and nurseries willing to participate in research, which will support future research with these communities. Lastly, in actively communicating our research the broader society, the PI, CO-I, PDRA and PGRA will gain experience and training in knowledge exchange and communicating research to non-academic audiences, supporting future impact activities.