The Science of Baby Talk - University of Toronto Magazine
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A collage of two toddlers playing with building blocks and figurines, and a rectangle filled with words in different languages behind them
Photo illustration by Studio Wyse

The Science of Baby Talk

A U of T Mississauga lab finds that children pick up on a lot more than just words as they learn how to speak Read More

Elizabeth Johnson’s research was not going as planned in the early days after she launched her Child Language and Speech Studies Lab at the University of Toronto Mississauga in 2008. She was trying to replicate the infant word recognition studies she ran at her previous labs in the U.S. and the Netherlands, and the results were not lining up.

“I panicked,” says Johnson, a professor in U of T Mississauga’s department of psychology. “Then I realized that the children in the other labs had come from mostly uniform English language backgrounds, while at UTM there was so much variation. I had to adapt, and I didn’t know what to do at first. But I soon saw that it was a huge gift to be here because I could ask all these cool questions about how diverse language environments affect language development and perception.”   

Johnson has spent the last 17 years at U of T Mississauga exploring how children’s experiences – the languages they hear at home, for example, and their familiarity with accented English – influence their learning and attitudes about language. “What pulled me into the field at the beginning of my career was wanting to understand how humans process sounds and words,” she says. “Being at UTM has expanded that interest to include how kids learn about the social side of speech, instead of just the phonetic side. Children are very good at tuning in to things like accents, tone and gender.”

A stint in Italy as an undergraduate student first sparked Johnson’s fascination with language acquisition. “I had a really hard time learning Italian, and it was fascinating to me that it was so difficult,” she says. Back at the University of Rochester, in upstate New York, Johnson started taking linguistics and neuroscience courses, and by chance a new program called Brain and Cognitive Sciences had just launched. “This interdisciplinary area of study was perfect for me, and it’s continued to be,” says Johnson, who went on to earn her doctoral degree from Johns Hopkins University in Maryland.

Professor Elizabeth Johnson in an office with a large abstract painting on the wall behind her and potted plants by the wall, both painting and plants out of focus
Prof. Elizabeth Johnson. Photo by Drew Lesiuczok

At the Child Language and Speech Studies (CLASS) Lab, Johnson collaborates with researchers from developmental psychology, linguistics and the speech sciences to explore the factors that contribute to children’s ability to master language so quickly. Language acquisition is a complex process, involving many regions of the brain, as well as the child’s environment, and “there’s still a lot we don’t understand,” says Johnson. Studies in the CLASS Lab focus primarily on infants (as young as four months old) and children, but they also work with some adults, mostly for comparison. Research participants come from many different language backgrounds reflecting the Mississauga community.

This diversity has inspired Johnson to move away from research that looks at speech processing in isolation to research that considers the contextual factors in children’s lives. Her findings have produced insights that are uniquely relevant to parents and educators in linguistically diverse communities.

One branch of research, for example, reveals that the English vocabulary growth of children from families where both parents speak English but not as their first language, is just as rapid as the vocabulary growth in children from families where English is the native language. The CLASS Lab has also made surprising discoveries about children’s perception of foreign-accented speech. When they began a study to determine whether children’s preference for friends and teachers is influenced by the accents of these individuals, Johnson was convinced that Canadian children would be immune to this bias. “I was wrong,” she says. In fact, when asked who would make a better teacher or friend, Canadian children overwhelmingly picked those who spoke the locally dominant variety of Canadian English, though bilingual children were slightly more accepting of non-local accents.

In another study, Johnson and her colleagues revisited Tufts University research from more than 25 years ago that confirmed villains in North American children’s cartoons typically have non-American accents. “We believed that surely couldn’t still be the case,” she says. “Yet our team watched a large sampling of cartoons and found the pattern is still striking. We wanted to know if kids were sensitive to this, so we played cartoons to kids and provided choices as to what voices should match with certain characters. The children more often chose the local English accent to go with the heroes and non-local accents to go with the villains. Even if the children’s parents didn’t have English as a first language, they demonstrated these preferences.”

Most recently, in work that’s still unpublished, the CLASS Lab has been examining infants’ emotional reactions to familiar and unfamiliar languages and accents. “I think this kind of research is important so that we become explicitly aware of these responses and think about how they might relate to the messages about language we’re sending children through our implicit attitudes, or through the media we’re exposing them to,” says Johnson.

Monolingual kids pay more attention to the real words they recognize, but bilingual kids are sometimes more interested in words that are new and different …”

– Elizabeth Johnson, U of T Mississauga psychology professor

The CLASS Lab uses a number of behavioural methods – such as eye tracking and head turning – to measure how infants and children perceive and acquire language. But Johnson recognized that the Toronto region’s linguistic diversity demanded a new and better approach alongside these tried-and-true techniques. “Using attention to measure ability and familiarity works well with monolingual populations, but bilingual children have different experiences, which complicates the research,” says Johnson. “We use made-up English words mixed among real English words in word recognition studies, for example. Monolingual kids pay more attention to the real words they recognize, but bilingual kids are sometimes more interested in words that are new and different – even made-up ones. So, this test doesn’t give me an accurate measure of their ability.”

These complications led her to a method that goes more directly to the source: observing electrical activity in the brain. In 2021, Johnson received funding from the Canada Foundation for Innovation for the Baby Brain and Behaviour Lab, an addition to the CLASS Lab that uses electroencephalogram (EEG) to measure infants’ neural responses to speech. “Now we can look at the relationship between the EEG measures and the behavioural measures,” she says. The EEG enables researchers to monitor something called “neural tracking,” a phenomenon where electrical brain activity synchronizes with listening to speech.

It’s early days for the new lab, but one soon-to-be-published study found that monolingual adults’ and infants’ neural activity tracks, or synchronizes with, their own variety of English speech better than accented English. Bilingual babies’ brains, on the other hand, display significantly different tracking of unfamiliar accents. It reinforces the outcomes of the behavioural research in this area yet delivers more detailed information. “We’re also looking at EEG studies of word recognition in different accents, where I don’t just get a yes or no result in terms of the child’s understanding of a word, but a graded effect that shows the degree of understanding,” says Johnson. “It’s very exciting.”

While some speech researchers turn their discoveries into practical interventions to improve children’s language development, Johnson, who, along with her team, holds frequent outreach events off campus, is passionate about the research itself. “I enjoy being curious, getting my students excited about science and connecting with parents and the wider community,” she says. “We give families a more nuanced understanding of the science of language learning, especially in multilingual homes, and they tell us what questions we should take back to the lab.”

Today, Johnson says she can’t imagine working in a place without the rich language diversity U of T Mississauga offers. “If we want to understand how language acquisition and speech perception works in the real world, we have to study how children learn in linguistically diverse environments.”

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