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Updated: May 17, 2021 23:11 IST
Washington [US]May 17 (ANI): In a study at the University of Miami, an associate professor in the Department of Psychology of the College of Arts and Sciences found that children tend to learn higher words about symbolism earlier in development then they learn from lower in symbolism.
Some words sound just like what they mean. For example, “slurp” sounds like the noise we make when we drink from a cup, and “tiny” sounds like something very small. This similarity between how a word is pronounced and what it means is called symbolism. The study was published in the journal Cognitive Science.
Associate professor Lynn Perry also found that adults are more likely to use symbolic words when they speak to children than when they speak to other adults.
“That got us curious as to why,” said Stephanie Custode, a psychology PhD student who worked with Perry to answer questions posed by her previous work. . “Does symbolism play a causal role in children’s language development, helping them learn new words, even words with non-symbolic or arbitrary sound associations?”
For their new study, researchers looked to see if parents who used symbolic words when they played with new objects with children ages 1 to 2 helped them learn names. of those objects or not. The objects are novel food and toys that the researchers have made and named, such as the word “blicket” to describe a decoratively shaped clay toy. They found that when parents name a novel object, their children are more likely to remember those novel names later if parents also use highly symbolic words in the same place. sentence. This is true for both English and Spanish-speaking parents.
“Consider when parents teach their children ‘cats’ by talking about how they ‘meow’ or about a sweater by talking about its ‘opacity’ or about ‘honey’ by talking about its stickiness,” says Perry. “The similarity between the sound of a word like ‘sticky’ and the texture of honey helps children notice that property. If parents also say ‘honey’ while describing its stickiness, children may form a stronger memory of that new word and its meaning, because they’re noticing its important properties – its sticky texture in this case.”
The researchers found that using special symbolic language when they introduce a novel title benefits parents. “If a parent talks about stickiness without saying the name ‘honey’, there will be no new name to associate with that sticky texture, and if a parent names honey but talks about it being yellow, one The word doesn’t sound particularly like it means the child may pay less attention to the honey and forget about it.In either case, the child won’t learn the new word ‘honey’, says Perry.
From these findings, the researchers concluded that symbolism could be an important cue that parents and other caregivers can use to facilitate speech. study.
Next, the researchers plan to investigate whether using more symbolic words can help children with language delays learn new words. They are also interested in studying how how parents talk to their children changes over time and whether they reduce their use of symbolic language as they realize that their child is becoming a better word learner. (ANI)
