By Neuroscience News
Elika Bergelson's multilingual upbringing sparked a lifelong curiosity in how children surpass adults in language acquisition, leading her to a groundbreaking career in developmental psychology.
Bergelson's research at Yale University delves into the intricate process of how infants and toddlers absorb and comprehend language from their surroundings.
A recent study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, challenges existing beliefs about language development in children from various socio-economic backgrounds.
Bergelson's earlier work, which began during her graduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania, unveiled that babies as young as 6 months start grasping common nouns, a significant discovery in understanding early language comprehension.
Further research by Bergelson at the University of Rochester led to the creation of a large naturalistic data set, revealing that the interaction patterns of caretakers with 6- and 12-month-olds are not fundamentally different.
The recent PNAS paper, co-authored with Alejandrina Cristia, is based on extensive daylong audio recordings of 1,001 children across 12 countries, speaking 43 different languages.
This global study, employing machine learning for data analysis, found that age and the amount of speech received from the environment are key predictors of language development, not gender, multilingualism, or socio-economic factors.
Bergelson's ongoing research aims to expand the understanding of language development in diverse groups, including children who are deaf or blind, further unraveling the mysteries of how language evolves in the youngest minds.