Parents take note! Toddlers learn new words more easily from other kids: Study

Either in studies or in extra-curricular activities, every parents want their children to be BEST. Well, for the BEST, children must be bright right from the very beginning. Once your children have a strong base, then they will never find any difficulty in future. Now, how to make the base of your children strong? Then find a good buddy. Parents, please take a note of this! According to a study, your toddlers are more likely to learn new words from other kids.

Scientists from Ohio State University in the US suggest that children learn new words best from other children. In the study, set to be presented at the 177th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, researchers from OSU and Purdue University set up two experiments to determine how 2-year-olds are influenced by the speech of people around them.

In one scenario, the kids were show side-by-side videos of two speakers reciting a nursery rhyme while listening to speech that matched either the age or gender of the speakers. They were then tasked with matching the vocal age and gender to what they’d seen. In the second experiment, the kids were taught new words by speakers of varying ages.

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And, according to the researchers the 2-year-olds appeared to learn best from other children, in this case those aged 8 to 10 years old.

"Much of what we know about the world is learned from other people. This is especially true for young children," said Yuanyuan Wang from Ohio State University.

"It is fascinating to learn children showed selected learning from other child talkers. This has implications for social cognition and selective social learning," Wang said.

Wang believes that toddlers are interested in the development of their own speech patterns and may be more attuned to the sound of other child speakers that resemble their own.

Wang further said, “This ability to learn selectively from a particular social group may serve as a foundation for developing preferences among social groups later in life.”

"Sensitivity to talker properties is found to be related to speech processing and language development. These are related to later personal, academic, social and overall achievements," Wang concluded.