Dr. Eve V. Clark has spent a career in academia pursuing one seemingly simple question: How do children learn to talk? The theory in vogue at the beginning of her career was advanced by Noam Chomsky, whose theory of Universal Grammar was all the rage amongst linguists. As a woman outnumbered by men, Eve pursued her research doggedly, from Edinburgh where she made her first recordings, to Bing Nursery School at Stanford, where she solidified her findings. She also drew on her experiences as a mother, documenting her son’s speech in over a thousand pages as he learned to speak. In the end, she had to admit that Chomsky was wrong: language is largely taught to children by adults around them, though not in the ways that adults presumed.
In this conversation, we talk about the difficulties of being a ground-breaking woman in academia, the progression of her research, and the conclusions she came to. We bring it up to the modern day, a time when the academic environment where she has spent her career are under attack by an administration hostile to painstaking documentation of the facts before us.
[Click for transcript]
What can we learn from the way children learn to speak?
“Keep asking questions. To ask questions about anything we don’t understand, to ask questions about things that are new and to find out.”
Eve V. Clark is emeritus faculty at Stanford University. She earned her doctorate in Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh and spent her career studying how young children attain language. She is author of First Language Acquisition (3rd. ed. 2016) and Language in Children (2016), amongst other publications. Learn more.
Listening to Children: In Conversation with Linguist Eve Clark
[00:00:39] Eve Clark: We had a son and I decided that one thing I would do, which was just write down everything that changed in development generally, and in particular in his language. And so I transcribed all his early speech. Um. and I ended up with a diary, which I gave him a, printed out version of it, uh, a couple of years ago. It was something like 1100 pages.
[00:01:07] Voiceover: This is your host, Suki Wessling. Language is the defining feature of humanity. Many animals can communicate, but only humans as far as we know, have a language that can explore well, language itself. Human language can express absolutely anything that humans want it to.
Segment 1: How Eve came to linguistics and learned about child language acquisition
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[00:01:25] Eve Clark: My name is Eve Clark and, I do research on how children learn a first language.
[00:01:32] Voiceover: Linguist Eve V. Clark is a pioneering specialist in child language acquisition. I studied with her as an undergraduate. As you’ll hear her explain, linguistics as a discipline has gone through immense change during her career, Eve’s focus was on how children learn language, but like many narrow seeming disciplines, how children learn language tells us a lot about ourselves as a species.
[00:01:56] In this conversation, we talk about Eve’s career as a woman in academia and a linguist who bucked the hot theory of the moment and showed, both through research and in her own intimate relationships, that we adults are actually very instrumental in how our children learn to speak.
[00:02:11] In this conversation we talk about her work, but more widely we talk about language, which in my humble opinion is part of the fundamental package that makes us human. We also talk about the current state of politics and academia, and the need for furthering our understanding of ourselves as a species.
[00:02:30] I hope you enjoy the conversation.
[00:02:35] Eve Clark: When I was, uh, fairly small, uh, we moved to France and I was dropped straight into the French school system and I could already read, but I have no memory, whatever of what it meant to change over, except that I just did.
[00:02:53] And after living in France for some years, we moved back to the UK but I continued to speak French. My mother encouraged it. She used to send me to visit friends in Fountainebleu where we had lived. The friends would take it as a challenge to have me do things that would really exercise my French. So sending telegrams over the telephone, for example, when I was about nine. And I must say I have never felt any hesitation, whatever, about picking up a telephone in any country I was in and figuring out how to work things.
[00:03:27] Voiceover: Eve met her husband, psycho linguist Herb Clark, at UCLA, where she’d gone on a fellowship. He got an academic job in Pittsburgh, but like many women of the time, her career as an academic took a back seat. In Pittsburgh the only job she could get was teaching French.
[00:03:43] Eve Clark: I was writing my PhD dissertation. I had collected all the data in my first year, but, uh, I then I just to keep myself sane, taught French for two years at the University of Pittsburgh. They have this wonderful building, which they call the Cathedral of Learning. Every instructor that I knew there called it the Tower of Ignorance, and, and I had, I had an interesting time. I had two members of the Pittsburgh football team in my class. And of course they didn’t do the work and they failed the midterm. And I thought, well, they’ll just be out maybe. And I got a phone call the next day at home from someone whose name I did not recognize, saying, should I get tutors for these two? And I said, only no, make them come to class and do the work.
[00:04:35] And I put down the receiver. I had no idea who it was. It was a football coach. Teaching French was interesting there because they could read and write and they had no idea what I was talking about when I talked to them. I said, I’m going to do classes in French, you must listen. They had never heard anyone French speaking French. And it was a disaster for them. I mean, it took, I think some of them began to get it, but they didn’t have language labs in those days. They didn’t have tapes they could listen to. They, they just had no knowledge of it.
Getting established at Stanford and the challenges faced by women academics
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[00:05:13] Eve Clark: So you, you ended up at Stanford with your husband.Right. We, he was offered a job at Stanford he had been an undergraduate at Stanford,and he said, oh, I wouldn’t dream of coming unless I had tenure. And he put down the receiver and we sort of forgot about it. And a month later he got another call from the chair of the psychology department, saying, well, we’ve got your tenure, will you come? And he hummed and hawed and I said, look, let’s go and look at California as a place to possibly work and see if there’s anything there that I could get as a job.
[00:05:49] And so we flew out and I thought Stanford looked very nice and I was offered a job, by Joe Greenberg to work on the Language Universals projectand so I said yes, and Herb said yes, and we moved.
[00:06:03] I worked for Joe Greenberg for a year, and then I was appointed as a, a lecturer in linguistics. And, it was at a time when there were a couple of men who were at the same level as me, and they were made assistant professors, and I complained to the head of the department saying, why? And he said, well, they don’t want to be drafted.
[00:06:24] And I said, I don’t care about that. I want to be treated, reasonably. And the next year I was appointed assistant professor.
[00:06:33] Suki Wessling: Wow. That’s a great story. That, well, you know, I Stanford has, uh, an interesting history in that it was founded as a co-ed university.
[00:06:43] Eve Clark: Absolutely. And for years they accepted fewer men than women. And because they were worried because women all had higher scores than men on the sort of qualifying exams, and they thought that they would have too many women.
[00:06:57] Suki Wessling: Mm-hmm.
[00:06:58] Eve Clark: Um, so, you know, there there’ve been ups and downs on all of that.
[00:07:03] There was a, a, a woman professor at the med school who was just not, she was not given a tenure line job for years and years and, um, and she was just very good and that came out and it was a big scandal about it.
[00:07:18] But Stanford has done various arbitrary things. I remember, early on, uh, when I was in linguistics, at a certain point, one of the lecturers in the French department was going to be given the Legion d’Honneur by the French embassy in San Francisco.
[00:07:33] And she had been a lecturer for something like 10 years. Overnight, she was made a full professor. So that she was not being presented as a lecturer in the department, which is a, you know, non-tenure line, no seniority and stuff. When we came, I think we were one couple out of something like two other couples, um, who had been hired by Stanford, where both had department jobs. And we were luckily in two different departments.
[00:07:59] Suki Wessling: Mm-hmm.
[00:07:59] Eve Clark: But if you looked around, there were lots of couples at Stanford and the wife was always a lecturer, man was always in a tenure line.
[00:08:06] I think a lot of that is over now, but there’s still, there’s quite a big asymmetry still between women at each tenure level and men.
[00:08:15] Suki Wessling: There’s a study that shows that when you record a meeting with women and men and you ask them afterwards how much the women talked, the men generally think that the women talked more than half of the time. And almost always the women talked less than half of the time.
[00:08:33] Eve Clark: Yes, absolutely. And the other thing I used to find very irritating, at times, was in meetings, you would make a suggestion and it would be ignored. Same suggestion would be taken up five minutes later by one of the men on the committee, and it would be applauded. And I just found that infuriating.
[00:08:53] Suki Wessling: It. It is infuriating and it is so interesting for me talking to women of your generation, real groundbreakers in a sense, because you walked into these situations where you were the unusual woman in the room and, and that although there’s so many more women, a lot of things really haven’t changed, especially, and this, you know, has to do with linguistics, though not necessarily your specialty, especially the relationship that we have with gender and language.
[00:09:32] Eve Clark: Yes. No, I, I think that, I think that’s quite true and, I don’t know whether it’s starting to improve a bit. I think it’s, it is better than it was 20 or 30 years ago, but I it’s still, it’s still there.
Changing the study of children and language acquisition
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[00:09:45] Voiceover: Eve Clark did her linguistics research at a time when everything was done by hand, painstakingly. I asked her to talk a bit about the foundational work that led her into the question of how children learned to talk, because it might be surprising to know that this was an unsolved and somewhat contentious question.
[00:10:02] At that time, the linguist Noam Chomsky, now perhaps more widely known for his political writings, was the most prominent linguist in the world. His theory of Universal Grammar was a framework that explained, he said, how human children acquired language. But Eve didn’t start with theory. She started with children.
Edinburgh research
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[00:10:21] Eve Clark: I did research on acquisition for my dissertation, so I had, um, already started on that and I was recording children in Edinburgh in a, a little playgroup of, uh, three year olds who had been gathered by a professor in the psychology department who wanted to study various aspects of development.
[00:10:40] And in return for copies of all my transcripts, they said, yes, you can come in and record all the kids anytime you want, uh, for as much time as you want. And so I recorded every day for about an hour and a half or two hours, and then I went back home and transcribed all the tapes, did the same thing the next day.
[00:10:57] So I ended up with a very large corpus of data from these three year olds. And what I did was decide I wanted to look at subordinate clauses. So clauses containing when, before or after. on the timeline to see how they described sequence and time. And my guess was that they would just start with saying X and Y or X and then Y for two events. Um, and the question was what did they do when they started to use things like before and after? For before, if they say they can say X before Y and they’re still using time sequence. But if they use after X, after Y, it’s out of sequence. But of course they can put the after first and then they’re back in sequence again.
[00:11:42] But subordinate clauses don’t usually occur first the majority of the time, they typically come in second place. Equally, they could put before in first position, and then they’re out of sequence. But why would they do that? Well, you could say, well, in a conversation, if one speaker’s just mentioned the event uh, that belongs in the before clause, you would want to put the before clause first when you took up that topic in the next turn. So what I looked at was, uh, what ordering children used, so what, which conjunctions they chose, and then what had just been said before that and what was said next, by the, typically the adult that they were talking to.
[00:12:50] What I found was that children liked putting subordinate clause second, and they did this consistently. With when it didn’t matter very much, but with before and after if they used before, they were still in sequence and they liked sequence. And they did have a lot of, sequential descriptions, which just used and.
[00:13:10] But with after they had a lot more difficulty. And so what I found was that they really learned how to use before, before they learned how to use after. And I followed them for a year. And then when I moved to the States, someone else made recordings for me for a second year. So I actually had data from three to five in my, in my dissertation, looking at this sort of sequence.
Stanford research
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[00:13:32] Eve Clark: Working on Language Universal’s project with Joe Greenberg was just wonderful because I had to look at all sorts of different languages. I would take a topic and say, okay, how do you do this in, um, Germanic, Romance, Indonesian languages, Chinese. And so I, I learned a lot about many languages in doing this and thoroughly enjoyed it.
[00:13:56]
Aspects of English that differ from other European languages
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[00:13:57] Suki Wessling: So just for listeners who don’t really know what sort of differences there might be, what are some major differences that might surprise an English speaker?
[00:14:08] Eve Clark: English speakers often are surprised by changes in word order. So in English you have a subject verb object as the main order in simple sentences. But in many languages you actually have, uh, things like verb subject object instead with the verb first. Sometimes you have verb last instead, so German and Dutch.
[00:14:32] Suki Wessling: I have a German friend who believes that Germans are more patient because you have to wait, you, you have to wait for the end of the sentence to know what the person is talking about, you know?
[00:14:47] Eve Clark: I know that one of the other things that is really surprising to English speakers is languages that are highly inflected, where the words change instead of having a preposition, you just have the noun and the noun changes to
[00:15:01] And the case. Yeah. Yes. Finnish is a sort of prize case because they have 12 different cases and
[00:15:13] Suki Wessling: And you know, it’s interesting because English is both really complicated and really simple. You know, it’s really complicated historically because we have so many different languages influencing it and it’s such a mishmash, but it’s really simple ’cause it’s a little harder to make mistakes because of the fact that it’s not a highly inflected language.
[00:15:30] So.
[00:15:30] Eve Clark: Right.
[00:15:31] Suki Wessling: It’s a little bit easier just to muddle your way through English.
[00:15:36] Eve Clark: Right. And English is, is curious actually because through the 10th or 11th century it had a quite complicated case system, which it then started to lose. And you know, 200 years later there was a wholesale importation of French into English, which a lot of English speakers don’t seem to realize.
[00:15:55] Suki Wessling: Yes.
[00:15:56] Eve Clark: And um, but then with all their, you know, gallivanting around through different countries and taking them over, they adopted words from Hindi. They adopted words from, um, from some Australian Aboriginal languages, they adopted words from, uh, French Canada. There’s a huge number of foreign origin words that are in English, and so although it’s a Germanic language technically, it actually is a sort of hybrid of Germanic and Romance plus a whole lot of other borrowings all over the place.
[00:16:29] Suki Wessling: Yeah, one of my favorite is ketchup.
[00:16:31] Eve Clark: Uh, yes.
[00:16:32] Suki Wessling: You can’t you can’t get more all American than ketchup, except that you can, because it originated in Indonesia. So, there you
[00:16:39] Eve Clark: right. Yeah.
[00:16:41] Suki Wessling: at the time that linguist Eve Clark was exploring the question of how children learned language. Through meticulous research, Noam Chomsky was making waves with a bold new theory.
[00:16:52] Eve Clark: one of the things I was curious about at the time, Chomsky was starting to make some very strong claims about language being innate.
[00:17:02] And it was very unclear to me what it meant to say language is innate, with respect to how you learn subordinate clauses. You know, particularly since languages differ in where they place subordinate clauses, they always go first in a language like Japanese. In English, they can move around. So I, I was sort of puzzled by that, but not really thinking very much about the, the sort of final basis of it. I was just looking at, well, what stages do children go through? And assuming that they were learning them from how adults talked about sequences in time at the time.
A longitudinal study of 1
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[00:17:39] Eve Clark: But, as I went on, one of the things I decided I wanted to do was keep a diary of language development. So I did, for about 10 years I did a whole lot of experimental work.
[00:17:50] But, we had a son and I decided that one thing I would do, which was just write down everything that changed in development generally, and in particular in his language. And so I transcribed all his early speech. Um. And so his attempts at words and things like that early on.
[00:18:12] And I ended up with a diary, which I gave him a printed out version of it, uh, a couple of years ago. He’s now in his early forties. Right. Um, and it was something like 1100 pages.
[00:18:27] Suki Wessling: Oh,
[00:18:27] Eve Clark: Yes.
[00:18:28] Suki Wessling: Now that’s a dedicated mother. and researcher.
[00:18:33] Eve Clark: When I stopped keeping it, I realized it had probably taken me, you know, somewhere between, uh, 10 and 15 hours a week for six, seven years.
[00:18:44] But I should tell you why I stopped doing it when he was, when he was about six so he was in first grade.
[00:18:50] He had a, a very good friend who was Italian, who spoke Italian at home, but English at school. He said, do you know what Mathia said?
[00:18:58] And I said, no. He said, I taked care. I take cared of the dog.
[00:19:03] Suki Wessling: Yes. Aren’t you going to write it down? He said, and I said, no, and, and he said, but you always write down these things. And that was true. So I started being rather careful and trying to write down his own things out of sight. But I really started to give, give it up at, around that time because he, he was a, a pretty fluent speaker and yes, there were still things were, were changing, but nowhere near what had been changing when he was two, three, and four years old.
[00:19:32]
Extrapolating from the one to the manySegment 2: Proving Chomsky wrong
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[00:19:35]
[00:19:36] Suki Wessling: When linguist Eve Clark started doing her research into child language acquisition, it was really considered a mystery how children learn to talk. Researchers knew often from personal experience how hard it was to learn a language as an adult, yet children seemed to inhale language rather than study it.
[00:19:54] Voiceover: The process seemed so easy and so much faster than adult language learning. And in the 1960s, linguist Noam Chomsky rocked the academic world with his theory of Universal Grammar. This theory posited amongst other things that the only way children would be able to learn so quickly is if the human brain contained a structure of universal grammar into which they could plug the language they were hearing like different shaped pieces of a puzzle.
[00:20:20] Eve had done her graduate work in Edinburgh painstakingly, recording and hand transcribing hundreds of hours of preschool children’s speech. As a mother, she had done a longitudinal study of one child keeping detailed notes of her son’s speech development.
[00:20:35] Now, it was time to test her observations directly by observing children in, different stages of language learning, as well as the adults caring for them.
[00:20:47] Eve Clark: There’s a lot of variation from one child to the next, but one of the things I did find was that several things that I noticed in his speech, I used as the basis of saying, okay, how general is this? And then I would go out and do an experimental study with a whole lot more children to see whether this was a common phenomenon or whether it was idiosyncratic.
[00:21:07] Voiceover: Linguists deal with the utter complexity of human language by drilling down into the specifics. In the study Eve describes here, she had noticed that children misused the words by and from when they were young, but eventually they all figured out the correct form. How?
[00:21:23] Eve Clark: Kids don’t know how to use by in a passive form. So when they want to talk about something and sort of, you know, um, downgrade the agent a bit, they will say things like, I was scared from the car instead of, I was scared by the car.
[00:21:40] Suki Wessling: Huh.
[00:21:40] Eve Clark: So I thought, well, how common is this use of from, because one of the things it does is. It’s used for talking about the source of something.
[00:21:50] What we did first was go and look at different, systematic recordings of kids that had longitudinal recordings and pull out all the uses of from, with and by that were used by parents and children, and look at what sorts of errors were occurring and very similar errors to the ones that I had seen in in my son’s speech. And then I thought, okay, let’s see what happens if you give children between say, two and six examples, which are okay, they’re conventional, and examples which have the wrong preposition in.
[00:22:27] And so we substituted from for by, but we also gave them things with with and we gave normal uses of by and normal uses of from, and we had them just imitate the sentences. And it turns out that really young children, if they’re given a sentence to imitate, which doesn’t fit the forms they are favoring themselves, will change it. As they get older, they get better at doing a verbatim imitation.
[00:22:54] Suki Wessling: Mm-hmm.
[00:22:54] Eve Clark: And what we found was that two and three year olds, many of them preferred from to by in anything that could be construed as passive, like, but with didn’t make any difference. That stayed. They usually used width appropriately and so they changed wrong uses of with to with itself. And you know, by four or five they just were picking up on what would be the conventional way to say this. And they ignored what we had actually given them to imitate.
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[00:23:25] Eve Clark’s research proved what any parent paying attention to their child knows that children start with simplistic forms that get their meaning across, but gradually replace those forms with the correct ones as they hear others around them speaking differently.
[00:23:39] Eve Clark: With language, they’ve worked out some of the meanings and they have a set of meanings that make sense to them, and so they favor those. And then they gradually learned that, oh, well actually there are some parts of uh, this domain, which I’m using from, for where everyone I hear speaking about that particular situation always uses by and not from. And so maybe I should use by in that context. I. Um, and so I think there’s a lot of learning that’s going on, and at first it’s limited by the fact that the child has a smaller vocabulary, smaller range of constructions they really know and so on, and then they start expanding that as they go on.
[00:24:19]
[00:24:19] Suki Wessling: So you’re looking at these real children learning in real time, and there’s still this— I mean, I was at Stanford in the eighties and there was a very strong will in the linguistics department to believe in these innate structures in the
[00:24:36] Eve Clark: brain,
[00:24:36] Yes,
[00:24:37] Suki Wessling: And you are not seeing them, I’m taking it.
[00:24:42] Eve Clark: I’m not, and, and actually, well, it took, took a while. I suppose we, I basically ignored the innate, claims and just showed children understood certain things at certain ages, went through particular stages in learning what the conventions were for English. And then in 2003 with a student, I published a paper. Where what we had done was go and look at three children acquiring English from about age two and a half up to age five, two children acquiring French, same age range.
[00:25:20] And what we did was look at every single error they made in the transcripts, and then we looked at what the parent said next, and then whether the child took a third turn. And what we found was that after errors, adults tended to reformulate what the child appeared to be trying to say in a conventional way for that language, and gave it to the child as the next turn, but with rising intonation.
[00:25:47] So it was basically, is this what you meant? And a lot of the time, children would take, take that up on the third turn and either say, yes. or Aha. Or they would actually repeat the part that the adult had corrected where they had made an error earlier. And what we did with these, we call them reformulations, we argued that this in fact was negative evidence for children.
[00:26:16] Voiceover: What you are about to hear is a father playing with his son. You’ll hear the child speak and the father reformulate the child’s speech to check whether he’d understood the child correctly. In the process of reformulating, the father also models correct forms.
[00:27:01] Eve Clark: It was telling them that they had made an error and giving them what the conventional form. Really was. this was, regarded as very revolutionary as a view because Chomsky had two, um, dogmas, let’s say that went along with his claim about Innateness. And one was there is no negative evidence. Kids are just getting all of this stuff because it’s innate. What we started looking at, we looked at different languages. We looked at English and French. I later looked at a whole lot of Hebrew, and, parents do this reformulation all over the place. And when they hear an error from their kid. and it is incredibly pervasive and children take notice of it and It’s not an instantaneous correction in that they don’t get it right the next time they try. It may take them several months before they get it right, but they are acknowledging it. They are repeating the repaired form that they’ve been offered. And a few months later, their error has gone.
[00:28:14] Voiceover: Eve Clark’s work at Stanford University not only proved Chomsky wrong, though that wasn’t her direct intent, but it also proved something fascinating and to me, moving, about parenting. Across the languages and cultures she studied, Eve found that in a way, Chomsky was right. Parents didn’t really teach their children how to speak. The reformulations that Eve observed parents doing in every culture, language, and socioeconomic class were not done to teach or even to model correct language. They were simply done to improve communication between parent and child.
The role of parenting in language acquisition
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[00:28:48] Eve Clark: In fact, what you’re doing is just making sure you’ve understood what the child seems to be trying to say. when you have a, a language that you’re using to communicate with and to accompany all sorts of activities, so it, it can guide you in the activities and it allows you to coordinate with someone else, and you keep track of what that person already knows and what you know, uh, so that you have this common ground that you’re always adding to with each person, Um, then it’s, it’s a sort of fundamental part of the communication system, and with the communication you have to count not just the language, but also gestures.
[00:29:25] Whenever I use a demonstrative and say that, then I point. Right. and if I’m offering something, I may make an offer with my hands as well as saying, do you want this? uh, and so there’s facial expression, there’s hand gesture. There’s your stance. If you are standing in a group with three people, if you want to exclude one of them, you turn your shoulders a little bit away from them, right?
[00:29:51] Suki Wessling: Mm-hmm.
[00:29:53] Eve Clark: And, um, uh, so we, we make use of, of our bodies, our hands and our faces as a really, um, it’s something you can’t separate from language. Um, and it’s only when you see language printed on the page that you don’t have that sort of accompaniment. But, but when you are actually using it and producing it and understanding it, then that’s always there.
The role of neglect and disability in language acquisition
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[00:30:19] Suki Wessling: Mm-hmm. I’m thinking of two sort of counter examples to that and wondering if there’s been research done. One on language acquisition in more neglectful households. Um, I. are the children is their language significantly delayed because they aren’t being spoken to and being corrected?
[00:30:40] Eve Clark: I think the answer is yes. The less input you get and the less practice you get with conversation, um, the further behind you are. And this shows up in differences, say in vocabulary size by social class. We take social class as a very broad cut to make because of course within any social class there are huge individual differences as well, among parents and children. Um, but uh, yes, that makes a big difference.
[00:31:06] Suki Wessling: Mm-hmm. And the, the other that I notice is, you know, that we who are fully able -bodied do depend on visual cues on what we hear. But when you start looking at subgroups such as, deaf families or blind children, who are learning language without the other input, do you see differences in how they learn?
[00:31:33] Eve Clark: Okay, with deaf children, I know something about that. There was a lot of work done by, um, someone called Ursula Bellugi at, down in San Diego. One of the things they found was that deaf parents do just as much sort of input and reformulation, but with signing, but they will often change how they sign with little kids. So instead of signing in the signing space in front of them, uh, they would make a sign, right, let’s say they’re naming a toy or something, they make a sign right on the toy.
[00:32:04] Suki Wessling: Oh, interesting.
[00:32:06] Eve Clark: And so, they’re getting kids to understand sign in much the same way that parents will point at something and say the word. They can rely on the child’s gaze with pointing, um, in the hearing case, but not in the deaf case.
[00:32:25] Um, with blind children, uh it’s very interesting ’cause one of the things that blind children do is they hold things, they touch them, they feel what the difference in shape is, texture, weight, everything like that. Um, and again, parents tend to touch their hand, touch the object, um, and label very early. So, um, a little bit like the deaf but where there’s not sight involved. And of course, blind children can’t use things like direction of gaze, but they become pretty good at focusing on source of voices. So they’re using whatever sentences they can in a way that is slightly different from the sighted speaker.
[00:33:10] Suki Wessling: Language, you know, it’s so intertwined with parenting and with, with our relationship with our kids. And, and, you know, when you were talking about, the vocabulary size, I have a very fond memory of my 4-year-old and I going to a pet shop to get an aqua, uh, terrarium for a lizard that or one of our cats had brought in and I thought, Oh, wouldn’t it be fun to watch the lizard grow its tail back and then we’ll let it go.
[00:33:40] This is a little science experiment, right? And we go in and the salesperson asks what we’re looking for. And my little 4-year-old says, we’re looking for a terrarium you know, and she was just like completely blown away. And afterwards we get in the car and he says, Mommy, why did she think it was wrong that I used the right word for something? Which, you know, I mean, he was, he was his parents’ kid, we, we, all take up some of the culture of our parents, no matter what our relationship is with our parents, good or bad. Um, we end up. being influenced by their
[00:34:21] Eve Clark: culture
[00:34:22] Yeah. Right.
[00:34:22] Suki Wessling: and you know, we already talked about, we we have a wordy household,
[00:34:26] Eve Clark: Yes. Right?
What can parents take away from this?
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[00:34:26] Suki Wessling: so, so it was not surprising, But if you had, say, a parent listening to this and saying, you know, I have this baby
[00:34:35] Eve Clark: Mm-hmm.
[00:34:36] Suki Wessling: uh, or I’m pregnant.
[00:34:38] Um, I know that in the nineties there was all this, you know, baby Mozart stuff. And so, so my, my husband would, talk to our firstborn in utero and, and make jokes at him and say, I want my kid to, to have a good sense of humor, but, but if we have so much influence on how our kids learn how to speak, what can we do? And this is free, you know, that all of us can do. What can we do to give our kids a leg up?
[00:35:07] Eve Clark: I think the best leg up is to talk to them a lot and to listen to them so that in fact they, they get a whole lot of practice with conversation, but they also learn how to use language and of course the more you talk to them and the more you read to them, the more words they’re going to learn. And that’s always going to be a leg up.
[00:35:32] Suki Wessling: And as mentioned liking physical books, there’s research that says that kids who live in houses with books, just physical books displayed, have a higher reading ability. And it doesn’t matter. It’s like even if I with my phone full of books, that would not influence a child’s development at all, my phone full of books. It’s the physical thing and they’re interacting with a physical thing that seems to be important.
[00:36:06] Eve Clark: Right. In fact, I think there’ve been studies done where they’ve looked at, districts where there is or isn’t a public library available, and where there is a public library available and if the parents go, those kids do much better than kids who never get exposed. I mean, there are no books in the house, never get exposed to books. At least with public library, you can borrow books and, um, I think that’s a really important element. Um, there’ve been several, uh, big projects in Europe where they’ve tried to get pediatricians to give books to families with new babies, and they get a book every six months or when the baby is really small, um, to encourage them and they’re, they’re told where the local public library is and how to enroll there. and uh, I think that, that, that has been working quite well. And I know there’ve been attempts to try this also in the States, but I don’t know how, how far that sort of project has got.
[00:37:05] Suki Wessling: Mm-hmm. Yeah. We have one locally where I live, uh, a nonprofit does collect books and give them to kids who are growing up in households that can’t afford books, and, you know, just having the books available,
[00:37:19] I remember reading the same book over and over and over again. You know, because we had it, we’d go to the library, but then we’d have this book and so I’d read it over and over and over again.
[00:37:30] Eve Clark: Ah., Yes, I, I was very fortunate. We always had lots of books in the house and my grandparents had lots of books and so, and no one ever told me I couldn’t read something because I was too young. So I read a ton of stuff, which was not in my age range, let’s say.
[00:37:44]
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[00:37:48] Suki Wessling: Listeners, have you checked out the Babblery Substack at babblery.substack.com? There you can find all sorts of materials related to the full episodes, such as short written pieces by Babblery guests, writing on subjects related – and sometimes wholly unrelated – to the show theme, and also Minibabbles, short companion audio pieces. Subscribe at babblery.substack.com.
The challenges of parenting in the age of smartphonesSegment 3: Language underpins all of human achievement
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[00:38:16] Voiceover: When I applied to college, my least favorite question was, what career are you going to have? I had no idea. The only thing I did know was that I had wide interests. I liked to find out how seemingly unrelated disciplines would intersect, and no matter where I looked, it seemed like language was the common factor.
[00:38:35] Language underpins everything we do. Without language, we’d just be the meanest wily- est apes in the jungle. My guest, Dr. Eve Clark, studied a narrow field that underpins everything else we study. Before we can invent the automobile, we have to find the words to talk about it. Before we can consider theoretical physics, we have to learn complex and abstract ideas in the form of words. So I wanted to find out how Eve sees the wider questions of humanity, knowing as she does so intimately, how we learned the foundation of what it is to be human.
[00:39:10] Suki Wessling: I wanted to ask you a little bit about, you know, what’s happening now with our culture in a few different ways. One is with the advent of the smartphone, parenting has changed dramatically. So I know that back when I was a young mom. Uh, not that young, but a new mom. Um, I would go walking with my friends, you know, with strollers and we would talk to each other and we talk to the kids and there was just a lot of talking going on. And now when I see parents in the street walking their kids in strollers, it’s
[00:39:54] Eve Clark: looking at their phones.
[00:39:55] Suki Wessling: it is almost a hundred percent that they probably even have earbuds in.
[00:39:59] Eve Clark: Oh, gosh.
[00:40:00] Suki Wessling: And if they’re talking, they’re talking into their earbuds to someone else.
[00:40:05] Do you think that this is going to have an effect on future generation of kids that the the face-to-face interaction with their families does seem to be going down?
[00:40:16] I.
[00:40:18] Eve Clark: It’s, I, it’s possible that this is, is going to have an effect. I, I really don’t know. Um, I mean, We brought up our son before the advent, really, of smartphones. And I, I mean, I didn’t get a smartphone till very late. My students kept on saying, well, don’t you have a, you know, a mobile phone? And I would say, no, I don’t. You can call me at home, you can send me email.
[00:40:41] But it’s interesting ’cause at least with my grandchildren, I don’t see that the, the older grandchild, she’s 14. She has a phone, I think, but I’ve never saw her using it in the house when we’re staying there. The younger one has no phone and, and won’t, I think from until some time to go. And I don’t know what my daughter-in-law’s view of this is.
[00:41:06] She’s a pediatrician, so she sees, you know, the whole age range. Um, but I don’t think they would be particularly positive about having phones around and on all the time. On the other hand, both parents look at the news on the phone, read the New York Times on the phone, and do that at breakfast every day.
[00:41:27] so,
[00:41:28] Suki Wessling: Yeah,
[00:41:28] Eve Clark: you know, so it’s hard hard to know.
[00:41:31] Suki Wessling: My dad had the newspaper up in front of his face every morning at breakfast, so I suppose that’s not too different. Although with the newspaper, the rest of it was on the table and I could grab a piece and look at it too. So, you know, it’s, it’s just, I’m, I’m really interested in how fundamental this change has been in ways that we aren’t able to measure yet.
[00:41:54] Eve Clark: Yeah, I think we may not be able to measure it for another 10 years or so, actually, but I, but it, it’s very hard to know because again, there are huge differences in how kids deal with their, their phones and when they’re around each other, they may be much more focused on their phones as a group.
[00:42:13] Suki Wessling: Mm-hmm.
[00:42:14] Eve Clark: But, uh, but when they’re with other people, you know, maybe not.
[00:42:18] Suki Wessling: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I just, I, the first really phone oriented mom i knew used to literally give her phone to her baby to play with ’cause it would keep the baby quiet
[00:42:33] Eve Clark: Oh, oh, oh,
[00:42:35] Suki Wessling: and I know a lot of parents do that these days ’cause they have, you know, they’ll have an iPad that’s just for the kid and it’ll have kid games on it.
[00:42:43] So given what you’ve described about language learning, it feels like language learning is this really intensive face-to-face thing.
[00:42:54] Eve Clark: Right, but, but of course the question is how much do you get in a day of that kind of intense face to face? And it may not be an awful lot. So let’s say it’s two or three hours, but you’ve got another nine hours of, you know, being awake and doing things. So the question is, what are kids doing in the rest of that time?
[00:43:12] And I think this is something that it hasn’t, people haven’t looked very carefully at how much time is spent in actual interaction, uh, versus doing other things. And of course, kids do lots of other things. They use Lego, they play with blocks. They, um, have all sorts of toys and some kids are very inventive.
[00:43:32] They, they will have all sorts of little plays going on with toys and doing voices for each toy and things like that. You know, other kids don’t do that necessarily, but may make very elaborate Lego structures. Um, you know, so I, I think. Uh, in a way we really want developmental psychologists to look at how children are spending their days, their whole day,
[00:43:55] Suki Wessling: yeah.
[00:43:55] Eve Clark: when they’re not in school.
[00:43:57] Suki Wessling: Mm-hmm.
[00:43:58] Eve Clark: And I don’t, I don’t know what the data are.
A life in academia
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[00:44:01] Voiceover: Eve Clark has the wide perspective of having grown up in, lived, and researched in various countries. She’s multilingual and spends her time with some of the most learned people on the planet, but academia is also sheltered from the wider world, or rather has been sheltered.
[00:44:17] On the day we spoke, the news was full of the Trump administration cutting off funding from universities. I wanted to get her point of view on where this attack comes from and what the effect will be on the formerly sheltered land of higher education.
[00:44:31] Suki Wessling: In the last, say, 10, 15 years, we’ve really had this sort of culture battle over academia. What have you seen in, in that culture battle? What, what do you feel is going on and has it affected the lives of professors?
[00:44:47] Eve Clark: Well, I think in a way you have to distinguish the US from other countries in that in that I think there’s been much more of a battle in the US and it’s partly that the Republicans seem to have decided, even though many of them went to elite schools and had a very privileged education, that this is somehow, um, something that belongs to Democrats and, uh, that they emphasize it too much.
[00:45:18] Suki Wessling: Mm-hmm.
[00:45:19] Eve Clark: Although I don’t think that’s true, but I mean that’s, um, and they’ve then gone after all sorts of research and things and in, I find a very anti-scientific way. Um, so you know, our current candidate for the CDC in terms of anti-vaccine, um, attitudes. Uh, those are incredibly destructive to public health and it’s completely unscientific and it’s completely uninformed. why are they doing it? I don’t know. But I think that that has then colored a lot of the conspiracy theories and misinformation and stuff that is floating around in the us. I think there’s a bit less of that in many European countries. Although it’s, it’s around. So, um, Marine le Pen in France is certainly pushing a lot of that stuff and our father pushed it like fury.
[00:46:16] And there’s this, a new right-wing party in Germany that is pushing things rather hard. Um, so, it’s very hard to tell, but I think that whenever you get a country where there’s a big gap in income between the I would say middle and upper, middle class versus lower class as there is in the States, then that gets aggravated and I think that’s part of what, what we’re seeing here.
[00:46:44] Suki Wessling: Once I release this episode this might be old history, but right now, the last couple weeks we have seen this sudden cutting off of funding. And I think a lot of people don’t really realize how deep this goes. I mean, we know people who have lost their jobs and you wouldn’t have even known that they would be affected. Um, but, a university like Stanford is really going to be affected by the cuts in funding.
[00:47:13] Eve Clark: Well, if, if they cut the indirect costs, that’s going to cost Stanford something like 160 million a year. That’s on hold at the moment. Um, we’ll just have to see. But I think what I find most disturbing is how incredibly destructive this is of the US’s reputation abroad. They don’t seem to have any idea of this.
[00:47:39] So, U-S-A-I-D not only helped with health issues all over the world, but it also helped with health issues in the US and they just tried to throw the whole thing away. The sort of foreign aid is a minuscule part of the US budget. It’s less than 1%. And so gutting that makes no sense whatever.
[00:48:04] They don’t seem to really be worrying about the budget for the US or how it’s going to affect citizens of the US and much of this will affect them. So if they start cutting Medicaid, um, and programs like that and education um, that’s going to affect families all over the country and some of the cuts they’ve already made are affecting farmers. It doesn’t make any sense.
[00:48:29] Suki Wessling: Yeah, and I think that the thing that really sticks out is the lack of understanding, and this isn’t just the people doing the cuts, but the lack of understanding in our society as a whole about the interconnectedness of all of this that when a scientist loses funding at a university janitors lose their jobs. And you know that that in this modern world we’re all so interconnected.
[00:48:57] Eve Clark: Right. A lot of people don’t seem to realize that Social Security is a government program. So if you go and start cutting funds from that, it’s going to affect everyone who is on Social Security. So there’s a sort of a big hole in the educational system in terms of understanding what the relation is between government and everyday taxpayers.
[00:49:19] Suki Wessling: I have one sort of big question to end. You know, I think that, that It’s really interesting to see how you, found a passion, you went very deep into that passion, you know, and people who have been listening and who think that you’ve been using jargon, they don’t know linguists, ’cause you’ve done a great job of staying away from the,
[00:49:45] Eve Clark: I tried!
Takeaways from a long career
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[00:49:47] Suki Wessling: You’ve lived this life where your work has led you to work with so many children, so many families, so many students… What are some things that you have noticed about people, maybe things that that you find wonderful, that give you hope that make you feel like we’re, we’re, we’re doing great things.
[00:50:11] What is it that you’ve noticed?
[00:50:14] Eve Clark: Well, one thing I notice is the place where I did a lot of my research is a nursery school on campus called the Bing Nursery School. What I’ve always loved about that nursery school is that it is full of kids who speak languages other than English, as well as English. A lot of the kids come from, obviously come from faculty at Stanford, and there are a lot of different languages spoken at Stanford. But when I was working there, there was also a scholarship program through East Palo Alto. So there were kids coming from East Palo Alto who were Spanish speakers, for example. But the kids were all learning English in school, and thriving.But the, the whole school is run on a, you know, play is something you can learn from, and each classroom has an outdoor yard where the kids can build things, play on swings, um, climb on all sorts of structures.
[00:51:11] I loved it. It was, the perfect sort of lab space, to do work on language, but you could, but people do work on social development, on conceptual development, and still some on language there. And, uh, it, it was always inspiring to spend time with those kids. I mean, they weren’t always super cooperative. I had kids who, in one study where I was looking at the difference between say big and small, tall and short, wide and narrow, all these adjective pairs, and you could observe what was going on in the experimental rooms and my research assistant was in there. And she was very puzzled ’cause this kid was consistently making the wrong choices, when asked, show me the tallest one, show me the narrowest one. And so I went into the experimental room and uh, and I said, okay, let’s do this again. And I asked the child to show me the tallest one. And she looked from one to the other of, I had about six objects, array of different heights, and she picked the smallest one. And, and so I looked at her and I just laughed. And I have never seen a 4-year-old blush.
[00:52:25] And then I said, so, you know, you’re joking, right? And she looked up at me and very, very small voice said yes. And it was clear she understood these things and she was deliberately picking the wrong one.
[00:52:42] Suki Wessling: Which is so hilarious given that she was in a school where the so much research was being done. I will point out, I believe that the, the marshmallow test, the famous marshmallow test was done at that school.
[00:52:54] Eve Clark: It was actually done at that school by Walter Mischel. That is true. You know, there’s been lots of dispute over how to interpret that since, but um, yeah, we never used marshmallows.
What can adults learn from the way children learn language?
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[00:53:06] Suki Wessling: What do you think that we adults could take away from the way that children learn language and use productively in our lives?
[00:53:18] Eve Clark: Oh, that is a really hard question. I think it is to keep asking questions. To ask questions about anything we don’t understand, to ask questions about things that are new and to find out. So I think keeping on asking questions is probably a good takeaway.
[00:54:15] Voiceover: Thanks to Dr. Eve V Clark for her thoughtful conversation and contribution to our understanding of humanity. The child speech recordings are courtesy of the Childes Talk Bank. This priceless repository of decades of research on child language acquisition unfortunately, as of this recording, saw the need to post a disclaimer on their front page, which reads, ‘This repository is under review for potential modification in compliance with administration directives.’
[00:54:44] Luckily, one thing we know is that you can’t keep human beings from talking to each other.
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[00:55:02] Voiceover: The song, Same Words by Monplaisir, is courtesy of the free music archive.org and Lonely No More courtesy of Carsie Blanton on Bandcamp. You can find links to topics discussed on our episode page at BABBLERY.com.
[00:55:37] Suki Wessling: Hi, everyone. Suki here. The Babblery is a labor of love. Love for good conversation, love for community radio, and love for the free exchange of ideas. But although all the ideas I give here are free life costs money, so I just wanted to let you know a few ways you can support this work.
[00:55:54] First of all, support your local community radio station. Mine can be found at ksqd.org. I support KSQD through small donations and huge amounts of time that I happily give them to support streaming content and technology. You can also support the Babblery and read some fun stuff by subscribing to babblery.substack.com.
[00:56:17] That’s free too. But your paid subscription will help me spend more time on this project. Finally, you can give at patreon.com/babblery.
