Two‑year‑olds already have a surprisingly good sense of when it is someone’s turn to speak. This is shown by new research conducted by linguist Imme Lammertink from the Baby & Child Research Centre at Radboud University, together with colleagues from the Max Planck Institute and the University of Chicago. That’s impressive, because it requires detailed knowledge of language and sentence structure - skills we know children do not fully possess at this age.
As adults engaged in conversation, we constantly predict when the other person will finish speaking and whether a response is expected from us. This helps us avoid long, awkward silences or talking over someone. New research by Lammertink and colleagues shows that children from the age of two already use linguistic cues to predict whose turn it is to speak. “Apparently, even without fully understanding sentences, young children are able to anticipate when a turn switch will occur,” Lammertink explains.
In interrogative sentences, the verb often appears at the beginning ( “may you put them outside?”), and the pronoun “you” is used more frequently than “I” (“shall I leave them outside then?”). The researchers showed children an animation of two characters engaged in conversation while tracking the children’s eye movements. “We examined whether children looked towards the other character before the speaking character had finished talking. If they did, this meant they were predicting that a turn switch was about to happen,” Lammertink explains. Toddlers made more predictive eye movements during questions containing “you” than during questions containing “I”. This shows that toddlers already realise that, after questions with “you”, someone else is more likely to speak than after questions with “I”.
The researchers also observed that the number of predictive eye movements increases with age. “One‑year‑olds did not pick up on these signals, but from two years onwards, children become increasingly better at predicting turn‑taking: four‑year‑olds predict even more than two‑ and three‑year‑olds.”
The use of these linguistic cues is linked to language ability. Therefore, the researchers also investigated whether children suspected of having a Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) are able to predict turn switches. Lammertink explains: “Children with DLD struggle significantly with language. They often start speaking late, have difficulty understanding others, can be hard to understand themselves, and produce short sentences. But our study showed that three‑year‑olds with DLD, just like their peers without DLD, are able to predict turn‑taking.”
Children with DLD were, however, slower in making their predictions than children without DLD. This may explain why children with DLD sometimes respond more slowly in conversation. The research shows that children with DLD do understand when it is their turn to speak. They also understand that a response is expected after a question. “By asking these children more questions, you help them practise switching turns,” says the linguist. “It helps to begin these questions with a verb and to use the personal pronoun ‘you’. This enables them to pick up more quickly on the signal that a response is expected from them.”
Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research
Observational study
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