Toddlers' Grammatical Knowledge Boosts When They Reach 24 Months, Is It Innate Or Learned? New Study Revelation Here!

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Researchers were doubtful if children's competency to understand basic grammar in their early language development is inborn or learned as time progresses. But child speech patterns showed that grammatical knowledge is learned with a relevant increment when toddlers reach their 24th month.

According to the new research published in Psychological Science, toddler's early grammar skills are not innate but learned.
“The ability of humans to acquire and use language is a big difference between us and other species, and it’s also one of the biggest scientific puzzles out there,” Professor Michael Frank, a professor of psychology at Stanford University who co-authored the study said.

Learning language attainment in children is one way for the psychologists to discover what makes everybody as human, he added. According to Daily Mail, past research on children's speech revealed that the use of articles like “a” and “the” are early and usually in a proper way.

However, Professor Frank said that it was hard to classify whether children are only mimicking adults, or if they really comprehend that articles. In addition, these should be uttered before nouns like dog or shoe.

To clarify the problem, the team designed a new statistical model to measure modifications in a child’s grammar from time to time, Stanford News reported. This model depends on Bayesian inference, which is a process that guides the approximation of the results' assurance level. Furthermore, it considers the association between what the child utters and what the child heard from adults, splitting imitation from generalization.

Researchers used the model on a group of data that is available for 27 toddlers. They eventually discovered that grammatical ability in toddlers' speech wasn’t stable and was more exhibited by older children.

The statistical model enables researchers to assess children’s language. They were also allowed to disregard the excessively confident interpretations when too little data for a certain child was determined. The absence of data and the analytical trials the model displays prompted researchers on grammar debate to gather different conclusions, Frank said.

There were two studies published in peer-reviewed journals in 2013 that used the same data sets. The one determined that grammatical knowledge is innate while the other concluded that grammar is a learned skill. According to Professor Frank, "People have very strong feelings about the question of innateness versus learning.”

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