A team of cognitive scientists has good news for parents who are worried about setting a bad example for their children when they say "um" and "uh."
A study conducted at the University of Rochester’s Baby Lab shows that toddlers, 24 months and older, actually use their parents’ stumbles and hesitations (technically referred to as disfluencies) to help them learn language more efficiently. When adults fumble for the correct word, they send the child a signal that they are about to teach them something new, so they should pay attention, according to the researchers.
The study, which was conducted by Celeste Kidd, a graduate student at the University of Rochester, Katherine White, a former postdoctoral fellow at Rochester who is now at the University of Waterloo, and Professor of brain and cognitive scientist, Richard Aslin, was published online today in the journal Developmental Science.
Researchers studied three groups of children between the ages of 18 and 30 months. Each child sat on his or her parent’s lap in front of a monitor with an eye-tracking device. When the voice stumbled and said "Look at the, uh…" the child instinctively looked at the made-up image much more often than the familiar image (almost 70 percent of the time).
"We’re not advocating that parents add disfluencies to their speech, but I think it’s nice for them to know that using these verbal pauses is OK – the "uh’s" and "um’s" are informative," said Kidd, the study’s lead author.
The study builds on earlier research by Jennifer Arnold, a scientist at the University of North Carolina and a former postdoctoral fellow at Rochester, which found that adults also can use "um’s" and "uh’s" to their advantage in understanding language. Additionally, work by Anne Fernald at Stanford University has shown that it’s not the quality but the quantity of speech that a child is exposed to that is most important for learning.