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Children are more likely to learn to use sophisticated language when adults speak to them in complex sentences, according to a new University of Chicago study.

While baby talk helps infants learn the sounds of words, children need to hear adult language to develop their ability to form grammatically correct sentences that incorporate more than one idea, said U. of C. psychology professor Janellen Huttenlocher.

Her study, reported in Thursday's issue of the journal Cognitive Psychology, found that children's ability to use complex language grew significantly in language-rich preschool rooms compared to rooms in which teachers continued to speak down to children.

Learning how children acquire language is complex and many theories abound. But the new finding supports an increasing body of evidence indicating that the words and sentences children hear in their formative early years plays a key role in their mastery of language.

The ability to understand complex sentence structure is important in helping children understand new concepts in math, history, English and other subjects in elementary school, Huttenlocher said.

The preschool study found that by the end of the school year, 3- and 4-year-olds whose teachers used the most multiclause sentences could comprehend a sentence such as "The boy is looking for the girl behind a chair, but she is sitting under the table."

Children whose teachers used the least complex sentences failed to improve their comprehension skills. In some classrooms their ability to understand complex speech actually declined.

"This is a very important study because it shows that the differences we see among children in the way they use language can be explained as a result of differences in the language experience they have had," said psychologist Erika Hoff, a language development expert at Florida Atlantic University.

The findings support results from earlier studies showing that children whose mothers spoke in more adult language also had a greater facility for complex syntax, the way sentences are put together to express an infinite number of thoughts.

"A child's brain grows in its complexity over the early years of life, especially in the language area, and the way it grows is affected by its environmental input," said Huttenlocher, who previously showed that the more mothers talked to their infants, the greater the children's vocabulary was.

Chicago preschools studied

The purpose of the preschool study was to determine if a nonrelative--someone who has no genetic or social connection to a child--could make a significant improvement in how children master language. The study involved 305 children in 40 classrooms in 17 preschools in the Chicago area.

It was designed to cut to the heart of a long-standing scientific debate over which is more important in the development of language: nature or nurture.

Many experts are coming to believe that learning language is a combination of nature and nurture.

"Of course genetics plays a role in language acquisition," Hoff said. "Genetics, not experience, explains why human children acquire language and birds acquire song. But when one child acquires language faster than another child, this study shows that experience is a big part of the reason."

Agreeing that brain structures dictated by genetic inheritance are vital to language, Huttenlocher said the critical input from the environment has been ignored.

"The findings have enormous implications for preschool," she said. "Where it matters most is the kids who really don't get adequate input at all. There should be universal day care with the better kind of teachers in our study spending a lot of time with kids that aren't going to get very satisfactory input at home."

The best results

The teachers who produced the best results used multiclause sentences 20 percent to 30 percent of the time. Teachers who had the poorest outcome used complex grammar less than 10 percent of the time.

Children in the language-rich classrooms improved their comprehension skills an average of 10 percent while those in language-poor rooms averaged a slight loss in comprehension skills during the school year.

The improvement in comprehension occurred among children from poor, wealthy and middle-class families when teachers spoke in complex sentences. Comprehension rates stagnated in preschools, including those serving well-to-do families, when teachers mostly used simple language.

"This means that children from low-income families, whose syntactic level is quite low at the beginning of the year, may grow as much or more than children from high income families," Huttenlocher said.

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