Young Children As Natural Language Teachers

 

 

 

Young children can learn languages, but can they also teach them? The question is prompted by several videos that have appeared on YouTube showing toddlers teaching American Sign Language to their siblings. Here’s a text and a still photo from one of them (see Sources below):

Three-year-old Amelia was born deaf and began signing at 14 months. The inquisitive kid decided to teach her brother too. Using an iPad Amelia flicked through images of animals. Then showed her brothers how to match the sign for each one. Amelia’s Mom Jennifer spotted her daughter and decided to document it. “My sons were mesmerized with her signing the animals,” said Jennifer.  “It’s been proven learning two languages at a young age helps brain development.”

Thus the well-attested natural ability of young children to learn languages meets up with another human ability that may also be instinctive and inherited, namely the desire and ability to teach. We are aware of the latter in its more advanced form, namely the ability of trained teachers and the liking many of them have for their work; but as with other human skills (such as professional football or translating) it may be based on something more primitive and not needing instruction, whether formal or informal.

The idea that teaching is instinctive, and therefore by implication inherited, is catching on nowadays. A recent book (see Sources) says as follows:

“First we explore how children naturally use ostensive communication when teaching; allowing them to be set in the emitter side of natural pedagogy. Then, we hypothesize that the capacity to teach may precede to have even a mature metacognition… Thus we propose that teaching… may be occurring as an instinct from a very early age.”

The double instinct for language learning and for teaching may even perhaps begin lower down evolution than humans. For instance there is the case of the famous gorilla Koko who taught some American sign language to her companion gorilla Michael, though admittedly her environment wasn’t natural and she wasn't young. We should look at the other means and media of communication besides human-like language.

 Sources

Parents catch deaf daughter teaching siblings ASL. YouTube, 2019. Click [HERE] or go to

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JxMU28h5mA.

Cecilia I. Calero, A. P. Goldin and M. Sigman. The Teaching Instinct. Review of Philosophy and Psychology 9, 2018, pages 819-230.

Michael (gorilla). Wikipedia, 2021.