Subject 046M, two years old, was seated nervously across from me at the table, his hands clasped tightly together in his lap. He appeared to have caught an incurable case of the squirms. I resisted the urge to laugh and leaned forward, whispering conspiratorially. “Today we’re going to play a game with Mr. Moo.” I produced an inviting plush cow from behind my back. “Can you say hi to Mr. Moo?”
At the Stanford University lab in which I work with cognitive scientist Michael Ramscar, we study how children go about what is arguably the most vital project in their schooling—learning language. Over the past several years we have been particularly taken with the question of how kids learn a small but telling piece of that vast complex: color words. We want to know how much they know, when they know it and whether we can help them get there faster.
046M (“M” for male) was off to a good start. I arranged three color swatches in front of him. “Can you show me the red one?” He paused, then pointed to the middle rectangle. “Very good!” I said, beaming. “Now, what about the one that’s blue?”
The test was not designed to trip kids up. Far from it— we tested only basic color words, and we never made them pick between confusable shades, such as red and pink. To an adult, the test would be laughably easy. Yet after several months of testing two-year-old children, I could count my high scorers on one hand. Most would fail the test outright. 046M, despite his promising start, proved no exception.
There is a surprising disconnect between what children seem to know about colors and numbers and what they actually know when tested. Nailing down just what “red” or “three” means is a difficult hurdle in mastering language, and even older children sometimes slip up and reveal a less than expert grasp of the concept. We discovered in our lab that the way we use color and number words in everyday English actually impedes kids’ learning.
Parents see their children’s color and number knowledge as developmental milestones for good reason—once these concepts are mastered, a whole world of nuanced comprehension opens up for their kids. Our research reveals that if we understand how the developing brain makes sense of speech, we can help children reach these milestones more painlessly. By phrasing things slightly differently, adults can help youngsters to grasp colors and numbers—and therefore advance to a higher understanding of language— much earlier in life.
Red Apples, Blue Skies Before our testing begins, a research assistant will explain to the child’s parents that we will be testing color words. Responses are typically enthusiastic. “Oh, that’s great! Margie’s got her colors down pat.” At that point we level with them: if they want to be present during the study, they will have to be blindfolded. Such measures may seem extreme—but then again, so were the reactions we got from parents during the pilot study, as they watched their little ones fail to pick out the right hue, over and over again. The reactions ran the short line from shocked to terrified, and back again. Some parents were so dismayed they started impatiently correcting their children midtest. One mother, in particular, could not seem to stop herself and took to nervously grabbing her little boy’s hand whenever it started to veer away from the correct choice.
Then, inevitably, came the posttest breakdown: “Is my child color-blind?”
The baffled response is not new. Charles Darwin was startled by his own children’s failings when it came to color, writing in 1877: “They could not name the colors, although I tried repeatedly to teach them.” About a century later developmental psychologists began to systematically determine what it was that made learning color words so hard for kids. The obvious hypotheses were soon ruled out. First, children are not colorblind. They can perceptually distinguish colors within a few months of birth. Nor do kids lack experience with color words, which are highly frequent in speech and some of the first words in children’s vocabularies.
A typical toddler, for example, can use colors appropriately in common phrases, such as “yellow banana,” “blue sky” and “red fire truck,” and can even correctly answer familiar questions such as “What color is a tomato?” This apparent mastery is why parents are so often convinced their kids are color experts. But they might be far less confident if they realized that blind children are capable of much the same feat. It turns out that kids can learn to use color words in context simply by paying attention to how things usually get talked about—for instance, the word “red” tends to come up a lot with “fire trucks” but not so much with “ice cream.”
Take away that crucial context, and most two- and three-year-old kids are stumped—they cannot correctly identify colors in a lineup or accurately use color words in novel scenarios. What is more, psychologists have found that even after hours and hours of repeated training on color words, these kids’ performance typically fails to improve noticeably, and children as old as six continue to make major errors naming colors. This last fact is seriously bizarre when you consider all the other things that children at that age can do: ride a bike, tie their shoes, read the comics and—mistake a blue cupcake for an orange one? Really?
Really. And that is where 046M and his color-naming compatriots came in. Armed with the tools of cognitive psychology, we decided it was high time to figure out why it takes so long for children to learn colors, of all things, and whether we could shortcut the process.
The Grass Is Green Psychologists before us have pointed out that part of what makes color learning difficult is that we are constantly surrounded by a vast array of hues. This overwhelming ubiquity is not a feature of other common words, such as nouns. Imagine, for example, that a child is trying to learn to distinguish “dog” from “bear.” The learning problem is not so difficult in this case: unless you are watching Old Yeller, dogs will tend to be seen and talked about in contexts in which bears are not present, and vice versa.
Contrast this with the problem of learning color words. Whenever a threeyear- old hears “red,” it can be virtually guaranteed that there will be a kaleidoscope of other colors present. Sorting out which hues are “red” and which are “orange” is much harder than figuring out which furry beasts are “bears” and which are “dogs.” This may explain why children, across every language studied, invariably learn their nouns before their colors.
As it happens, English color words may be especially difficult to learn, because in English we throw in a curveball: we tend to use color words “prenominally,” meaning before nouns. For instance, we will often say things like “the red balloon,” instead of using the postnominal construction, “the balloon is red.” Our study set out to determine if our choice of word placement could actually influence kids’ ability to learn colors.
Sentence construction matters, in theory, because of the way attention works. In conversation, people have to track what is being talked about, and they often do this visually. If I were to start blathering about “the old mumpsimus in the corner,” you would probably begin discreetly looking around for the mystery person or object.
Kids do the same thing, only more avidly, because they have much, much more to learn about. That means that when you stick the noun before the color word, you can successfully narrow their focus to whatever it is you are talking about before you hit them with the color. If you say “the balloon is red,” for example, you will have helped narrow “red” to being an attribute of the balloon and not some general property of the world at large.
From what we can decipher, children also figure out that the “red” in “the red balloon” has to do with the balloon, but they interpret it differently. When we say “the balloon is red,” they learn that “red” is the name of a property, such as “wet” or “sharp,” whereas when we say “the red balloon,” they learn that “red” is more like a proper name, such as “Tom” or “Heather.” Knowing someone’s name does not usually tell you very much—it is just a label that happens to get attached to a person—but knowing whether someone is funny or boring or whether a dish is mild or spicy tells you a lot. Whether kids learn “red” as something like a name or something like a property depends entirely on how their attention is directed when they hear it.
Helping Kids Learn Hues Our hypothesis as we set up the study, therefore, was that using color words after nouns should make colors far easier to learn and kids far faster at learning them. To test this hunch, we took 34 two-yearolds and gave them some quick training on color words. Either we trained them with prenominal sentences (the standard variety) or postnominal sentences (helpful, we hoped). In both cases, we would simply show them familiar objects and say encouraging things such as “this is a blue crayon” or “this crayon is yellow.”
As we reported in August 2010 in Cognitive Science, the kids who got the postnominal training improved significantly over their baseline test scores, whereas the ones who got the prenominal training still looked just as confused as ever. Given that previous studies had not found much improvement after hundreds of explicit training trials, it was hard to believe that such a simple manipulation could make such a clear difference. And yet it did.
Recently we ran a similar experiment using numbers instead of colors, which we will be presenting at conferences this summer. We tested 56 youngsters on number comprehension with questions such as “Look, hearts; can you show me four?” and “Can you show me four hearts?” We then trained the kids on number words, one group prenominally and one postnominally. Here again the sentence construction made all the difference. After only 15 minutes of training, youngsters who learned postnominally (“Flowers! There are six”) dramatically improved their test scores, averaging 30 percent better in both reliability and accuracy. Those who we trained prenominally (“There are six flowers”) showed no improvement.
Considering that early number comprehension is a good indicator of how well children will do in math later in life, helping kids learn numbers at a younger age could very well have a long-lasting influence. Which brings me to the simple, take-home point: if you want your two-year-old to match colors with aplomb and count with ease, watch your tongue. It might seem faster to ask Johnny not to pop “the red balloon,” but it may be better for him if you rephrase: “I mean, the balloon that is red.”
At the Stanford University lab in which I work with cognitive scientist Michael Ramscar, we study how children go about what is arguably the most vital project in their schooling—learning language. Over the past several years we have been particularly taken with the question of how kids learn a small but telling piece of that vast complex: color words. We want to know how much they know, when they know it and whether we can help them get there faster.
046M (“M” for male) was off to a good start. I arranged three color swatches in front of him. “Can you show me the red one?” He paused, then pointed to the middle rectangle. “Very good!” I said, beaming. “Now, what about the one that’s blue?”
The test was not designed to trip kids up. Far from it— we tested only basic color words, and we never made them pick between confusable shades, such as red and pink. To an adult, the test would be laughably easy. Yet after several months of testing two-year-old children, I could count my high scorers on one hand. Most would fail the test outright. 046M, despite his promising start, proved no exception.
There is a surprising disconnect between what children seem to know about colors and numbers and what they actually know when tested. Nailing down just what “red” or “three” means is a difficult hurdle in mastering language, and even older children sometimes slip up and reveal a less than expert grasp of the concept. We discovered in our lab that the way we use color and number words in everyday English actually impedes kids’ learning.
Parents see their children’s color and number knowledge as developmental milestones for good reason—once these concepts are mastered, a whole world of nuanced comprehension opens up for their kids. Our research reveals that if we understand how the developing brain makes sense of speech, we can help children reach these milestones more painlessly. By phrasing things slightly differently, adults can help youngsters to grasp colors and numbers—and therefore advance to a higher understanding of language— much earlier in life.
Red Apples, Blue Skies Before our testing begins, a research assistant will explain to the child’s parents that we will be testing color words. Responses are typically enthusiastic. “Oh, that’s great! Margie’s got her colors down pat.” At that point we level with them: if they want to be present during the study, they will have to be blindfolded. Such measures may seem extreme—but then again, so were the reactions we got from parents during the pilot study, as they watched their little ones fail to pick out the right hue, over and over again. The reactions ran the short line from shocked to terrified, and back again. Some parents were so dismayed they started impatiently correcting their children midtest. One mother, in particular, could not seem to stop herself and took to nervously grabbing her little boy’s hand whenever it started to veer away from the correct choice.
Then, inevitably, came the posttest breakdown: “Is my child color-blind?”
The baffled response is not new. Charles Darwin was startled by his own children’s failings when it came to color, writing in 1877: “They could not name the colors, although I tried repeatedly to teach them.” About a century later developmental psychologists began to systematically determine what it was that made learning color words so hard for kids. The obvious hypotheses were soon ruled out. First, children are not colorblind. They can perceptually distinguish colors within a few months of birth. Nor do kids lack experience with color words, which are highly frequent in speech and some of the first words in children’s vocabularies.
A typical toddler, for example, can use colors appropriately in common phrases, such as “yellow banana,” “blue sky” and “red fire truck,” and can even correctly answer familiar questions such as “What color is a tomato?” This apparent mastery is why parents are so often convinced their kids are color experts. But they might be far less confident if they realized that blind children are capable of much the same feat. It turns out that kids can learn to use color words in context simply by paying attention to how things usually get talked about—for instance, the word “red” tends to come up a lot with “fire trucks” but not so much with “ice cream.”
Take away that crucial context, and most two- and three-year-old kids are stumped—they cannot correctly identify colors in a lineup or accurately use color words in novel scenarios. What is more, psychologists have found that even after hours and hours of repeated training on color words, these kids’ performance typically fails to improve noticeably, and children as old as six continue to make major errors naming colors. This last fact is seriously bizarre when you consider all the other things that children at that age can do: ride a bike, tie their shoes, read the comics and—mistake a blue cupcake for an orange one? Really?
Really. And that is where 046M and his color-naming compatriots came in. Armed with the tools of cognitive psychology, we decided it was high time to figure out why it takes so long for children to learn colors, of all things, and whether we could shortcut the process.
The Grass Is Green Psychologists before us have pointed out that part of what makes color learning difficult is that we are constantly surrounded by a vast array of hues. This overwhelming ubiquity is not a feature of other common words, such as nouns. Imagine, for example, that a child is trying to learn to distinguish “dog” from “bear.” The learning problem is not so difficult in this case: unless you are watching Old Yeller, dogs will tend to be seen and talked about in contexts in which bears are not present, and vice versa.
Contrast this with the problem of learning color words. Whenever a threeyear- old hears “red,” it can be virtually guaranteed that there will be a kaleidoscope of other colors present. Sorting out which hues are “red” and which are “orange” is much harder than figuring out which furry beasts are “bears” and which are “dogs.” This may explain why children, across every language studied, invariably learn their nouns before their colors.
As it happens, English color words may be especially difficult to learn, because in English we throw in a curveball: we tend to use color words “prenominally,” meaning before nouns. For instance, we will often say things like “the red balloon,” instead of using the postnominal construction, “the balloon is red.” Our study set out to determine if our choice of word placement could actually influence kids’ ability to learn colors.
Sentence construction matters, in theory, because of the way attention works. In conversation, people have to track what is being talked about, and they often do this visually. If I were to start blathering about “the old mumpsimus in the corner,” you would probably begin discreetly looking around for the mystery person or object.
Kids do the same thing, only more avidly, because they have much, much more to learn about. That means that when you stick the noun before the color word, you can successfully narrow their focus to whatever it is you are talking about before you hit them with the color. If you say “the balloon is red,” for example, you will have helped narrow “red” to being an attribute of the balloon and not some general property of the world at large.
From what we can decipher, children also figure out that the “red” in “the red balloon” has to do with the balloon, but they interpret it differently. When we say “the balloon is red,” they learn that “red” is the name of a property, such as “wet” or “sharp,” whereas when we say “the red balloon,” they learn that “red” is more like a proper name, such as “Tom” or “Heather.” Knowing someone’s name does not usually tell you very much—it is just a label that happens to get attached to a person—but knowing whether someone is funny or boring or whether a dish is mild or spicy tells you a lot. Whether kids learn “red” as something like a name or something like a property depends entirely on how their attention is directed when they hear it.
Helping Kids Learn Hues Our hypothesis as we set up the study, therefore, was that using color words after nouns should make colors far easier to learn and kids far faster at learning them. To test this hunch, we took 34 two-yearolds and gave them some quick training on color words. Either we trained them with prenominal sentences (the standard variety) or postnominal sentences (helpful, we hoped). In both cases, we would simply show them familiar objects and say encouraging things such as “this is a blue crayon” or “this crayon is yellow.”
As we reported in August 2010 in Cognitive Science, the kids who got the postnominal training improved significantly over their baseline test scores, whereas the ones who got the prenominal training still looked just as confused as ever. Given that previous studies had not found much improvement after hundreds of explicit training trials, it was hard to believe that such a simple manipulation could make such a clear difference. And yet it did.
Recently we ran a similar experiment using numbers instead of colors, which we will be presenting at conferences this summer. We tested 56 youngsters on number comprehension with questions such as “Look, hearts; can you show me four?” and “Can you show me four hearts?” We then trained the kids on number words, one group prenominally and one postnominally. Here again the sentence construction made all the difference. After only 15 minutes of training, youngsters who learned postnominally (“Flowers! There are six”) dramatically improved their test scores, averaging 30 percent better in both reliability and accuracy. Those who we trained prenominally (“There are six flowers”) showed no improvement.
Considering that early number comprehension is a good indicator of how well children will do in math later in life, helping kids learn numbers at a younger age could very well have a long-lasting influence. Which brings me to the simple, take-home point: if you want your two-year-old to match colors with aplomb and count with ease, watch your tongue. It might seem faster to ask Johnny not to pop “the red balloon,” but it may be better for him if you rephrase: “I mean, the balloon that is red.”
