Editorial: Language Development in the Digital Age

摘要

Introduction The digital age is changing our children's lives and childhood dramatically. New technologies transform the way people interact with each other, the way stories are shared and distributed, and the way reality is presented and perceived. Parents experience that toddlers can handle tablets and apps with a level of sophistication the children's grandparents can only envy. In Great Britain, a recent survey of preschoolers shows that a rising number of toddlers are now put to bed with a tablet instead of a bedtime story. In the USA, a telephone survey of 1,009 parents of children aged 2–24 months (Zimmerman et al., 2007a ) documents that by 3 months of age, about 40% of children regularly watched television, DVDs or videos, while by 24 months the proportion rose to 90%. Moreover, with the advance and exponential use of social media, children see their parents constantly interacting with mobile devices, instead of with people around them. Still, research in the US indicates that assistive social robots seem to have a favorable effect on children's language development ( Westlund et al. ).Existing theories of language acquisition emphasize the role of language input and the child's interaction with the environment as crucial to language development. From this perspective, we need to ask: What are the consequences of this new digital reality for children's acquisition of the most fundamental of all human skills: language and communication? Are new theories needed that can help us understand how children acquire language? Do the new digital environment and the new ways of interaction change the way languages are learned, or the quality of language acquisition? Is the use of new media beneficial or harmful to children's language and cognitive development? Can new technologies be tailored to support child growth and, most importantly, can they be designed to enhance language learning in vulnerable children?These questions and issues can only be addressed by means of an interdisciplinary approach that aims at developing new methods of data collection and analysis in a longitudinal perspective. This type of research is however not yet documented. Past and current research The question of how the ecology of the child affects the acquisition of competencies and skills has been approached from different perspectives in different disciplines. In linguistics, the central question addressed concerns the specific role of exposure to language. Two influential types of theory have been proposed. One view is that the capacity to learn language is hard-wired in the human brain (Chomsky, 1965 ; Pinker, 1994 ); linguistic input is merely a trigger for language to develop. From an alternative view, language acquisition depends on the linguistic environment of the child, and specifically on language input provided through child-adult communication and interaction (Tomasello, 2003 ). The latter view further specifies that factors in interaction are crucial for language learning to take place. Such views are aligned with overarching theories of human development in cognitive science and psychology. These theories (known as embodied and situated cognition theories) hold that knowledge is acquired by humans through rich physical and social interaction with their environment (Barsalou, 2008 ). This interaction leaves multiple traces provided by a number of modalities (auditory, visual, haptic etc.) and helps consolidate knowledge in the brain by strengthening the neural networks that support learning and the use of knowledge. Exactly how input received from multiple, and multi-sensory in nature sources, interacts in both knowledge acquisition and use is, however, still poorly understood.A current theme in the fields of information technology, artificial intelligence and robotics is to create robots that develop, as children do, and to establish how embodiment and interaction support language learning in these machines. These artificial models will eventually inform us about child development and vice versa (Cangelosi and Schlesinger, 2015 , forthcoming ). In the field of human-machine interaction, research is investigating whether using a physical robot, rather than a virtual agent or a computer-based video, has a positive effect on language development. Kennedy et al. ( 2015 ), for example, investigate how toy-like robots, such as, the Aldebaran Nao, are used in the classroom instead of, or together with, digital tools such as tablets, to show how a richer embodied technology method further improves language learning. Vogt envisage that, in the digital age, social robots will increasingly be used for educational purposes, such as, second language tutoring. They propose a number of design features to develop a child-friendly social robot that can effectively support children in second language learning, and discuss the technical challenges for developing such tutors.In education research, the main question is the extent to wh