Active Learning in Language Development

Recent evidence suggests that children play an active role in their own learning in many domains, yet the study of language development typically casts children as passive recipients of adult guidance. We argue that this approach overlooks language learning as a fruitful domain in which to explore children’s active, self-directed learning. Specifically, children seize language-learning opportunities and actively select the linguistic information they want to receive, thereby enhancing their own learning. We suggest that reframing the child as an active language learner generates novel explanations for key phenomena in language development, and generates complex, ecologically valid test contexts for researchers interested in rational accounts of learning.