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Brains over bots: Why toddlers still beat AI at learning language

Even the smartest machines can't match young minds at language learning. Researchers share new findings on how children stay ahead of AI—and why it matters.

If a human learned a language at the same rate as ChatGPT, it would take them 92,000 years. While machines can crunch massive datasets at lightning speed, when it comes to acquiring natural language, children leave artificial intelligence in the dust.

A newly framework in Trends in Cognitive Sciences by Professor Caroline Rowland of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, in collaboration with colleagues at the ESRC LuCiD Center in the UK, presents a novel framework to explain how children achieve this remarkable feat.

An explosion of new technology

Scientists can now observe, in unprecedented detail, how children interact with their caregivers and surroundings, fueled by recent advances in research tools such as head-mounted eye-tracking and AI-powered speech recognition.

But despite the rapid growth in data collection methods, theoretical models explaining how this information translates into fluent language have lagged behind.

The new framework addresses this gap. Synthesizing wide-ranging evidence from computational science, linguistics, neuroscience and psychology, the research team proposes that the key to understanding how children learn language so much faster than AI, lies not in how much information they receive—but in how they learn from it.

Children vs. ChatGPT: What's the difference?

Unlike machines that learn primarily, and passively, from written text, children acquire language through an active, ever-changing developmental process driven by their growing social, cognitive, and motor skills.

Children use all their senses—seeing, hearing, smelling, listening and touching—to make sense of the world and build their language skills. This world provides them with rich, and coordinated signals from multiple senses, giving them diverse and synchronized cues to help them figure out how language works.

And children do not just sit back wait for language to come to them—they actively explore their surroundings, continuously creating new opportunities to learn.

"AI systems process data ... but children really live it," Rowland notes. "Their learning is embodied, interactive, and deeply embedded in social and sensory contexts. They seek out experiences and dynamically adapt their learning in response—exploring objects with their hands and mouths, crawling towards new and exciting toys, or pointing at objects they find interesting. That's what enables them to master language so quickly."

Implications beyond early childhood

These insights don't just reshape our understanding of child development—they hold far-reaching implications for research in artificial intelligence, adult language processing, and even the evolution of human language itself.

"AI researchers could learn a lot from babies," says Rowland. "If we want machines to learn language as well as humans, perhaps we need to rethink how we design them—from the ground up."