Listen to Your Mother: What Children Learn by Eavesdropping

Published on Psychology Today

Sometimes it feels like getting my children to listen to me is like pulling teeth. Getting out of the house in the morning for school unfolds as a series of prompts that my kids have heard every single day for years, yet somehow, they respond to each request—get dressed, eat breakfast, brush your teeth, comb your hair—like it’s the very first time they’ve ever heard it. Sometimes I have to call their names 4 or 5 times just to get them to pay attention to what I’m saying, and inevitably, by the 5^th time I’m yelling, which they receive like two wounded puppies. It makes me absolutely crazy.

What makes me even crazier is that I know they can listen. I know this because they do all the time, mostly when they aren’t supposed to. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been having an adult conversation with my husband and/or friends and my two children—who haven’t listened to a word I’ve said all day—suddenly have very thoughtful and detailed questions about who my single friend just went on a date with, who said what about whom at the last moms happy hour, or why a local dad recently got laid off from his job. They secretly look over my shoulder when I’m reading texts or browsing social media and will ask 100 questions about every single post that scrolls by.

So kids do listen. And most importantly, they eavesdrop. In fact, they eavesdrop a lot. The question is, what do they learn from eavesdropping?

Research suggests that children begin eavesdropping even as babies. And for the most part, it’s a good thing, as they learn some important information this way. For example, they learn new words. In one classic study, 2-year-old children in the US were presented with a new word. For half the infants, the new word was taught to them directly, while the other half merely overheard the new word from an experimenter. Toddlers learned the new word equally well in both conditions, suggesting that even toddlers can learn from eavesdropping (Akhtar et al 1998). A similar study tested whether slightly older kids—aged 3 to 6—could learn both new words and facts by overhearing them in a phone conversation. Older kids (aged 5 and 6) were able to learn both words and facts with no problem. The younger kids learned the facts from overhearing a phone conversation but struggled with the words (Foushee et al., 2021).

There is even evidence that kids can learn actions by eavesdropping. In a similar study as the one I just described, a child played with an experimenter and various toys and was then brought into an adjoining room where they could see the experimenter on a television monitor. The child watched as the experimenter used a novel object to ring a bell as she was cleaning up the room. When the child was returned to the room, they also used the object to ring a bell, imitating what they saw the experimenter do (Phillips et al., 2012). This suggests that kids can learn new actions by watching other people (who may not even know they’re being watched!).

There is evidence that even animals can learn by eavesdropping. For example, researchers looked at how young song sparrows learn their species-specific song, which is often used by male birds to court females. In one study, half of the song birds interacted with another bird who sang the song, while the other half simply heard the sound of the adult bird singing the song. The young birds learned the song either way, but importantly, they actually learned better by overhearing the song than by learning it directly from another bird (Beecher et al., 2007).

You might find this surprising, but in a lot of cultures, the primary way children learn is by eavesdropping. In some communities like the Kaluli in Papua New Guinea infants aren’t viewed as communicative partners and are less likely than in the US to be spoken to directly. These infants gain most of their language experience by listening to the conversations around them, rather than from language directed to them (Ochs et al., 1984). The few studies that have been conducted in these communities show that these infants acquire language on the same developmental timeline as Western children, despite dramatically different methods of transmission (Casillas et al., 2019).

So what do children learn from eavesdropping? Anything and everything! So be careful what you say—they’re always listening, especially when you don’t want them to.

Photo by Pexels/Yan Krukau

References

Akhtar, N., Jipson, J., & Callanan, M. A. (1998). Learning words through eavesdropping. Infant Behavior and Development, 21, 258.

Beecher, M. D., Burt, J. M., O'Loghlen, A. L., Templeton, C. N., & Campbell, S. E. (2007). Bird song learning in an eavesdropping context. Animal Behaviour, 73(6), 929-935.

Casillas, M., Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (2019). Early Language Experience in a Tseltal Mayan Village. Child Development. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13349

Foushee, R., Srinivasan, M., & Xu, F. (2021). Self-directed learning by preschoolers in a naturalistic overhearing context. Cognition, 206, 104415.

Ochs, E., Schieffelin, B., & Others. (1984). Language acquisition and socialization. Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion, 276–320.

Phillips, B., Seston, R., & Kelemen, D. (2012). Learning about tool categories via eavesdropping. Child Development, 83(6), 2057-2072.