A recent study published in the journal *Trends in Cognitive Sciences* in May 2025, conducted by Professor Caroline Rowland of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, revealed that children outperform Artificial Intelligence (AI) in language learning.
The study highlights how children acquire language through an active and evolving process, driven by their growing social, cognitive, and motor abilities. Unlike machines, which learn primarily and passively from written texts, children use all their senses to make sense of the world and develop their language skills.
This embodied and interactive approach allows them to master language more effectively. These insights not only reshape our understanding of child development but also have implications for AI research and the evolution of human language. AI researchers could learn a great deal from children, suggesting that to improve machine language learning, it may be necessary to rethink how we design them, from the ground up.