Talking to your child may accelerate his or hers understanding and processing of new words, according to a recent study.
Prior studies by Anne Fernald, a psychology professor at Stanford University, showed a language gap between rich and poor children. Children born to lower-income and less educated parents, the researcher found, usually exhibited weaker language skills by the time they first started school when compared to their counterparts from higher-income, higher-education homes.
This gap, according to Fernald's research, starts at infancy.
Abilities in vocabulary and language processing diverged for both groups at 18 months in English-speaking infants from families of low and high socioeconomic status (SES). By 24 months, there was a six-month discrepancy between the groups in critical language-processing skills.
Fernald and colleagues explored this divergence in language capabilities by putting recording devices in low-SES, Spanish-learning children's households. The recordings showed that in home environments where parents talked to their children more, kids developed greater language efficiency and a broader vocabulary. The results suggest that child-directed speech - opposed to a child simply overhearing a conversation - makes infants more proficient in language processing.
Once the study's team saw this, they began running a parent-education intervention study called ¡Habla conmigo! (Talk with Me!) in East San Jose, Calif. The program teaches low-income, Spanish-speaking mothers from 32 families about supporting their child's brain and language development, and arms them with strategies on how to verbally engage with their children more at home.
Even at its early stages, Fernald says they are already seeing positive results.
"What's most exciting is that by 24 months the children of more engaged moms are developing bigger vocabularies and processing spoken language more efficiently. Our goal is to help parents understand that by starting in infancy, they can play a role in changing their children's life trajectories," Fernald said in the report's press release.
