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 Talk With Kids, Not At Them
Source: HealthDay News Date: 6/29/09
Give-and-take conversations speed language development, study finds
If you want to help children develop language and speech skills, UCLA researchers say, listening to what they have to say is just as important as talking to them.
The effect of a conversation between a child and an adult is about six times as great as
the effect of adult speech
input alone, the researchers found. The results of their study appear
in the July issue of Pediatrics.
"Adults speaking to
children helps language develop, but what matters much more is the
interaction," said the study's lead author, Frederick Zimmerman, an
associate professor in the school of public health at the University of
California, Los Angeles. "The child speaking is a big part of what
drives language development. The more the child speaks, it reinforces
their knowledge."
The researchers also found that TV viewing
didn't have much of an effect -- positively or negatively -- as long as
it wasn't displacing conversations between an adult and a child.
That,
however, may be exactly what's happening in many homes. A study in the
June issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine found
that for every additional hour of television exposure, young children
heard 770 fewer words from an adult. And, infants watching TV made
fewer vocalizations when adults spoke to them.
The UCLA study
included 275 families with children between 2 months and 48 months old.
They represented a variety of incomes and education. Most families were
white, with 3 percent of the families black, 8 percent Hispanic and 7
percent another non-white ethnicity.
On a randomly chosen day,
parents recorded their child's entire day, from wake-up until the child
went to sleep. Each family provided about five full-day recordings
during the six-month study. In addition, 71 of the families continued
the study for 18 months longer.
The researchers found that, in
an average day, children hear about 13,000 spoken words from adults and
participated in about 400 adult-child conversations a day.
Assessed
separately, factors positively associated with language development
included each additional 100 conversations a day and each 1,000 word
increase in the number of words spoken by adults and heard by children.
When looked at alone, TV was negatively associated with language
development.
But, when the three factors were analyzed together, the only one that stood out was conversation between adults and children.
"The
more a child speaks and interacts with an adult, the better idea a
parent has about where the child is," Zimmerman said. "Although it's
mostly done unconsciously, parents will provide feedback and correct
mistakes. They'll also tailor their speech to the child."
"This
study supports what we recommend to families," said Maxine Orringer, a
speech-language pathologist at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh. "When
there's conversation, you get practice communicating. The child can
make a mistake, and that helps parents understand what the child's
perception is, and it can help them correct those mistakes," Orringer
explained.
"Parents can give a child words by talking to them
about what they're doing, such as, 'I'm putting on your pajamas now.'
But give your child the opportunity to talk, hopefully without the rest
of the noise in the environment," she added. "If parents can carve out
some conversation time -- maybe at bath time or at dinnertime -- that's
a wonderful thing."
Adults should remember that "sometimes it's
quicker and easier just to tell children what to do, and it's difficult
to slow down, but that's what's important for language development,"
Zimmerman added.
"Conversation should always be a two-way street," he said.
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