MONDAY, June 29 (HealthDay News) -- 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.
More information
The Nemours Foundation has more on children's speech development.
