Talking Directly To Toddlers Could Help Strengthen Their Language Skills

My 18-month-old son has started talking. Even with his limited vocabulary, he tries to have conversations with everyone around him. While most times I am tempted to also talk 'baby talk' with him, I don’t.

This is because I once read somewhere that to encourage your toddler to talk, you should talk with them as you would an adult. This week, a new study was published suggesting that talking directly to toddlers could help strengthen their vocabulary and language skills.

A team of psychology researchers at Stanford University studied what the world sounds like to 29, 19-month-old children. Each 19-month-old wore a special shirt equipped with an audio recorder that captured all the sounds he or she heard during the course of a 10-hour day.

At the end of the day, the researchers sifted through the sounds to determine how many words were spoken to each child, as well as how many words the child simply overheard.

The variation in verbal communication the toddlers in the study experienced was significant. For example 12,000 words were spoken directly to one of the children during the day and another child in the study heard just 670 words in that day.

"That's just 67 words per hour, less speech than you'd hear in a 30-second commercial," one of ther study’s author Anne Fernald said in a statement.

The researchers then conducted follow-up tests five months later, when the children were 24 months old. They tested the kids' vocabulary and language processing skills.

They observed that the ‘kids who were spoken to more often had larger vocabularies and could interpret words more quickly than their peers who were exposed to less child-directed speech from adults’.

The findings from this study suggest that simply overhearing speech is not enough to boost children's verbal skills early on in life. Overheard conversations and watching TV are not as effective for language development, as is talking directly to toddlers.

Another one of the study’s authors Adriana Weisleder added that:

"Mere exposure to speech directed to others or on TV is not enough to drive early vocabulary development."

"Toddlers learn language in the context of meaningful interactions with those around them."

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