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Speak Only When Spoken To?
Conventional Wisdom
Toddlers’ language acquisition depends on how much exposure they have had to spoken language since they were babies.
NurtureShock Wisdom
Toddlers’ language acquisition depends on how often their vocalizations have been responded to since they were babies.
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Everyone agrees that early language advantage is desirable, since toddlers’ language proficiency strongly predicts their grade 3 language skills, including reading, spelling, and other measures of verbal ability. For a long time, people thought that it was enough just to surround babies and toddlers with language, for example putting them in front of the TV for hours every day to look at videos like the Baby Einstein line. But it turns out that the more hours kids watched these videos, the worse their vocabulary.
The trick is that the main driver of language acquisition is not how much language young kids hear, but rather how often their vocalizations are responded to. In Cornell’s B.A.B.Y. (Behavioral Analysis of Beginning Years) lab, an interesting experiment illustrates how powerful “turn-taking” conversations are. For part of the experimental period, mothers reacted normally to their babies, and for part of the time they were cued to respond to their infants every time the baby made a voiced sound. Here’s what happened (p. 213).
“In the first ten minutes (that baseline natural period when the mom responded as she might at home), the average child vocalized 25 times. The rate leapt to 55 times in the middle ten minutes, when the mom was being coached to ‘go ahead’ by Goldstein. The complexity and maturity of the babble also shot up dramatically; almost all vowels were now fully voiced, and the syllable formation improved. Canonical syllables, previously infrenquent, now were made half the time, on average.
“To my ear, it was stunning - the children literally sounded five months older, during the second ten-minute period, than they had in the first.”
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This concludes the series on the lessons in NurtureShock. I hope you found them as interesting and thought-provoking as I did.
I can relate to this, as with other parents who have kids starting speech therapy before the age of 2 years. How when you are talking to your child, make sure it is face to face. Exaggerate the face expressions, to get them to verbalized the sounds. My child, still remembers it in vivid clarity.It is probably the reason why she is able to pronounce the most difficult words, only after hearing it once. And she is quite the mimic, when portraying other people and the local accents. It is so funny, how she can morph into a teacher or someone else, and you swear if you close your eyes, the person who she is mimicking, is really there in the room.
Funny thing though, schools still think that the beginnings of verbal language, are not as important, as to when they are speaking in full understandable sentences. If schools asked the simple question, when the child started to speak in 2 to 3 words, and full sentences, it would be an easier way of finding out, the children who will have some difficulties in learning how to read. Much easier for a primary teacher, instead of relying on the usual method, the wait and see method.