Talking with Kids: The Early Years

Janet Twyman and the Cambridge Center Parenting Group

Talk Early, Talk Often

Some overwhelming facts:

• Children who heard ~ 2,100 words/hour (11 million words their first year) typically scored in the high average range on a standardized IQ test at age 3.
• Children who heard ~ 1,200 words/hour (6 million words their first year) typically scored in the average range on a standardized IQ test at age 3.
• Children who heard ~ 600 words/hour (3 million words their first year) typically scored in the low average range on a standardized IQ test at age 3.

How often do you talk to your child?

Different Experiences = Different Accomplishments

There is a scientifically verified link between a child's early family experience, especially language experience, and their later intellectual performance.

The amount of interaction between parents and child is reflected in the child's later vocabulary use, vocabulary increase, and IQ scores.

Real Life

Research on early development shows us how infants can make fine auditory and visual discriminations in the very first months of life. The bulk of nerve cell growth and myelinization is completed by age 2. By age 4, cortical development is largely finished. Thus, a child's early years are the critical time for action.

Virtually all children begin emitting some words during the second year of life. The home environment and the child's family provide the primary circumstances for the acquisition of language and communication. We know that experience is cumulative. Thus, differences in the amount of talk emitted by families add up to tremendous differences in a child's cumulative experience with language.

What All This Means – Frequency Matters

Differences in vocabulary use, growth, and IQ are greatly influenced not just by the kinds of experiences provided, but by the amount of those experiences.

Quality Features of Language Interactions

The Kansas researchers found that families of children who scored highest on outcome measures gave more affirmative feedback (e.g., "good," "that's right," or "yes" ), used a variety of different words of all types (e.g., nouns, verbs, modifiers), asked lots of front-ended, descriptive yes/no questions (e.g., "Shall we ..." ) and used fewer imperative and prohibitive statements (e.g., "Don't" or "Stop" ).

Most of all, these parents made language important. They named and explained everything even if the child didn't yet understand or appear to care.

Improving Your Child's Language Abilities: What You Can Do

• Talk to your kids

  talk for sociability; talk to stay involved

• Tell your kids about things

  talk about what is around them and what is going on; talk about what is worth noticing and remembering; talk about what to expect and how to cope

• Listen to your kids

  listen to add information, to comment, to encourage, to prompt elaboration

• Give your kids choices

  use yes/no choices as reminders; use choices as instruction for what to do

A Final Note

In his book Verbal Behavior, noted psychologist B. F. Skinner wrote about the relevance of the environment in developing and enhancing communication behavior. Adults provide the language environment for young children whose communication repertoires are just developing. The behavioral interpretation of communication, called verbal behavior, provides a useful framework for determining what to teach and how to teach language skills to young children. Strategies and tactics born out of an understanding of verbal behavior has been effective in (1) establishing communication repertoires for young children without language; (2) strengthening, elaborating, and embellishing existing language skills; and (3) in better understanding thinking and problem solving.

Please refer to other sections of behavior.org for more information on verbal behavior.

References

Hart, B., & Risley, T. (1996). Meaningful differences in the everyday lives of America's children. Baltimore, MD: Paul H. Brooks. The Cambridge Center has a review of this book in our Book Review section.

Skinner, B. F. (1957). Verbal behavior. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

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