Friday, February 28, 2014

Language: The Key to Success

Talking to your newborn child may actually be the most important thing you will ever do for them. How so? Lise Elliot in her book Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow Into Troublesome Gaps - and What We Can Do About It analyzes the importance of talking and language to your infants during their development. Infancy, by definition, is a "preverbal phase in development"1 and the Latin term infans means "without language". However, what we know now is that this stage of life is when a great deal of language learning occurs. Babies, within the first year of life, can recognize familiar speech sounds, words, and even grammatical patterns. This is important to understand because this is not something that parents can obviously see, and speech therapists focus on receptive-language versus communication development to determine if a child is language delayed. Gesturing is also an important aspect of child development because their ability to gesture come before their ability to speak. Parents should focus on using gestures as well to aid their children in the development of their communication. After receptive-language and gesturing comes the actual formation of words followed by sentences. At each of these stages we can see a difference between girls and boys, however slight.

Girls lead boys in practically every step of the way in each of these stages. Studies on receptive-language skills have shown that male infants are about a month behind girls in the amount of words that they can understand. Typically a girl can understand about fifty words by nine months, whereas a boy reaches this stage at about ten months. Regarding gestures, girls begin pointing, raising up their arms to be picked up, and waving bye-bye a few weeks earlier than boys. That being said, a study observed girls producing only five percent more gestures than boys at eighteen months (not very significant). Girls typically say their first words a month earlier than boys as well, and can produce an average of three hundred different words by twenty-two months old. Boys do not reach this stage until about twenty-three or twenty-four months old. Finally, girls can put together eight words at a time by two and a half years old, while boys can only put together six. Although such study results exist, Dr. Elliot does not fail to mention that these difference are actually quite small, and some exceptions to these studies do exist. Therefore, parents should be equally concerned about the language development of both their sons and their daughters because "being male is no excuse for talking late".1

Dr. Elliot claims that a child's language ability is more strongly affected by their environment rather than by their gender. She states that studies have constantly shown that the "language in = language out"1 and that the amount and quality of language that these infants hear determines the quality and quantity of their own verbal skills. Each genders' brain handles language differently, but researchers cannot agree on exactly how because some studies show that girls' brains are more left-biased for processing language (which is where adults process language), but other studies show the complete opposite in boys' brains. What is certain though is that there is a clear correlation to the amount of language and a child's future vocabulary and reading skills. A study by Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley discussed in the article "The Power of Talking to Your Baby" in the New York Times supports this correlation.

Their study "Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children" from 1995 observed how the parents of various socioeconomic backgrounds talked to their children and how that affected the children's success in their later years. What they found was astonishing because the children from families on welfare heard about 600 words per hour, while children from working-class families heard about 1,200 words per hour. Not only that, but children from professional families heard 2,100 words per hour! With this sort of environment, by the age of three, "a poor child would have heard 30 million fewer words in his home environment than a child from a professional family".2 This difference matters because the more words the children heard per hour, the higher their IQ was by three years old and the better they performed in school. Ultimately, a child's level of language development increases until it matches that of their parents. Their research also discovered that parents talk more to girls than boys, a point that Dr. Elliot also makes and wants parents to avoid. This may be due to the fact that parents generally talk more to children of their gender and because mothers are usually the primary caretakers, they talk to their daughters more. Therefore, Dr. Elliot states that we must make sure to engage male infants in conversation from an early age so that they do not suffer in their reading and writing skills later down the road.

The article states that Hart and Risley's research suffered because there was no practical way of measuring how much the parents talked. They listened to the recordings and had to distinguish who said what. However, a new technology developed by Language Environment Analysis (Lena) allows for a child to wear a voice recorder in a special pocket of their clothing that unobtrusively records for up to 16 hours. Speech-recognition software analyzes, counts, and sources words while removing background noise to allow researchers to study how often parents were talking to their children. Recent studies have shown that such a device can entice parents to increase their daily word average by about 55 percent within ten weeks! Providence, Rhode Island won a $5 million grand prize in Bloomberg Philanthropies' Mayors Challenge and plans on using that to provide poor families with these recorders to encourage the parents to talk more to their children. Such research would provide children with the much needed language skills that Dr. Elliot argues is one of the most important aspects of a child's development.

References
1.  Eliot, Lise. “Under the Pink or Blue Blankie.” Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow into Troublesome Gaps- And What We Can Do About It. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009. 55-102. Print. 

2.  Rosenberg, Tina. "The Power of Talking to Your Baby." The New York Times. The New York Times, 10 Apr. 2013. Web. <http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/10/the-power-of-talking-to-your-baby/?_php=true&_type=blogs&action=click&module=Search®ion=searchResults%230 &version=&url=http%3A%2F%2Fquery.nytimes.com%2Fsearch%2Fsitesearch%2F%3Faction%3Dclick%26region%3DMasthead%26pgtype%3DHomepage%26module%3DSearchSubmit%26contentCollection%3DHomepage%26t%3Dqry295%23%2Fthe+power+of+talking+to+your+baby&_r=0>.

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