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.
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