Talking to Children Is Better than Reading to Them

Parents who want their children to develop language and speech skills, are advised not just to talk to them, but also to listen to what the kids have to say, UCLA researchers have found. Dr. J Frederick Zimmerman, PhD, an associate professor in the Department of Health Services in the UCLA School of Public Health, says that engaging children in conversation is up to 6 times more effective for the development of their language skills, when compared to exposing children to language through just one-on-one reading. And even if a child is too young to form words, the experts advise to let them babble. For the study purposes, the UCLA researchers involved 275 families with children whose ages were between 2 months and 4 years old. The families represented a variety of household incomes and education. Vast majority of families in the study were white, with 3 per cent of the families black, 8 per cent Hispanic and 7 per cent another non-white ethnicity. On a randomly chosen day, all parents were asked to record their child's entire day, from morning and until the child went to bed at night. That day children needed to wear a small digital language recorder or a processor known as the LENA System, for 12 hours. The device recorded surrounding speech and TV sound for later analysis. This innovative technology gave the investigators an opportunity to hear what was really going on in a child's language environment, facilitating access to valuable new insights. #parenting #communication Read more: https://www.enotalone.com/parenting/19738.html