Talking to Your Baby Creates the Foundations for Learning
As speech and language therapists we know that talking to your baby helps the youngster to learn language skills.
But there is evidence that shows that babies who hear more speech are not only likely to learn more words but are likely to benefit in terms of their cognitive development too.
Science Daily has reported on this topic.
America’s preoccupation with the “word gap”– the idea that parents in impoverished homes speak less to their children, which, in turn, predicts outcomes like school achievement and income later in life — has skyrocketed in recent years, leading to a rise in educational initiatives aiming to narrow the achievement gap by teaching young children more words.
In a forthcoming article titled “Listen Up! Speech Is for Thinking During Infancy,” to be published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Northwestern University psychologist Sandra Waxman and New York University’s Athena Vouloumanos broaden the scope of this issue by assessing the impact of human speech on infant cognition in the first year of life.
“It’s not because [children] have low vocabularies that they fail to achieve later on. That’s far too simple,” said Waxman, the Louis W. Menk Chair in Psychology, a professor of cognitive psychology and a fellow in the University’s Institute for Policy Research. “The vocabulary of a child — raised in poverty or in plenty — is really an index of the larger context in which language participates.”
Consequently, Vouloumanos advocates speaking to infants, not only “because it will teach them more words,” she said, but because “listening to speech promotes the babies’ acquisition of the fundamental cognitive and social psychological capacities that form the foundation for subsequent learning.”
In the article, Waxman and Vouloumanos open with a synopsis of classic research on infants’ responses to human speech, but then take a step forward, bringing together a series of new findings that reveal that listening to speech promotes much more than language-learning alone.
Specifically, when it comes to noticing patterns or regularities among the sounds or objects that surround them, recognizing partners with whom they can communicate, and establishing coherent categories of objects and events, infants listening to human speech are more successful than their peers listening to other interesting sounds like tone sequences.
“These new results, culled from several different labs including our own, tell us that infants as young as 2 or 3 months of age not only love to listen to speech, but that they learn about fundamental cognitive and social relations better in the context of listening to speech than in any other context we’ve discovered yet. Nobody would have thought that,” Waxman said.
“This early tuned sensitivity to human language has positive, cascading developmental consequences that go way beyond learning language,” she concluded.
According to another article in Science Daily called Early Childhood Education
…….Much of the first two years of a child’s life is spent in the creation of a child’s first “sense of self”; most children are able to differentiate between themselves and others by their second year.
This is a crucial part of the child’s ability to determine how they should function in relation to other people.
Early care must emphasize links to family, home culture, and home language by uniquely caring for each child.[according to whom?] Infant education is the education of children before they would normally enter school.
The term “Infant” is typically applied to children between the ages of 1 month and 12 months.
Early childhood education focuses on children’s learning through play, based on the research and philosophy of Jean Piaget.
This belief is centered on the “power of play.”
It has been thought that children learn more efficiently and gain more knowledge through play-based activities such as dramatic play, art, and social games.
This theory plays stems children’s natural curiosity and tendencies to “make believe,” mixing in educational lessons.
Researchers and early childhood educators both view the parents as an integral part of the early childhood education process.
Often educators refer to parents as the child’s “first and best teacher.”
An article on the Literacy Trust website also provides information about the development of a baby’s brain.
A Baby’s Magnificent Brain
Even before a woman may know that she is expecting, the first of 100 billion brain cells begin to multiply frantically inside the tiny embryo she is carrying. This is because a baby’s brain begins to develop nerve cells, or neurons, just three weeks after conception.
We now know that a baby does not arrive in this world with a fully assembled brain. Beginning shortly after birth, a baby’s brain begins to undergo magnificent changes. During the first years of life, it will actually double in weight and use twice as much energy as an adult brain. This is not because of new cell growth, but because of the trillions of connections, or pathways, that develop between the cells. These connections enable the baby to think and learn.
Babies simply do not receive enough genes from their mother and father to make all of these pure, unprogrammed connections work. Scientists now know that what a child sees, hears, touches, and feels before the age of three strengthens and shapes the trillions of finer connections that will work together to foster her learning throughout life. However, at different times during a baby’s development, some of the pathways that have not been used and reinforced by learning experiences in the outside world may be shed and lost forever. If a baby is provided with a lot of stimulation, however, the connections are strengthened and may remain active forever.
Think of a baby’s brain as a forest with many trails going through the thick brush. Like a baby’s brain pathways, the trails that are frequently travelled are always ready for passage and remain ready forever. The trails that aren’t used become overgrown with brush and then can never be used.
[Scientists stress that stimulating a young child’s brain can be done through simple acts, like playing with her, talking to her, naming things, singing songs and reading together for at least ten minutes a day.]
Talking and a baby’s brain
Babies learn to talk by listening. Research tells us that the more words babies hear, the faster they learn to talk. This is because frequent daily exposure to words helps the brain pathways that foster language learning to develop more fully. However, only “live” language, not television, helps children develop language skills. Experts feel this is because children need to hear language in relation to what is happening around them or it just becomes noise. It must be delivered by an engaged human being, and the child must focus on the speaker and environment.
According to research conducted by Janellen Huttenlocher, the actual size of a toddler’s vocabulary is strongly correlated with how much her mother talks to her. Dr Huttenlocher found at twenty months old, the children of chatty mothers averaged 131 more words than the children of mothers who didn’t speak much. At two years of age, the gap more than doubled to 295 words. Other researchers have found that talking to children a lot not only affects their vocabulary, but also their intelligence. Betty Hart, PhD, and Todd R. Risley, PhD, observed how parents interacted with their one- and two-year-old children. At age three, the ones who scored the highest on intelligence quotient (IQ) and language tests were the ones who had heard the greatest number of words at one and two.
Even though your baby may be surrounded by conversation from birth on, it is important that you talk directly to her before she can talk back to you. You don’t need to ask her a lot of questions or require her to respond. Your purpose is to build her understanding of language to help enhance her expression of language.
Taken from the chapter “How Babies Learn to Talk”, in How To Talk To Your
Baby, Dorothy P. Dougherty, Avery, 1999.
For more information go to : The Literacy Trust Website
Northwestern University. “Human speech’s surprising influence on young infants.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 5 January 2015.
The above story is based on materials provided by Northwestern University. The original article was written by Hilary Hurd Anyaso. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length
Material from the Wikipedia article ‘Early Childhood Education’ is released under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Written by Rachel Harrison, speech and language therapist, on behalf of Integrated Treatment Services. www.integratedtreatmentservices.co.uk
