Research: Adult-child conversations and their importance to language development
The study, published in Pediatrics, Volume 124, July 2009, looked at the home language environment and the language development of children aged two to 48 months. The language environment was recorded and coded using Language Environment Analysis (LENA) which is comprised of a vest with a microphone, recording capacity of up to 16 hours, and language analysis software.
Both a six-month study (275 families) and an 18-month longitudinal study (71 families) were conducted. Language capacity of participant children was assessed by speech language pathologists several times, on average 2.3, throughout both studies. Additionally, socio-economic attributes were controlled for.
Adult-child conversation was defined by “conversational turns” in which communication followed a pattern like adult-child-adult-child with gaps between responses of no longer than five seconds.
The results of the study overwhelming showed that conversational turns are positively associated with child language development. In other words, the more a carer spoke with, instead of at, a child the better their language development score.
The researchers concluded that “adult-child conversations are an essential component of child language development…Parents should strive to read and talk with children and not merely to them. Parent-child interactions are best when they are a two-way street”.
