Research shows quality of parent-child communication is more important than the number of words a kid hears.
It has been nearly 20 years since a landmark education study found that by age 3, children from low-income families have heard 30 million fewer words than more affluent children, putting them at an educational disadvantage before they even began school.The findings led to increased calls for publicly funded prekindergarten programs and dozens of campaigns urging parents to get chatty with their children.
Now, a growing body of research is challenging the notion that merely exposing poor children to more language is enough. The quality of the communication between children and their parents, the researchers say, is of much greater importance than the number of words a child hears.
A study found that among twoyear-olds from low-income families, quality interactions involving words -the use of shared symbols (“Look, a dog!“); rituals (“Want a bottle after your bath?“); and con versational fluency (“Yes, that is a bus!“) -were a far better predictor of language skills at age 3 than any other factor, including the quantity of words a child heard.
“It's not just about shoving words in,“ said Kathryn HirshPasek, a professor of psychology at Temple University and lead author of the study . “It's about having these fluid conversations around shared rituals and objects, like pretending to have morning coffee together or using the banana as a phone. That is the stuff from which language is made.“
The idea that quality of communication matters when it comes to teaching children language is hardly new. But this year's studies are the first time researchers have compared the impact of word quantity with quality of communication. The findings, said Patricia K Kuhl, a director of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington and an author of the April study , suggest that advocates and educators should reconsider rally ing cries like “close the word gap,“ that may oversimplify the challenges facing poor children.
“I worry about these messages acting as though what parents ought to focus on is a word count, as though they need a Fitbit for words,“ she said. The use of the word “gap“ may be counterproductive, said Hirsh-Pasek. “When we talk about gaps, our natural tendency is to talk about filling them,“ she said. “So we talk about the amount as if we're putting words inside the empty head of a child.“
For the new study , Hirsh-Pasek and colleagues selected 60 low-income 3-year-olds with varying degrees of language proficiency, a long-term, wide-ranging study of 1,300 children from birth to age 15.Other researchers reviewed video of those children at age two in play sessions with their parents. The researchers watching the video were unaware of how the children would later develop.
“We were able to ask whether those interactions held any clues accounting for the differences we saw at age three,“ said HirshPasek, who was an author of the long-term study . “It turned out we were able to account for a whole lot of the variability later on.“
Quality of communication accounted for 27% of the variation in expressive language skills one year later, she said. The results were not significantly changed when the researchers controlled for the parents' educational level.
But those who urge parents to talk to their children more say that increased quantity of language inevitably leads to better quality .
“It's not that one mother is saying `dog' and the other is saying `dog, dog, dog,' “ said Ann Fernald, a psychologist at Stanford. “When you learn to talk more, you tend to speak in more diverse ways and elaborate more.
Ann O'Leary , director of Too Small to Fail, a joint effort of the nonprofit Next Generation and the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation that focuses on closing the gap, acknowledged that messages to parents could do more to emphasize quality . “When we're doing these campaigns to close the word gap, they capture the imagination, they get people understanding that we need talk a lot more,“ she said. “But we also need to be more mindful that part of what we need to do is model what that talking looks like.“
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