Time to chat – how you support your toddler’s speech development
The way children learn to understand and speak is fascinating to scientists and parents alike. How does your toddler learn the vocabulary and grammar of the language or languages you speak? Do you need to spend time teaching them and getting them to practise new words? You might be pleased to hear the short answer is no, just chat with them.
In 2019, educational psychologists and professors at Harvard Graduate School of Education, Meridith Rowe and Catherine Snow, reviewed research about language development,particularly which of the things that parents and other caregivers do to support children’s language learning during the first five years.[1]
They suggested that there are three aspects that should be considered when thinking about the quality of input – which sounds like an odd and complicated way to describe talking to your toddler but as you read on, you’ll see that these are quite simple things that you probably do anyway.
The three dimensions of quality (things you do!) that Rowe and Snow identified are:
Interactional features – responding to your toddler and taking turns to talk
This simply means that chatting with your toddler frequently about things they are interested in helps them to understand and use language.
It isn’t necessarily concerned with the words you use, more that when you chat with your toddler you each have a turn, and you respond to what your toddler says or seems interested in at the time.
Linguistic features
Rowe and Snow found that using a variety of types of words led to a wider vocabulary – this could include using the correct names for makes of car, breeds of dog or varieties of plants, as well as a variety of types of verbs.
This means in your back-and-forth conversations you use a range of vocabulary to describe the things that fascinate your toddler!
Conceptually supportive features
As your toddler’s cognitive skills develop and they begin to pretend, your conversations can take more interesting routes. You could talk to them about things that they can’t see, or play games in which they imagine they are someone else, or are somewhere else.
These are tricky ideas for your toddler to master at first, but as you pretend and imagine with them, they will be more able to do this themselves.
While the most important thing is that this is fun for you and your toddler now, it is also reassuring to know that researchers found parents and toddlers using more language linked to things that weren’t present at home (described as decontextualised language) predicted academic skills when those toddlers were adolescents.[2]
These three dimensions are not a checklist of things you need to have in mind as you chat with your toddler, but help to show that having relaxed chats as you look at a book, play or go about everyday life will help your toddler master skills.
Reference:
[1] Rowe, M.L., & Snow, C.E. (2019). ‘Analyzing input quality along three dimensions: interactive, linguistic, and conceptual’. Journal of Child Language, 47(1).
[2] Uccelli, P., Demir-Lira, Ö. E., Rowe, M. L., Levine, S., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2019). ‘Children's early decontextualized talk predicts academic language proficiency in midadolescence.’ Child Development, 90(5), 1650–63.