Which parents have children who start talking faster?
Last reviewed: 07.06.2024
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A child's early speech development depends on many factors, and one of them is how often they have to hear extraneous conversations.
Relatively recently it was proved that unfavorable living conditions and low socio-economic status have a negative impact on cognitive functions, including speech development. However, in their new study, experts have discovered a new interesting factor. It turns out that children of parents who like to "crack their tongues", begin to speak earlier. Researchers analyzed sound recordings with a total duration of about 40 thousand hours, involving more than one thousand children aged from 2 months to 4 years. For sound recordings they used special devices, which were put on the children and recorded all the sounds coming from both the children themselves and the environment.
It was noted that the talkativeness of babies was strongly dependent on the talkativeness of family members and close people. And the role was played not only by the speech addressed directly to the child, but also by the conversation of adults among themselves. Speech streams not only accelerated children's development, but also contributed to the expansion of children's vocabulary.
The importance of timely development of speech in young children is quite high. During the period of active improvement of the brain and central nervous system function, the emergence of conversational skills and the ability to explain something, to realize communicative needs and establish an exchange of information with others is extremely important. It is extremely undesirable to miss the period when the brain activity of the child is still flexible enough, when it is easy for him to master correct speech, to form a vocabulary sufficient for the appropriate age. Already at the age of two, the baby should communicate in simple short phrases, voice requests or explain something to parents. You should be alarmed if a two-year-old baby does not perceive adult speech, does not reproduce any sounds, does not try to imitate sounds and pronounce easy words.
Scientists insist: talk to your children, even if you think they are still young and do not understand anything. Babies learn from communication, from the dialogues of close people, from stories and poems read aloud. Unfortunately, not all parents have the right conversation in front of children, make mistakes, or remain silent, not even thinking about the consequences. Meanwhile, regular verbal communication supports two aspects: educational and speech. With a child can talk about almost everything: about their work, about the day, about what is interesting to the whole family and the baby, in particular. Parents' silence will not contribute to the infant's speech development.
Details published in the PNAS journal PNAS Journal