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Talking directly to toddlers strengthens their language skills



Just as young children need nourishing food to build physical strength, they also need linguistic nutrition for optimal development of language and cognitive abilities.





New research from psychology researchers at Stanford University shows that by talking more to their toddler, parents help the child learn to process language more quickly, which accelerates vocabulary growth. The research is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

It is well-known that socioeconomic status (SES) plays a role in language development. In general, children of lower-SES families have smaller vocabularies and lower language proficiency scores than more advantaged children. The new work helps elucidate the mechanism for these SES disparities, suggesting ways to reduce the language gap.

Previous efforts to measure the impact of child-directed speech have involved observing a mother and child interact for an hour or so during child-centered activities.

"This artificial setup isn't ideal," said lead researcher Adriana Weisleder, "since it ignores the other people and contexts important in the child's daily experiences."

Instead of bringing caregivers and toddlers to the lab for observation, Weisleder and Anne Fernald, a Stanford psychology professor and co-author on this study, asked mothers to record their children in the everyday tumult of the home environment. They enrolled 29 children, 19 months old, from low-income Latino families, a growing sector of the U.S. population that is underrepresented in research. Each child was outfitted with a special shirt containing a small audio recorder that captured all the sounds he or she heard during the day.

"Most toddlers don't spend their days just with mom," Fernald said. "A 10-hour recording of interactions at home gives us a more natural, representative sample of each child's daily language exposure."

The recordings were analyzed by special software, called LENA (Language Environment Analysis), which distinguishes between human speech and other sources of speech, such as television and radio, and provides a measure of each. Native Spanish speakers then listened to the recordings to differentiate adult speech directed to the child from speech the child only overheard, such as when the caregiver was on the phone or talking with another adult.





There were surprisingly large differences between families in the amount of child-directed speech toddlers heard from adults over the course of a 10-hour day. One toddler heard more than 12,000 words of child-directed speech, while another heard only 670 words during the entire day.

"That's just 67 words per hour, less speech than you'd hear in a 30-second commercial," Fernald said.

How child-directed speech works

To determine the impact of these differences, the researchers conducted follow-up tests five months later. They found that those children who had experienced more child-directed speech had larger vocabularies by 24 months, compared to children who had heard less child-directed speech.

"By capturing different contexts of daily language interactions at home, we were able to show that adult speech to the child – but not speech simply overheard by the child – is important for vocabulary learning," Weisleder said. "Mere exposure to speech directed to others or on TV is not enough to drive early vocabulary development. Toddlers learn language in the context of meaningful interactions with those around them."

The researchers also assessed children's efficiency in language processing, using a procedure designed by Fernald. Toddlers were shown two images – for example, a dog and a book – as they listened to a voice asking them to look at one of the pictures, while a video camera recorded the child's reaction.

Trained "coders" then reviewed the video, noting the exact moment when the child's gaze shifted toward the named object. In this way, the researchers could study children's speed and accuracy in interpreting familiar words, with millisecond-level precision.

This test showed that children who had experienced more child-directed speech were more efficient at processing language. The analyses revealed a cascade of effects – those toddlers who heard more child-directed talk became faster and more reliable in interpreting speech, and it was their superior skill in processing language that then increased their success in vocabulary learning.

"As you learn language, you're getting faster and more accurate at interpreting the words you know in fluent speech, and this helps you pick up and learn new words as well," said Weisleder, who conducted the research as a graduate student in Fernald's lab and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the NYU School of Medicine.

Bridging the language gap

An important finding was that even within a low-SES group there were substantial differences among parents in verbal engagement with their children and in children's language outcomes.

"A central message of this research is that SES does not determine the quality of children's language experience," Fernald said. "Despite the challenges associated with living in poverty, some of these moms were really engaged with their children, and their kids were more advanced in processing efficiency and vocabulary."

In other cases, Weisleder said, the mothers they spoke with were unaware that they were capable of helping their young children learn. The researchers believe this lack of confidence exists partly because the adults hadn't received much education themselves.

The scientists are now working on interventions with disadvantaged Latino families to help parents learn how to engage more effectively with toddlers. By developing special games and skill-building exercises, their goal is to educate families about the crucial role they can play in fostering a child's language and cognitive development.

"Parents need to know the importance of providing linguistic nutrition and exercise to their young children," Fernald said. "By talking with them more in an engaging and supportive way, parents can nurture early brain development and build a strong foundation for language learning."

Explore further: Language gap between rich and poor kids begins in infancy, study find

More information: pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/09/09/0956797613488145.abstract

Journal reference: Psychological Science

Provided by Association for Psychological Science

Source: http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-10-toddlers-language-skills.html



Toddlers need language stimulation to strengthen their vocab and language processing skills. It is almost a given that in another 2 - 5 years we are going to be hearing from pediatricians about a syndrome whereby many kids are very late in acquiring language. This is because their parents are no longer talking to others. Instead they are TEXTING. Young brains need to hear language to acquire it.

Published: Jan. 7, 2013 Updated: Aug. 21, 2013 1:17 p.m.



UCI researcher: male, female brains are different 'mosaics'



By PAT BRENNAN / ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER



Women should get angry when they read this story, and men should as well, says Larry Cahill, a neuroscientist at UC Irvine who studies what he considers to be the profound differences between the brains of men and women.

But Cahill, who delivers a talk on his research at UCI on Wednesday, hopes the anger won't come in its usual form: over misguided arguments about whether men or women are more intelligent.



No evidence exists for gender-based, biological impediments to academic achievement, he says – although he thinks there might be biological contributions to success in some fields.

Instead, Cahill hopes to provoke a reassessment among his colleagues, and anger among the general public, about medical science's failure to take gender-based brain differences seriously.

The differences exist at virtually all levels, he says, from those of tiny cells to large structures in the brain, from brain chemistry to what he calls intriguing differences in the way men and women remember emotionally searing events.

And a failure to see the differences can have medical consequences. Men and women react to pain medications differently. They show differences in symptoms of schizophrenia. Chronic stress can damage men's brains but, on average, has far less severe effects on women.

Hormonal differences can affect memory; one of Cahill's students made waves in 2011 when she discovered that taking the pill can cause women's memories of emotional material to more closely resemble those of men.

Virtually any brain disease, Cahill says, comes along with male-female differences big enough to call for major differences in medical treatment.

Cahill's talk begins at 7 a.m. Wednesday at the University Club; register to attend and pay the $35 fee at insideedge.org.





Q. What are some of the big differences emerging between male and female brains?

A. It's not the case that I can sit here and point to anything that is a single, dramatic thing – black and white – that is only in this sex and not the other. As a rule that is not the case. What it is, is just a storm of sex differences, big and little, found all over the place – down to the level of single neurons. We see these differences everywhere, and we started to realize, damn, we simply assume they aren't there. And these sex differences have implications for how the brain works and how to fix brains. That's your big story right there.

For me it's the existence of this huge fire in neuroscience. We've been collectively in kind of denial about it. But we've hit some sort of critical mass in the last couple of years. It's really starting to change.





Q. What differences have you seen that you'll mention in your talk?

A. One is not from the domain of neuroscience, but the domain of heart care. First of all, it turns out the No. 1 killer of women – which might surprise you – is heart attacks. More women die of heart problems than of all cancers combined.

Interestingly, women are much more likely to present the doctor with what are called atypical heart-attack symptoms. It isn't pain in the chest or down the left arm. They might be tired.

But you know why they are considered atypical heart-attack symptoms? Because they're not men. What is defined as typical heart-attack symptoms is defined on the basis of men. They're not atypical heart-attack symptoms if you're a woman. The typical woman is much more likely to go to the typical doctor and not be diagnosed properly.





Q. So what you're finding are not the cliché behavioral differences we might expect, but biological differences?

A. I stay away from the "12 things" that might be found in Vogue magazine. It is the case that male humans and male rats seem to navigate through space differently than female humans and female rats. It turns out that male rats and male humans are more likely to navigate by dead reckoning – knowing which way is north, east, south and west. Female humans are more likely to navigate through landmarks – go up to this 7-11, turn left. There's an intriguing difference right there.

It inevitably leads to the joke: Will male rats stop and ask for directions? The answer is no, because they're males.

Here's another (example): Women are more likely to get clinical depression than men.

To equally treat men and women for heart care, pain, depression, schizophrenia, you have to understand not just how they are similar, but how they are different. So if you treat women just like men, someone is not being treated equally.

Some people start to get real upset at any suggestion of sex differences in brain function. I say, sorry, but my job as a scientist is not to bend my pursuit of truth to accommodate anyone's political concerns. What I say to people when the issue comes up – it doesn't come up very often – I say, "I'm not Galileo, and you're not the Catholic Church."





Q. What are some of the other medical conditions that might require sex-specific treatment?

A. Almost any disease related to the brain that you can think of. We cannot optimally treat women by continuing to pretend they are simply men with pesky sex hormones. It is very, very clear that the brain mechanisms of pain perception are similar in some respects and different in other respects in men and women. Yet attempts to develop pain medications, to my knowledge, pay almost no attention to the differences. Therefore it must be the case that pain medications being developed largely on the basis of male animals are going to be suboptimal on females. It comes to the point where the scales fall off your eyes and you go, "Damn, this is huge."

By the way, every woman reading this article should start to get mad. And every man should while they're at it.

Male and female brains are like two mosaics – very similar in some respects, very different in others. It's not as simple as Mars and Venus.



Contact the writer: 714-796-7865 or pbrennan@ocregister.com.



http://www.ocregister.com/articles/differences-382702-women-male.html



I have always thought there were differences in the brain. I am surprised, yet glad that someone else out there has the guts to be politically incorrect and tell the scientific truth that there are differences between male and female brains.