Talking to Children Matters

2013/09/10 by Adriana Weisleder, Anne Fernald · 39 citations
Psychology · #Child and Animal Learning Development #Language Development and Disorders #Reading and Literacy Development

paper · doi:10.1177/0956797613488145

openalex publication_date 2013/09/10 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30

Abstract

Infants differ substantially in their rates of language growth, and slow growth predicts later academic difficulties. In this study, we explored how the amount of speech directed to infants in Spanish-speaking families low in socioeconomic status influenced the development of children's skill in real-time language processing and vocabulary learning. All-day recordings of parent-infant interactions at home revealed striking variability among families in how much speech caregivers addressed to their child. Infants who experienced more child-directed speech became more efficient in processing familiar words in real time and had larger expressive vocabularies by the age of 24 months, although speech simply overheard by the child was unrelated to vocabulary outcomes. Mediation analyses showed that the effect of child-directed speech on expressive vocabulary was explained by infants' language-processing efficiency, which suggests that richer language experience strengthens processing skills that facilitate language growth.

Citations

• Sources of variability in children’s language growth
• Object Naming, Vocabulary Growth, and the Development of Word Retrieval Abilities
• The Hispanic-White Achievement Gap in Math and Reading in the Elementary Grades
• Picking up speed in understanding: Speech processing efficiency and vocabulary growth across the 2nd year.
• The Specificity of Environmental Influence: Socioeconomic Status Affects Early Vocabulary Development Via Maternal Speech
• Variability in Early Communicative Development

Cited by

• Influence of language nutrition on children’s language and cognitive development: An integrated review
• Diversity in monolingual and multilingual communicative environments and its relation to vocabulary in early childhood
• A systematic review of language intervention research with low-income families: A word gap prevention perspective
• Beyond the Dyad: Infant Vocal Cues Organize Conversational‐Turn Taking in Infant‐Toddler Classrooms
• Wordbank: an open repository for developmental vocabulary data
• Analyzing input quality along three dimensions: interactive, linguistic, and conceptual
• Parentese in infancy predicts 5-year language complexity and conversational turns
• Time to Talk: Variability in Caregiver‐Child Verbal Engagement During Everyday Activities Sampled From Daylong Recordings
• A competitive edge: how social cues and spatial congruence influence joint attention in addressed or witnessed interactions
• Mapping the Early Language Environment Using All-Day Recordings and Automated Analysis
• Social Determinants of Health and Language and Academic Outcomes in Pediatric Cochlear Implantation
• Exposure to screens and children’s language development in the EDEN mother–child cohort
• The evolution of infant-directed communication: Comparing vocal input across all great apes
• Parent American Sign Language skills correlate with child–but not toddler–ASL vocabulary size
• Testing the relationship between preferences for infant-directed speech and vocabulary development: A multi-lab study
• Canonical Babbling May Differ Between Autistic and Non-Autistic Toddlers in Consonant Transition Probabilities
• Invited Forum: Bridging the “Language Gap”
• Infant Sitting Status, Sitting Age, and Everyday Positioning Experience Across the Transition to Independent Sitting
• A Meta‐Analysis of the Correlation Between Socioeconomic Status and Direct Measures of Young Children's Word Comprehension
• Stimulation beliefs, parental reading involvement, and social inequalities in children's language development
• Early Expressive and Receptive Language Development in Preterm vs Full-Term Children: A Meta-Analysis
• Developmental Screening and Family Resilience for Infants and Toddlers in Homeless Shelters
• Caregiver linguistic alignment to autistic and typically developing children: A natural language processing approach illuminates the interactive components of language development
• Quantity and Complexity of Speech-Language Pathologists' Talk During School-Based Therapy
• Frequency, redundancy, and context in bilingual acquisition
• Vocabuild: An Accessible Augmented Tangible Interface for Gamified Vocabulary Learning of Constructing Meaning
• Shared-Reading Onset and Emergent Literacy Development
• Investigation of di-pion resonances in 3.7 BeV/c [pi]Ëp collisions : technical report
• Exploring the Linguistic, Cognitive, and Social Skills Underlying Lexical Processing Efficiency as Measured by the Looking-while-Listening Paradigm
• The role of caregiver speech in supporting language development in infants and toddlers with autism spectrum disorder
• Socioeconomic Status Predicts Infant Word Recognition: Evidence From a Linguistically, Ethnically, and Socioeconomically Diverse Community Sample in Singapore
• Why Choo‐Choo Is Better Than Train: The Role of Register‐Specific Words in Early Vocabulary Growth
• Intersensory processing of faces and voices at 6 months predicts language outcomes at 18, 24, and 36 months of age
• The effect of the COVID‐19 pandemic on infant development and maternal mental health in the first 2 years of life
• Speech-Language Pathology and the Youth Offender: Epidemiological Overview and Roadmap for Future Speech-Language Pathology Research and Scope of Practice
• Frontolimbic Connectivity and Threat‐Related Psychopathology: A Data‐Driven Test of Models of Early Adversity
• From needs to goals and representations: Foundations for a unified theory of motivation, personality, and development.
• The Words Children Hear
• A thorough evaluation of the Language Environment Analysis (LENA) system
• Language environment and early language production in Slovenian infants: An exploratory study using daylong recordings

Related

• Time to Talk: Variability in Caregiver‐Child Verbal Engagement During Everyday Activities Sampled From Daylong Recordings
• A Longitudinal Investigation of the Role of Quantity and Quality of Child-Directed Speech in Vocabulary Development
• Parentese in infancy predicts 5-year language complexity and conversational turns
• Child-directed speech: relation to socioeconomic status, knowledge of child development and child vocabulary skill
• A cross-linguistic examination of young children’s everyday language experiences