If you want to help children develop language and speech skills, UCLA researchers say, listening to what they have to say is just as important as talking to them. The effect of a conversation between a child and an adult is about six times as great as the effect of adult speech input alone, the researchers found. "Adults speaking to children helps language develop, but what matters much more is the interaction," said the study' s lead author, Frederick Zimmerman, an associate professor in the School of Public Health at the University of California, Los Angeles. The researchers also found that TV viewing didn' t have much of an effect -- positively or negatively -- as long as it wasn' t displacing conversations between an adult and a child. The UCLA study included 275 families with children between 2 months and 48 months old. They represented a variety of incomes and education. The researchers found that, in an average day, children hear about 13,000 spoken words from adults and participated in about 400 adultchild conversations a day. Assessed separately, factors positively associated with language development included each additional 100 conversations a day and each 1,000 word increase in the number of words spoken by adults and heard by children. When looked at alone, TV was negatively associated with language development. But, when the three factors were analyzed together, the only one that stood out was conversation between adults and children. "The more a child speaks and interacts with an adult, the better idea a parent has about where the child is," Zimmerman said. "Although it' s mostly done unconsciously, parents will provide feedback and correct mistakes. They'll also  _ their speech to the child. Parents can give a child words by talking to them about what they' re doing, such as, 'I'm putting on your pajamas now'. But give your child the opportunity to talk, hopefully without the rest of the noise in the environment," she added. "If parents can carve out some conversation time -- maybe at bath time or at dinner time -- that' s a wonderful thing." What would be the best title for the passage?
Talk with kids, not at them Let your children voice their own opinions How to develop a child' s language ability The importance of early child language development