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BY: DR. EDITH BRACHO-SANCHEZ
(NEW YORK) – Talking to kids when they are little does not just teach them the talk – a new study published today in the Journal of Pediatrics.
"By showing that parent-child verbal interactions in early childhood predict critically important outcomes … the authors of this study made a major contribution to this," said pediatricians Dr. Alan Mendelsohn and Perri Klass, who did not participate in study – in a comment attached.
The team of researchers started with children from 18 months to 2 years old, recording – the words that children heard from adults and their adult-child conversations – once a month, for a total of six months. The researchers then brought the children back to language and cognitive tests at the age of nine to fourteen.
According to the study, children who had taken longer to talk with adults had an average performance of 14 to 27% higher on IQ tests, verbal comprehension, and receptive and expressive vocabulary scores. factors.
"Programs aimed at developing language skills in young children should be the focus of special attention. The promotion of language-rich and emotionally positive interactions should be objective, play and reading offering not only enriched contexts, but also enriched interactions. ", Said Mendelsohn and Klass in the commentary.
The quantity and quality of language is known to influence the future language and mental development of children.
In a recent short-term study, children who went back and forth with their parents had stronger connections between the brain regions responsible for speech understanding and speech production, and achieved higher scores at higher levels. verbal skills tests.
In a well-known study conducted in 1990, researchers showed that when children from higher socio-economic backgrounds reach school age, they are exposed on average to 30 million words more than children from poor families. This has been known in the medical community as the "lack of words" and since then many policies and interventions have been focused on the amount of words that a child hears.
But the word gap could be too simple an explanation of vocabulary differences, said Dr. Rachel Romeo, a postdoctoral researcher in translational neurodevelopment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Children's Hospital in Boston, who was not involved in the study. In a recent interview with ABC News, she said that her team and others were part of a movement to emphasize the importance of word quality – not just quantity.
"When you engage children in a conversation, you can target the language according to their appropriate level of development," she said. "They get that optimal return," said Romeo.
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