Published 26 January 2024 at 13.57
Domestic. The more talk a child hears, the better the language development. This is shown by an international study of the sound environment around 1,001 children from twelve countries and six continents.
Share the article
TwittraDela
That children's language development depends on how much talk the child hears is in itself nothing new. The groundbreaking thing is that it knocks out previously established factors such as the family's socio-economic status, the child's gender, and possible multilingualism which have also been said to influence language development.
For every 100 extra utterances the child hears per hour, it says itself 27 more opinions, the study shows.
– This means that children's language development can be influenced in a simple and straightforward way and not by factors that are difficult to change, such as socio-economic status. All the people around a child can promote the child's language development by talking, says Ellen Marklund, docent in linguistics at Stockholm University and one of the researchers in the study.
The researchers analyzed over 40,000 hours of recorded sound environment in the surroundings of children aged 0 to 4 years worldwide. The study's data set is thus much larger and contains much more variation than all other previous studies. The study examines both children from Western industrialized nations in Europe and North America, as well as children growing up in subsistence farming and gathering societies in Bolivia, Senegal and Papua New Guinea.
The children's language development was measured through analysis of language production, which spans from early vocalizations in infants to single words in toddlers and whole sentences in preschoolers. Regardless of which country or social structure the children grow up in, the more linguistic input the children receive, the more their language development is promoted. The amount of speech around the children is the strongest factor in language development, alongside the child's age and possibly clinical factors such as premature birth or dyslexia.
– Girls do not learn faster than boys. Children who grow up with more than one language do not learn more slowly. The parents' level of education does not matter. The most important thing for all children in the world is that you talk to them, states Iris-Corinna Schwarz, Associate Professor of Linguistics at Stockholm University, who also participated in the study, in a statement.