Talking to children matters: Early language experience strengthens processing and builds vocabulary

By A. Weisleder, Anne Fernald. Psychology Science, 2013

1,186 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/06ae22ec95f80bcce9d58bb4a704d85c1be86cdf

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In Developmental and Educational Psychology

Citations in the corpus

Frequency in lexical processing (2016, positive): “In the earliest years of life, children learn from their parents and their peers, and from the very outset, individual circumstances contribute in turn to the amount and the variety of linguistic input that individual children experience: differences in the amounts parents talk (Hurtado, Marchman an”
Supermarket Speak: Increasing Talk Among Low-Socioeconomic Status (2015, positive): “Increasing the amount and richness of parent–child conversation can combat language disparities between low-SES children and their high-SES peers (Cristofaro & Tamis-LeMonda, 2011; Weisleder & Fernald, 2013).”
Shared computational principles for language processing in humans and deep language models (2022, positive): “Observational work in developmental psychology suggests that children are exposed to tens of thousands of words in contextualized speech each day, creating a large data volume available for learning 65,66 .”
THE DETERMINANTS OF HUMAN CAPITAL FORMATION DURING THE EARLY YEARS OF LIFE: THEORY, MEASUREMENT, AND POLICIES (2015, methodology): “…environment is the LENA software, which is used to decode day-long recordings to assess the quality of the language environment children are exposed to.30 LENA has recently been used together with LWL to analyze pathways of language development in young children by Weisleder and Fernald (2013).”
Childhood Adversity and Neural Development: Deprivation and Threat as Distinct Dimensions of Early Experience (2014, background): “, 2007), language ability (Fernald et al., 2013; Weisleder and Fernald, 2013), and overall cognitive and academic achievement (Brooks-Gunn and Duncan, 1997; Duncan et al.”
Child-Directed Speech Is Infrequent in a Forager-Farmer Population: A Time Allocation Study. (2019, positive): “…in promoting verbal engagement and lexical development than overheard speech (Shneidman, 2010; Shneidman, Arroyo, Levine, & Goldin-Meadow, 2013; Weisleder & Fernald, 2013), particularly when uttered in oneon-one conversations (Ram ırez-Esparza, Garc ıaSierra, & Kuhl, 2014) with adults rather…”
Exposure and input in bilingual development (2017, background): “Some mothers were really chatty and some were not.7 Weisleder and Fernald (2013) reported similar findings based on recordings over a 10-hour period of all the speech spoken in the vicinity of 29 children from Spanish-speaking families from Miami.”
Beyond the “30 Million Word Gap:” Children’s Conversational Exposure is Associated with Language-Related Brain Function (2018, positive): “When SES is controlled, children’s language exposure remains strongly associated with variation in their language abilities (Rowe, 2012; Weisleder & Fernald, 2013), and differences in exposure partially or fully explain the SES-related gap in language skills (Hoff, 2006).”
Quantifying Sources of Variability in Infancy Research Using the Infant-Directed-Speech Preference (2020, background): “…amount of speech directed to U.S. 18-month-olds (which likely bears IDS features), rather than the amount of speech they overhear (which is likely predominantly ADS), relates to the efficiency of their word processing and to their expressive vocabulary at age 24 months (Weisleder & Fernald, 2013).”
Mapping the Early Language Environment Using All-Day Recordings and Automated Analysis. (2017, positive): “…Environment Analysis (LENA) System now allow for the efficient collection and analysis of large amounts of naturalistic language samples (Caskey, Stephens, Tucker, & Vohr, 2011; Caskey & Vohr, 2013; Warren et al., 2010; Weisleder & Fernald, 2013; Xu et al., 2008b; F. J. Zimmerman et al., 2009).”
Twenty Years after “Meaningful Differences,” It's Time to Reframe the “Deficit” Debate about the Importance of Children's Early Language Experience (2015, background): “Moreover, it was speech addressed directly to the child – not the overall amount of speech overheard by the child from adult-to-adult conversations or on TV – that predicted language outcomes [Weisleder & Fernald, 2013].”
Effects of feedback on parent–child language with infants and toddlers in Korea (2016, background): “…(AE) households, one previous study reported on the validity of the LENA technology with a small number of Spanish7speaking families of young children aged up to 60 months (Weisleder & Fernald, 2013), finding a correlation between automated estimates and transcriber7based word counts of = .80.”