Parents talk more to toddlers who talk back
ScienceDaily
These are just a few of the thousands of words scientists at Duke painstakingly decoded from over 2,000 hours of infants' daily lives. They recently used these data to determine if the amount of language kids hear might explain why girls have bigger vocabularies early in life than boys.
It doesn't.
Instead, Shannon Dailey, Ph.D., a Duke University postdoctoral scholar and lead author of the new study, found that rather than caregivers talking more to their young daughters, they appear to talk more to young children who themselves are already talking, regardless of their gender. This offers an important insight for language development.
"This study provides evidence that children actively influence their own language environments as they grow," Dailey said.
The new findings from Dailey come from her time as a graduate student in the lab of co-author and Duke psychology & neuroscience professor Elika Bergelson, Ph.D.
The paper appears in the journal Child Development on Dec. 1.
"People have long noted that there are sometimes differences between girls and boys for different language skills," Bergelson said. "Language delays and deficits, for example, are more common in boys than and girls, so that raises the question of why."
Dailey and Bergelson reasoned that girls' typical (and temporary) vocabulary advantage might be due to them receiving more "language input" from their parents than boys.
To test that hunch, the team and a cadre of research assistants counted the utterances that 44 kids (21 girls and 23 boys) heard and produced for an entire year, starting when the tots were only six months old. This age range is ideal because they can track what kids are hearing at six months, which is well before they start talking, all the way through when most kids have started talking at 18 months, Dailey explained.
