Are some types of talk better than others?

Is it better to just talk a lot to a baby or are some types of talk better than others?

I just read an article published in Child Development titled, “A Longitudinal Investigation of the Role of Quantity and Quality of Child-Directed Speech in Vocabulary Development.” That’s a mouthful, but it came out of a conversation questioning the importance of quantity versus quality when speaking to babies. In other words, is it better to just talk a lot to a baby or is some types of talk better than others?

As a dad who reads articles from TechCrunch and the NY Times to my daughters, I have often wondered the same thing. Before I get to the study’s results, it isn’t very surprising that that quantity and quality are correlated, so if you talk a lot to your kids your probably also doing a lot of the right kinds of talking. Anyway, here’s a quick summary of the study’s findings for you:

Baby: Just talk or read, a lot
Toddler: Context and vocabulary matter
Pre-School: Explanations matter

In other words, it turns out that both quantity and quality matter, but quantity seems to matter more for younger children (babies) and quality matters more for older children (toddlers).

Or as Meredith Rowe, the study’s author, puts it:

“The results are consistent with a developmental scenario in which quantity of input is most important during the 2nd year of life, the diversity or sophistication of the vocabulary in the input is most important during the 3rd year of life, and the use of decontextualized language such as narrative and explanations in the input is most beneficial during the 4th year of life.”

In everyday terms, a baby probably needs to hear a large volume of words just to build a vocabulary foundation. Once that foundation is established, the quality of the interaction matters more and more.

So what is quality? Rowe discusses it a little here:

“Decontextualized language (Snow, 1990) is language that is removed from the here and now. Examples of decontextualized language use in early conversations between parents and children are seen in parents’ use of explanations, narratives, pretend, nonimmediate talk during book reading, and formal definitions (e.g., Snow, Tabors, & Dickinson, 2001). By exposing children to this type of challenging talk, parents can provide them with practice in the forms of discourse they must come to master in school. “

This definition may or may not make sense to you, so let me break it down into three examples.

1. Rowe defines explanations as, “Talk that requested or made logical connections between objects, events, concepts or conclusions.” Example: “Olivia, you have to sit in your car seat when I’m driving because daddy will get in trouble with the police if you don’t.”
2. Rowe defines pretend as, “episodes of interaction including making an object represent another; attributing actions, thoughts, or feelings to inanimate objects; assuming a role or persona, enacting scripts or routes.” Example: “Hi Olivia, my name baby hippo [one of her stuffed animals]. Can you hold me? I’m scared and need you to protect me.”
3. Rowe defines narrative as, “Talk about events that happened in the past or will happen in the future.” Example: “Remember that time in California when we went on a Ferris wheel at the boardwalk?”

As a dad who is generally bad at improv with babies (or any improv for that matter), I have a few “go to” moves that help me come up with impromptu baby talk.

With my one-month-old daughter, Caroline, I like to:

• Tell her about something I did that day.
• Read newspaper articles.
• Read children’s stories.
• Talk to her about whatever her big sister Olivia is doing nearby.
• Get her big sister to talk to her.

With my three-year-old daughter, Olivia, I like to:

• Use stuffed animals to talk to her in a pretend voice.
• Answer her endless number of “why” questions as if I were answering an adult.
• Ask her an endless number of “why” questions about something (“Why does the puppy have pink stuff on her mouth? How did the puppy get pink frosting? Why did she eat those cupcakes sitting on the table? Why were cupcakes on the table in the first place?). Some of her answers are priceless.
• Tell her stories about events in the past. It’s surprising how much she loves to hear the same stories over and over. It’s also really entertaining to hear her relay those stories to third parties.
• Count things. I ask Olivia to count anything that can be counted (jelly beans, colors, puppies, people, toys, stickers, etc). Sometimes I just count to 50 or 60 out loud when it’s just her and I in the car, but otherwise we rarely go any higher than 10 or 15.

Most importantly, I really like the idea of focusing on quality over quantity because it’s just more fun. For the first year of her life I was convinced Olivia would never learn to speak and that we would have to communicate with her using all of the animal sounds I made all of the time. If I can talk about something funny then everyone is having a good time and enjoying the moment — we just happen to be saying a lot of words along the way.

Source: A Longitudinal Investigation of the Role of Quantity and Quality of Child-Directed Speech in Vocabulary Development, by Meredith Rowe

This piece was originally posted at VersaMe.com. VersaMe created the Starling the world’s first wearable engagement tracker that helps encourage and reinforce positive parenting behaviors.