For the longest time, we couldn't figure out the words coming from our nine-month-old son Josh.
Whenever he took a car ride, he would start saying the word "dah," repeating it over and over again as we strapped him into his car seat, "Dah dah dah, goo, dah dah, big-dah, big-dah." It often sounded like a child's version of an old Police song. We couldn't decode it and would just respond, a bit sheepishly, "Dah?" He would emphatically reply, "Dah." Sometimes our response made him happy. Sometimes it didn't do anything at all.
It wasn't until we were tooling down the interstate one fine, sunny day, moon-roof wide open to the clouds, that we finally figured it out.
Josh saw an airplane flying overhead and shouted excitedly, "Sky-dah! Sky-dah!" My wife suddenly understood. "I think he means airplane!" she said. She asked him, pointing to the sky, "Sky-dah?" Josh cheerily replied, "Sky-dah!" Just then a big noisy semi-truck passed us, and Josh pointed to it with concern. "Big-dah, Big-dah," he said. My wife pointed at the truck too, now shrinking in the distance. "Big-dah?" she asked, and he responded excitedly, "Big-dah!" Then "dah, dah, dah."
We got it. For whatever reason, "dah" had become Joshua's word for "vehicle." Later, Josh and I watched a ship cross Puget Sound. I pointed to the container vessel and guessed, "Water-dah?" He sat up, staring at me like I was from Mars. "Wet-dah," he declared, like a mildly impatient professor addressing a slow student.
Few interactions with children are as much fun as learning to speak their language. As they learn to speak ours, heaping tablespoons of words into their minds is one of the healthiest things parents can do for their brains.
Speak to your children as often as you can. It is one of the most well-established findings in all of the developmental literature -- which is why it is among those detailed in my new book, "Brain Rules for Baby: How to Raise a Smart and Happy Child From Zero to Five."
The linkage between words and smarts was discovered through some pretty invasive research. In one study, investigators descended upon a family's home every month for three years and jotted down every aspect of verbal communication parents gave their children. They measured size of vocabulary, diversity and growth rate of vocabulary, frequency of verbal interaction, and the emotional content of the speech. Just before the visits were finished, the researchers gave IQ tests. They did this with more than 40 families, then followed up years later.
Through exhaustive analysis of this amazingly tough work, two very clear findings emerged:
1) The variety and number of words matter.
The more parents talk to their children, even in the earliest moments of life, the better their kids' linguistic abilities become and the faster that improvement is achieved. The gold standard is 2,100 words per hour. The variety of the words spoken (nouns, verbs, and adjectives used, along with the length and complexity of phrases and sentences) is nearly as important as the number of words spoken. So is the amount of positive feedback.
You can reinforce language skills through interaction: looking at your infant; imitating his vocalizations, laughter and facial expressions; rewarding her language attempts with heightened attention.
Children whose parents talked positively, richly and regularly to them knew twice as many words as kids whose parents talked to them the least. When these kids entered the school system, their reading, spelling and writing abilities soared above those of children in less verbal households. Even though babies don't respond like adults, they are listening, and it is good for them.
2) Talking increases IQ.
Talking to children early in life raises their IQs, too, even after controlling for important variables such as income. By age three, kids who were talked to regularly by their parents (called the talkative group) had IQ scores 1.5 times higher than those kids whose parents talked to them the least (called the taciturn group). This increase in IQ is thought to be responsible for the talkative group's uptick in grades.
It takes a real live person to benefit your baby's brain, so get ready to exercise your vocal cords. Not the portable DVD players, not your television's surround sound, but your vocal cords.
What should you say and how should you say it? Find out in these videos:
WATCH:
Watch more parenting videos or learn more about your baby's brain at brainrules.net.
John Medina is a developmental molecular biologist and author of the New York Times bestseller "Brain Rules." His latest book is "Brain Rules for Baby: How to Raise a Smart and Happy Child from Zero to Five." He is an affiliate Professor of Bioengineering at the University of Washington School of Medicine. He is also the director of the Brain Center for Applied Learning Research at Seattle Pacific University.
Follow John Medina, Ph.D. on Twitter: www.twitter.com/babybrainrules
Study: TV May Inhibit Babies' Language Development - TIME
Baby talk: 8 easy and fun ways to improve your baby's language ...
I don't know if it's better for them or not, but I suspect that if my interpretations are on the mark, the sound intention association will be made more clearly than if I were talking like a schitz.
http://graciouslivingdaybyday.com/
Leave many simple books (illustrated) on various subjects, animals, stars, rocks, etc laying around.
They will look at them. And like he says, talk to them like they are adults. A LOT.
One day, as things were really getting dangerous, I got it in my head that maybe if I just explained the situation to him, he'd get it. "It's not that I want to control you" I said, "it's that those cars can hurt or even kill you and then you would be gone and I would be sad because I love you and don't want that to happen"... "oh" he said, and took my hand and we never had to talk about that again.
Today, he's 23 and about one of the most articulate and intelligent people I know, and he teaches gymnastics to little kids for a living!
She has gone to become a very good reader. She and her sister both finished the Harry Potter series in about three weeks last year. They now have the series almost completely memorized.
BTW, her sister's first word was "airplane". Not a baby talk version, the real word airplane. She started school early.
Baloney.
I feel so bad for kids who aren't allowed to have booboos. "Here, let Mommy kiss your mild contusion, Poindexter."
Adult talk for a baby makes as much sense as adult clothes for a baby. Sure it can work; it's just dumb. Would you take a neophyte skier down a double-diamond slope ... because that's the way advanced users of skis do it?
Let them do their verbal snowplowing for a while. Ski/talk with them on the linguistic bunny hill. It's fun. Let them see you taking joy in what they take joy in--which sometimes includes systematic pronunciation, grammar and syntax "failures". In a week or a month they will self-correct on a given "error" and you can leave that childhood trinket behind at about the same time they do.
For every thing there is a season. Let them guide you.
My offspring have wicked vocabularies and impressive lists of accomplishments. This after upbringings in which they were allowed to be the little dickens they happened to be at a given age, not a mini-me.
Love them like crazy. Don't imagine that they are some project you are building. They are whole people on day one. They just need to unfold. There is a right order to unfolding. Violating it risks strains and tears. Some of which don't show up till much later.
Toddlers who talk like Donald Sutherland are just creepy, anyway.
http://raisingamazingdaughters.wordpress.com
Mystery solved.
The thing that works is simply talking like a normal person. Children are going to learn at their own pace. Baby-talk is a bad idea because it reinforces the wrong sounds and the child doesn't learn the words he/she really needs to know.