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How baby talk gives your child the best start in life

By Aviva Rutkin

26 November 2014

New Scientist Default ImageJust keep talking

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THERE is only one real rule to conversing with a baby: talking is better than not talking. But that one rule can make a lifetime of difference.

That’s the message that the US state of Georgia hopes to send with Talk With Me Baby, a public health programme devoted to the art of baby talk. Starting in January, nurses will be trained in the best way to speak to babies to help them learn language, based on what the latest neuroscience says. Then they, along with teachers and nutritionists, will model this good behaviour for the parents they meet. Georgia hopes to expose every child born in 2015 in the Atlanta area to this speaking style; by 2018, the hope is to reach all 130,000 or so newborns across the state.

Talk With Me Baby is the latest and largest attempt to provide “language nutrition” to infants in the US – a rich quantity and variety of words supplied at a critical time in the brain’s development. Similar initiatives have popped up in Providence, Rhode Island, where children have been wearing high-tech vests that track every word they hear, and Hollywood, where the Clinton Foundation has encouraged television shows like Parenthood and Orange is the New Black to feature scenes demonstrating good baby talk.

“The idea is that language is as important to the brain as food is to physical growth,” says Arianne Weldon, director of Get Georgia Reading, one of several partner organisations involved in Talk With Me Baby.

“The idea is that language is as important to the brain as food is to physical growth”

“You don’t need a neuroscientist to tell you that it’s better to provide more supportive parenting and stimulating experiences,” says Martha Farah, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. “But neuroscience points us to specific pathways that might be good places to intervene.”

Attention was drawn to the importance of language nutrition two decades ago by psychologists Betty Hart and Todd Risley at the University of Kansas. They tracked 42 families with young children for several years, noting the number and type of words that parents spoke to their children over the course of a typical day. The data revealed an alarming trend: by the age of 3, children from affluent families had heard some 30 million more words than their impoverished counterparts.

Early language exposure has since been linked to a number of cognitive skills, including attention, memory and emotional development. For example, studies of bilingual children – who hear a greater variety of sounds – suggest that they are better at tasks such as ignoring irrelevant information and switching between different activities. Those who hear more words early on also have larger vocabularies and better real-time word processing by the age of 2.

Grade boost

Such findings have persuaded policy-makers that more and better conversations can help kids from disadvantaged backgrounds get ahead in school and in life.

“Daily interactions help our youngest kids learn words, build vocabulary, and yes, develop their brains,” former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton told a conference at the New York Academy of Sciences earlier this month, where such interventions were discussed. “They lay a foundation for future success long before a child steps foot into a classroom for the first time. Sadly, however, many of our kids are not getting the support they need to grow and thrive to their fullest potential.”

This is acutely felt in Georgia, where 27 per cent of children were living in poverty in 2012 – 5 per cent higher than the national average – and more than half are eligible for free or reduced price meals at school. The specific aim of Talk With Me Baby is to boost the state’s dismal school reading levels – just a third of children are reading proficiently by the age of 8 – but it will also be evaluated on its impact on overall well-being, reported via measures such as preschool expulsion rates.

The first year of life is a particularly explosive time for neural growth. Although babies aren’t yet talking, their brains are already identifying common speech sounds by how often they appear. At this point, they can distinguish between nuances in languages as disparate as Chinese and Swedish, an ability that falls off as they age.

It’s imperative that this language exposure happens in person. In a study run by Patricia Kuhl at the University of Washington, babies from English-speaking families sat through a dozen 25-minute sessions of reading and playing in Mandarin Chinese. Some spent their time face-to-face with a native Mandarin speaker, while others watched identical sessions on DVD or listened to audio while looking at a teddy bear. The former group learned to differentiate between Mandarin syllables as well as babies raised in Taiwan but the latter two could not.

Through Talk With Me Baby, Weldon and her team intend to demonstrate effective speech to parents first-hand. One trick is to talk in parentese, the slow sing-song cadence that adults tend to slip into when speaking to children – studies suggest that infants pay more attention to it than to regular speech. Another is to talk about whatever seems to already draw the child’s attention, like a passing train or a toy, rather than try to get them to focus on something different.

The professionals will be expected to demonstrate the good speech skills as they work. A nurse teaching a new mother how to give a bath, for example, might explain the steps directly to the baby while the adult listens. The project also plans to release a smartphone app for parents that plays videos of sample baby talk and suggests conversation topics based on your location.

Meanwhile, other organisations are exploring what language nutrition can do for children. The Thirty Million Words initiative in Chicago teaches a 12-part language nutrition programme centred on “three Ts”: tune in, talk more and take turns. Jessica Polk, a Chicago mother of three, went through the programme several years ago. She says it helped her learn how to build conversations around what her baby was interested in. “We realised we should tune into what they want to do and they’ll pay attention more,” she says. “I’ve told a lot of people about it.”

Thirty Million Words is now recruiting for a randomised control study. For five years, it will follow the progress of 200 Chicago families, half of whom will undergo language nutrition training, to see what kind of impact the intervention has on school readiness.

“As we learn more about the brain and how it is connected, we’re able to be more effective in trying to impact this public health issue,” says Dana Suskind, founder of Thirty Million Words. “Brains aren’t born. They’re built”.

“As we learn more about the brain, we’re able to be more effective in closing children’s language gap”

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Deep impacts

The first 1000 days of life are a busy time for the growing brain. An impoverished environment can have a lasting impact.

1 The prefrontal cortex is behind much of our thinking and reasoning. Children born to parents with lower educational achievements tend to have thinner prefrontal cortices, which may explain why they are worse at filtering out distractions while they work – a skill specific to this brain region.

2 The hippocampus is responsible for learning and memory. Kids who had poor parental support in early childhood show signs of a smaller hippocampus by the time they reach school age.

3 A smaller amygdala, a structure that handles our emotions, has been associated with children from low-income homes or born to parents with less education.

4 During our early years, different regions of our brains start to specialise in certain tasks. Word tasks are delegated to the left side of the brain, in particular to Broca’s area. But fMRI scans of 5-year-olds found that the brains of those from disadvantaged backgrounds weren’t as specialised as their high-income counterparts.

5 MRI scans of children under 5 found that those from low-income families had lower volumes of grey matter in their frontal and parietal lobes, which are associated with working memory and language, among other things.

That’s not to say that these changes can’t be overturned. The brain is most malleable in childhood, and responds well to interventions in the early years. For example, the Bucharest Early Intervention Project has followed 136 children from Romanian orphanages since 2000. Those placed in foster homes before they turned 2 showed higher brain activity across several different regions and higher scores on emotional and cognitive tests compared with those who remained in institutions.

Article amended on 3 December 2014

When this article was first published, it mistakenly implied that Hart and Risley were the discoverers of the importance of language nutrition.

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