Conversation more important than word exposure for literacy and language development

Conversation more important than word exposure for literacy and language development
While it is common knowledge that talking to children helps them develop language and pre-literacy skills, new research from Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania shows that children gain greater language development and pre-literacy benefits the more that caregivers engage them in conversational turn-taking-like exchanges. In other words, talking with children is more beneficial than talking tochildren.
 
In the first study to link children's language exposure to neural functioning, functional MRIs showed that children who experienced more frequent conversational turntaking with caregivers while listening to stories demonstrated greater activity within the part of the brain in charge of language processing than children who didn't interact in as many conversational exchanges. These same children also scored higher than their counterparts on standardized language assessments measuring vocabulary, grammar, and verbal reasoning. This was true regardless of children's socioeconomic status or parental education.
 
Audio recordings of 36 four- to six-year-olds from various socioeconomic backgrounds measured the number of words children said, the number of words they heard, and the number of conversational exchanges in which they engaged for two days. All children were native English speakers who did not significantly differ by behavior, language exposure, or neural measures on standardized tests. When these measures were compared to the brain scans, researchers found a positive correlation between conversational turns and brain physiology.

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