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are actually communicating.
When my son was a baby we had this saying that 'no baby ever spoke
"tata" like him'. He would communicate with lots of "tata"s and we
would always respond to him like we understood what he was saying. The
interesting thing is that I never even noticed when he started
speaking properly.
Now scientists are saying that responding to your baby's language will
actually help speed up his language speaking.
According to a new study by the University of Iowa and Indiana University:
Parents who consciously engage with their babbling infants can
accelerate their children's vocalizing and language learning.
These findings challenge the belief that human communication is innate
and can't be influenced by parental feedback.
Researchers observed the interactions between 12 mothers and their
8-month-old infants during free play twice a month for 30 minutes over
a six-month period. They noted how the mothers responded to their
child's positive vocalizations, such as babbling and cooing,
especially when it was directed toward the mother.
Current research in Gros-Louis's lab has found similar levels of
responsiveness of mothers and fathers to infants' babbling.
What researchers discovered is infants whose mothers responded to what
they thought their babies were saying, showed an increase in
developmentally advanced, consonant-vowel vocalizations, which means
the babbling has become sophisticated enough to sound more like words.
The babies also began directing more of their babbling over time
toward their mothers.
On the other hand, infants whose mothers did not try as much to
understand them and instead directed their infants' attention at times
to something else did not show the same rate of growth in their
language and communication skills.
Gros-Louis says the difference was mothers who engaged with their
infants when they babbled let their children know they could
communicate. Consequently, those babies turned more often to their
mothers and babbled.
"The infants were using vocalizations in a communicative way, in a
sense, because they learned they are communicative," Gros-Louis says.
Gros-Louis and her colleagues took that research a step further by
observing the interactions of mothers and infants over a longer period
of time and without instructing the mothers how to respond. Thus, they
added a control group -- the mothers who directed their babies'
attention elsewhere versus those who actively engaged when their
infants looked at them and babbled.
Once again, the results showed infants whose mothers attended more
closely to their babbling vocalized more complex sounds and develop
language skills sooner.
So go ahead and respond to your baby...Who says you and baby can't
have a constructive chit chat?
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