Mrs. Berkheiser
Speech

Speech and language learning begins long before a child utters her first words. Parents can boost language development by commenting on what their child is viewing and giving meaning to her gestures and sounds. If the child looks at a car and makes a sound say, "Yes, that is a car!" Researchers have found that children with parents who talk to them have greater vocabulary and grammar accuracy. In learning to speak, babies benefit from social interaction.

Patricia Kuhl, a researcher in the field of language acquisition, conducted an experiment. Nine-month old American babies were presented with Mandarin Chinese. The babies interacted with a live Mandarin speaker. After 12 sessions, these babies showed an "enhanced ability to discriminate certain speech sounds that are common in the Mandarin language." The experiment was repeated with another set of babies who watched only televised language tutors. These babies expressed no greater ability to discriminate Mandarin speech sounds than the control group.

The newest research indicates that conversation has the strongest positive effect on language development in children. Parents should be talking to their children even before the child can talk back. Encourage give-and-take with the sounds your infant makes. Talk about what your are doing, what will happen next, and how things look. Your child will benefit!

A fun interactive site to reinforce speech and language skills is ReadWriteThink.org.

Email: kberkheiser@franklintwpschools.org