The Power of Baby Talk SEVERAL RECENT RESEARCH PROJECTS from the Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences are providing new guidance on the best ways for parents and caregivers to help babbling babies develop into articulate toddlers. Researchers Daniele Raneri, Katie Von Holzen, Professor and Chair Rochelle Newman and Professor Nan Bernstein Ratner discovered that when mothers spoke more slowly to their 7-month-old infants, children developed higher vocabulary knowledge at 2 years old. The results, published in the Journal of Child Language, show that slower infantdirected speech may benefit language learning even before children speak their first words. Meanwhile, the goo-goos and ga-gas coming out of babies’ mouths may sound like nonsense to the untrained ear, but Kayla Gerhold, Catherine Torrington Eaton, Newman and Bernstein Ratner discovered that they can serve as an indication of how many words children will be speaking at 2 years old. Findings published in the journal Folia Phoniatrica et Logopaedica reveal that infants who use a wider variety of sounds and syllables at 11 and 18 months of age are better able to express themselves verbally at 2. “The more we can discover about how infants gather the first building blocks to language development, the earlier we can pinpoint language problems that are likely to crop up through childhood,” said Bernstein Ratner. “Early intervention is paramount in treating language disorders and delays.” Finally, parents reaching for a bedtime book to read to their preschoolers might want to search for one where words are repeated numerous times throughout. Research by Maura O’Fallon,Von Holzen and Newman published in the Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research showed that 3-year-olds were able to learn new words after a single storybook reading with an adult when target words were repeated, either with or without an explanation. “Prior studies with older children have suggested that what benefits learning is basically hearing a definition of new words as you come across them,” Newman said. “However, we found that younger children learn just as well from simply hearing the words repeated in the story, even without a definition.”
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