Study that the future of children is determined by "conversation at childhood"

There is an idea that it is important for a child to have a lot of words during childhood in order to succeed in the future. However, in new research, it is not only necessary to take a large amount of words, but "conversation" which is the exchange of words and words is said to have an important role.

Beyond the 30-Million-Word Gap: Children's Conversational Exposure Is Associated With Language-Related Brain Function - Rachel R. Romeo, Julia A. Leonard, Sydney T. Robinson, Martin R. West, Allyson P. Mackey, Meredith L. Rowe , John DE Gabrieli, 2018
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797617742725?journalCode=pssa

Talking with - Not Just to - Kids Powers How They Learn Language - Scientific American
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/talking-with-mdash-not-just-to-mdash-kids-powers-how-they-learn-language/

Psychologist Dr. Betty Hart and Dr. Todd Risley presented in 1995paperIt was revealed that the cause of the poor cognitive ability of children in the poor and suffering future disadvantage lies in the number (amount) of words in childhood. According to the two researchers, when comparing the children raised by rich and poor, the number of words brought up by the age of four was 30 million on average for poor children compared with children of wealthy people I understood that there are few words. This small number of experiences exposed to languages ​​during childhood was thought to have an influence on language ability at the time of enrollment, subsequent academic performance, and further economic success in the future.

On the other hand, John Gabriel and colleagues research team of MIT on February 14, 2018, "those that affect, such as the future cognitive ability of children, spoken in childhood, of the conversation that speak I conclude that "I'm interacting."reaserch resultAnnounced. "Quality of words" is more important than the "amount of words" which was the common hypothesis in the past.


Dr. Gabriel and his colleagues conducted 36 linguistic and cognitive examinations for 36 children aged four to six years with different socioeconomic backgrounds. First, the children were evaluated verbal conversation skills (spoken language ability), and then the state of the brain when the listener was listening to a relatively short story of 15 seconds was measured with fMRI. Finally, the state of communication between adults and children at home was evaluated by a record analysis system called LENA.

As a result of the investigation, the closest relevance to the score of children's conversational ability was not the number of words spoken by the child, but the response number of the conversation. In other words, it seems that it was found that the number of round trips for adults and children to talk to each other, to talk to each other and to talk is important. According to Dr. Gabriel, parents who received high income and high standards education often talked with the children, but also that the content was diverse. Quantitatively, it seems that it turns out that the spoken language ability tends to increase by 1 point every time the number of conversation exchanges in one hour increases by 11 times.


For reasons why conversations, which are reciprocal word interactions, have a positive influence on the brain, the hypothesis is that the communication between before and after produces a connection between brain cells. In the exchange of words, children are forced to respond to what they did not predict in terms of "time" and "meaning". In other words, learning the conversation tempo and correspondence to the words will stimulate the brain and enhance language ability.

If "conversation" of word interaction has a big influence on improving the language ability of children, creating a "language shower" by putting on a TV may not have much meaning . Also, if you are crazy about smartphones and ignoring calls from children, it seems that they will pick out the future buds of children.