Interventions aimed at increasing parents' verbal engagement with their infants to strengthen processing skills and vocabulary growth¶

Strategy · All strategies
Evidence · 6 claims (6 for) · 1 study (1 associational), q3 · 1 of 1 report an effect size · 6 claims rest on one study

Description¶

The article proposes that because more child-directed speech both provides word-learning models and sharpens infants' lexical processing, interventions targeting caregivers' verbal engagement could alter developmental trajectories. It states that "interventions aimed at increasing parents' verbal engagement with their infants have the potential to change the course of vocabulary growth and, in turn, to improve later outcomes for disadvantaged children." This follows from its findings that child-directed speech predicted processing efficiency and vocabulary, with processing efficiency mediating the vocabulary link.

Design Implications¶

Context¶

Requirements¶

• Caregivers must increase speech addressed directly to the child, since overheard speech was unrelated to vocabulary outcomes in this study.

Constraints¶

• The recommendation is inferred from correlational evidence; verbal engagement was not experimentally manipulated in this study.

Target Learners¶

• infants from low-SES Spanish-speaking families

Target Learning Goals¶

• early expressive vocabulary growth
• real-time speech-processing efficiency

Claims¶

• Child-directed speech varies dramatically among low-SES families, up to an 18-fold difference, largely independent of maternal education and overall talkativeness [+W]
• Child-directed speech predicts real-time language-processing efficiency at 19 and 24 months and explains gains in efficiency [+M]
• Amount of child-directed speech at 19 months predicts expressive vocabulary size at 24 months in low-SES Spanish-learning infants [+M]
• The mediation of child-directed speech effects through processing efficiency holds after controlling for knowledge of the target words and excluding at-chance performers [+M]
• Overheard adult speech is unrelated to 24-month vocabulary, unlike child-directed speech [+W]
• Processing efficiency at 19 months mediates the relation between child-directed speech and 24-month vocabulary [+M]

Related Strategies¶

• Shared book reading as a potential intervention for increasing lexical diversity in young children's learning environments

Examples¶

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Key Sources¶

• Weisleder Adriana, Fernald Anne. (2013). Talking to children matters: Early language experience strengthens processing and builds vocabulary. Psychological Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797613488145