High Quality Vocab Cues from Parents Predict Better Comprehension Among Their Children

“Be careful, Ben, that’s fragile.”

Liz Giron, Chicago mother to her three-year-old Benjamin, says her son first learned the word “fragile” from a song on Sesame Street. “But I reinforced it by letting him ‘help’ with the dishes and reminding him to be careful because the dishes were fragile.”

The way Giron reinforced the learning of the new word was by using a socio-visual cue. This technique may simply seem natural to her, but new research suggests that the use of effective cues actually creates positive learning environments for children. A paper published in the July 2013 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that 12-18 month old children who repeatedly receive higher quality cues from their parents have higher levels of vocabulary acquisition by the time they enter pre-school three years later.

Erica A. Cartmilla of the University of Chicago and her team measured the quality of parents’ cues by videotaping parents interacting with their children, who were between 14 and 18 months. Researchers then selected ten to forty second video clips that showed a parent saying a concrete noun to a child. When showing these clips to test subjects, the concrete noun was bleeped. The frequency with which subjects correctly identified the muted word determined the effectiveness of parents’ cues and thus the quality of that particular learning opportunity. When researchers reviewed children’s vocabulary scores three years later, they concluded that children whose parents were rated highly demonstrated higher vocabulary comprehension.

Previous research has focused on the quantity of words addressed to children as a significant determinant of vocabulary acquisition. However, because language learners do not need repeated exposure to a word to learn its meaning, the connection between word quantity and vocabulary acquisition has not been as intuitive as researchers would have liked. Cartmilla’s new research on the quality of parents’ cues, then, better aligns with common sense. A child will, for example, more likely learn what “golden retriever” means in the presence of a real golden retriever than without a real-life experience of it.

Because, in reality, children will experience both the quality and quantity of their parents’ words, Cartmilla and her team looked at the interaction between word quantity and quality of the learning experience. They found that both are associated with higher vocabulary comprehension at age three, but the number of quality learning experiences may matter more than the number of words children hear.

A final interesting result is that, while higher word quantity is correlated with higher family socioeconomic status, parents’ cues are not associated with family socioeconomic status. Parents who used effective cues were distributed evenly across demographics.

This holds important promise for policymakers. Since the quality of these learning environments for children is not characteristic of a particular income or cultural group, it may be more easily improved than the sheer quantity of words parents use (which, as mentioned, is directly linked to socioeconomic status). A strategy for improving children’s vocabulary across income levels may therefore be as simple as a public education campaign to remind parents to use cues and real-life experiences when teaching new words to children.

The more parents view their children as conversational partners and intentionally act out or make connections to new words for them, the brighter these children’s futures may be.

Article Source: Erica A. Cartmilla, Benjamin F. Armstrong, Lila R. Gleitman, Susan Goldin-Meadow, Tamara N. Medina, and John C. Trueswell, “Quality of Early Parent Input Predicts Child Vocabulary 3 Years Later,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 110, No. 28 (July 2013): 11278-83.

Feature Photo: cc/(Kamau Akabueze)