Want to Boost Your Preschooler's Vocabulary? Start Talking

Thursday July 2, 2009

As parents, we want to do all we can to give our children an academic edge. So we spend lots of money and time with flashcards and workbooks and computer programs and educational DVDs in the hopes of increasing the brain power of our little one.

What if there was a simpler answer?

There is -- and it doesn't require you to open your wallet. In fact all you need is time.

A new study, Teaching by Listening: The Importance of Adult-Child Conversations to Language Development, published earlier this week in Pediatrics found that while reading to a young child certainly helps language development, so does just talking to them. Researchers, led by Dr. Frederick J. Zimmerman of the University of California Los Angeles discovered that having parents who talked with their children were as much a critical part in language development as reading to them.

The research found that preschoolers who engaged in conversations with adults frequently often scored higher on standard language-skills tests and had strong language development. The study also found the more television that a child watched each day, the lower their language test scores.