Parents should not only read to their preschoolers to boost their language development, but engage them in conversations as well.
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Parents should not only read to their preschoolers to boost their language development, but engage them in conversations as well.
Experts often recommend that parents read to their children to enhance their language development. To confirm whether talking to children also helps in developing their language skills, researchers provided 275 families with digital recording devices that captured their preschool children's speech and their exposure to TV and other people's talking.
The children, aged 2 to 4 years old, wore the devices one day per month for six months. Some of the families were followed for 18 months to see how those exposures related to the children's longer-term language development.
It was found that preschoolers who had more conversations with adults tended to score higher on standard language-skills tests than their peers. They also showed stronger language development over the next 18 months.
The above findings suggest that parent-child conversations are important in building language skills.
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