Meaningful
gestures and glances may help children learn more words, independent of how
much parents talk to them
The more you
gesture and use nonverbal signals to communicate with your child the bigger
their vocabulary. I love to watch my niece and her husband play and communicate
with their daughter AVA, They make funny faces and use gestures like a greatest
mimes ever, but they do it while they speak to baby AVA. They raise their arms in the air and bring
them down as they sing the theme song to Sponge Bob Square Pants, acting out
each line of the lyrics. According the to latest research that should improve
their child ability to understand language and to increase her vocabulary. Here is the research study I read recently in
one of my favorite monthly magazines Scientific American Mind.
Children with a large vocabulary
experience more success at school and in the workplace. How much parents talk
to their children plays a major role, but new research shows that it is not
just the quantity but also the quality of parental input that matters. Helpful
gestures and meaningful glances may allow kids to grasp concepts more easily
than they otherwise would.
In a study published in June in the Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences USA, Erica Cartmill of the University of Chicago and her
collaborators videotaped parents in their homes as they read books and played
games with their 14- or 18-month-old children. The researchers created hundreds
of 40-second muted video clips of these interactions. Another set of study
participants watched the videos and used clues from the scenes to guess which
nouns the parents were saying at various points in the sequences. The
researchers used the accuracy of these guesses to rate how well a parent used
nonverbal cues, such as gesturing toward and looking at objects, to clarify a
word's meaning.
Cartmill and
her team found that the quality of
parents' nonverbal signaling predicted the size of their children's vocabulary
three years later. Surprisingly, socioeconomic status did not play a
role in the quality of the parents' nonverbal signaling. This result suggests
that the well-known differences in children's vocabulary size across income
levels are likely the result of how much parents talk to their children, which
is known to differ by income, rather than how much nonverbal help they offer
during those interactions.
This article was originally published
with the title "Nonverbal Cues Could Boost Kids' Vocabulary."
Patti Wood, MA, Certified Speaking Professional - The Body Language Expert. For more body language insights go to her website at www.PattiWood.net. Check out Patti's website for her new book "SNAP, Making the Most of First Impressions, Body Language and Charisma" at www.snapfirstimpressions.com. Also check out Patti's YouTube channel at http://youtube.com/user/bodylanguageexpert.
