development of language

Defrazzle and reconnect: tips for families to talk to each other to stimulate language development

12 October 2015 by David Kinnane Leave a Comment

The irony of spending time away from my family to write this post about increasing communication at home isn’t lost on me. Nor is the truth about how hard it is to do this stuff in practice!

I suspect our family is fairly typical for Sydney. Both parents work, juggling child-minding with help from family. Kids at different schools, with different sports and other activities. Homework. Volunteer work. Kids’ friends’ birthdays every second weekend – sometimes more than one. Visiting grandparents whenever we can. Weekends eaten up with chores we couldn’t squeeze into the week. Criss-crossing Sydney, always stuck in traffic. Always en route to or from somewhere.

Every now and then, when we discover a magical gap in our schedule, all we want to do is come home, switch on the TV, distract the kids with iPads and do nothing at all. Now, once in while, that’s perfectly fine. But, too often, too easily, that once in a while becomes the norm, and we stop talking to each other about anything other than ‘disciplinary matters’ and the logistics of the next event in our overstuffed-calendar.

Why does it matter?

As we’ve previously said, children are hard-wired to learn language. They don’t need flashcards, educational apps or expensive training systems, and they don’t learn language efficiently from passively watching screens. Instead, the key in how children learn to talk is obvious, free and simple: talking with them. Conversation.

Talk contributes not just to language development, but to children’s expanding knowledge of the world and their willingness to talk to others. Studies show that children exposed to fewer words, and a higher percentage of negative statements (e.g. “No. Don’t do that, Stop that!”), tend to have lower vocabularies and IQ scores (e.g. Hart & Risely, 1999). In other words, the amount and quality of talking with your kids can have lasting impact on children’s language development – especially during their first three years when they are most dependent on you doing most of the conversational heavy-lifting.

So how can we do it in the real world?

Here are 8 ideas to kindle or rekindle real communication with your family. None is rocket science. But they all take conscious thought and commitment to pull off:

1. Eat together: even if it’s just for 20 minutes and not every day. Make it a priority. Turn off your TV, phones and other devices. Talk about daily events, share ups and downs. Take it in turns. Ask specific questions, not simply “how was your day today?”. Studies show that families who eat together as a family have children who have fewer problems when those teenage years hit.

2. Host a monthly family games night: take it in turns to choose the board game. Start with all those games you’ve received for kids’ birthdays and never used.

3. Set a weekly reading night: turn off the TV, turn on some music (traditional jazz is a big hit in my family), get everyone to sit in a room together (any room will do) and read anything they want for pleasure. Paper books only. No school texts or academic papers allowed. Leave plenty of time to discuss what you’ve read and learned.

4. Choose a walk morning/night: take advantage of daylight saving to explore your local neighbourhood. Take in the sights, sounds, smells, and textures all around you. Discuss anything and everything – bugs, rocks, leaves, flowers, overgrown hedges, unpainted fences, poorly-crafted graffiti, roadworks, and whether Mrs Carruthers down the road is a witch or just misunderstood.

5. Family membership: whether it’s a local footy club or the Australian Symphony Orchestra, subscribe to something that will get you all out and about at least a few times a year.

6. Public transport day: choose a day a month – we always go for Sunday – and catch a train, bus and/or ferry to somewhere you’ve never been before. Don’t over-research it. Just go somewhere, then look around.

7. Family project: now, before you roll your eyes, it doesn’t have to be lame. Nor does it have to be expensive. Design and plant a new garden bed. Cook a meal – everyone contributing ingredients. Corral all those thousands of digital photos on your phones into a personal website or an album-gift for the relatives.

8. Kids’ choice play: as a Hanen-certified speech pathologist, I would be remiss if I didn’t recommend getting down on the floor to the kids’ eye level and following their lead as they choose and play a game of their choice. Following a child’s lead is a powerful way to help him or her initiate interactions; and children are more likely to learn language talking about things of interest to them. Allow your children free play time – not everything has to have an educational purpose.

Principal source: Hirsh-Pasek, K. & Golinkoff, R.M., with Eyer, D (2003). Einstein Never Used Flash Cards: how our children really learn – and why they need to play more and memorise less. Rodale, New York, New York.

Banter Speech & Language

Banter Speech & Language is an independent firm of speech pathologists for adults and children. We help clients in our local area, including Concord, Rhodes, Strathfield and all other suburbs of Sydney’s Inner West.

Banter Speech & Language is owned and managed by David Kinnane, a Hanen- and LSVT LOUD-certified speech-language pathologist with post-graduate training in the Spalding Method for literacy, the Lidcombe and Camperdown Programs for stuttering, and Voicecraft for voice disorders. David is also a Certified PESL Instructor for accent modification.

David holds a Master of Speech Language Pathology from the University of Sydney, where he was a Dean’s Scholar. David is a Practising Member of Speech Pathology Australia and a Certified Practising Speech Pathologist (CPSP).

Are language development and motor development related?

22 June 2015 by David Kinnane Leave a Comment

Why do speech pathologists ask questions about motor development when assessing children for language disorders?

Many children with language disorders also have a history of motor difficulties, e.g. delays in sitting up independently, crawling and/or walking (Hill, 2001). But academic researchers in language development often exclude children with motor delays from their studies of children with language disorders and even their definitions of specific language disorder (e.g. Leonard, 2000).

Like most speech pathologists in practice, I ask parents and carers about their child’s developmental milestones as part of a language assessment. Among other things, I want to know when their child first sat up, crawled and walked.

Why?

1. Motor development does not cause language to emerge

In the 1920s-1940s, a group of researchers called the “maturationists” thought that motor and language skills developed in parallel and that language emerged as motor skills matured (e.g. Gessell, 1929). In the 1960s, this view was largely discredited, with researchers demonstrating that language learning is fundamentally different from motor development and that the onset of language is not simply a consequence of improved motor control (e.g Lenneberg, 1967).

2. Language and motor development are not completely unrelated

More recent studies have suggested that co-occurring motor and language difficulties may have a common underlying genetic basis, with the genes that put a child at risk for communicative impairment also affecting motor development (e.g. Bishop, 2002). This view is supported by research on children at risk for autism spectrum disorder and dyslexia, for whom attainment of early motor milestones like sitting up often lags behind that of typically developing children (e.g. Iverson & Wozniak, 2007, Viholainen et al., 2006).

3. New motor skills can contribute to language development

In the last decade, researchers like Dr Jana Iverson have undertaken research and reinterpreted older studies to argue persuasively that new motor skills can play an important role language development:

A. New motor skills give babies more opportunities to practice skills that are relevant to language development. For example:

Rhythmic hand and arm movements allow babies to practice rhythmically organised, tightly timed actions of the sort required for babbling. Studies show that these hand and arm movements emerge usually two or three weeks prior to “reduplicated babble” (e.g. mamama, bababa, dadadada) (e.g. Oller & Eilers, 1988).
Before children start to talk, they tend to take things apart (e.g. pulling nesting cups apart). With the advent of first words, putting things together becomes more frequent. Children also begin to put objects together in different ways (e.g. putting a bead inside a nesting cup). As a child’s vocabulary grows, children tend to make use of specific features of objects (e.g. putting a bead on a string, rather than putting it in a nesting cup). This may reflect advances in cognition that underpins both motor and language advances. But it may also suggest that, as a child develops motor skills, children are presented with more opportunities to notice specific features of the things they play with, e.g. that a string fits into the hole in a bead. As they make use of these features, they give specific meanings to objects – an important skill underpinning language.
First words are often tightly bound to action. Children are highly likely to name objects as they act on them (e.g. Rodgon et al, 1977). Children’s early words tend to refer to small, easily manipulated objects (e.g. Bates et al, 1979). Between 9 months and 12 months of age, children start to use “recognitory gestures” (e.g. putting a toy phone receiver to his/her ear, or putting an empty cup to his/her lips) and first words at around the same time. This suggests that naming (in gestures and in words) may be born in motor action.

B. New motor skills change the way babies interact with objects like toys, other people and their own bodies in ways that are relevant to language development. For example:

when a child is able to sit up on her own, she discovers new possibilities for vocal production. She can make more sounds because sitting up increases lung capacity, and repositions the main “articulators” particularly the lower jaw and tongue, which are both relevant to consonant-vowel combinations (e.g. MacNeilage & Davis, 2000). Speech patterns thus become more complex; and more like adult speech, e.g. more word-like utterances and several utterances within a single breathe group (e.g. Tingling, 1981).
between 6 and 9 months of age, children tend to explore objects by putting them in their mouths. This period coincides with when children start producing consonants (which require a degree of vocal tract closure). “Mouthing” objects may thus help children to learn different postures with their teeth, lips, tongue relevant to producing new speech sounds (Ragan & Iverson, 2007).
when a child starts to crawl, they are more likely to encounter danger (e.g. things they can swallow or fall down/off). Parents respond to this by communicating more – often loudly and with feeling – to try to protect their child. Children thus gain experience attending to people and things located at a distance, e.g. by turning to look at a parent as the parent gestures toward the stairs, then looking at the stairs and back at the parent (e.g. Campos et al, 2000).
Studies show that, at 13 months of age, walkers carry objects more frequently that crawlers. They are also more likely to share objects by moving to their mothers and holding the object out for inspection (Karasik et al al, 2011). Walking provides walkers with more opportunity than crawling to access things that are far away, to use their hands to carry objects, and to see and locate objects and people in their surroundings. Infants are more likely to learn words when their attention is already focused on what they are ‘naming’ (Tomasello & Farrar, 1986). Retrieving and sharing objects with parents may thus provide rich opportunities for a walking child to learn language.

4. Motor skills are not essential for language development

None of the examples above mean that you need good motor skills to develop good language. Slow motor development doesn’t mean that language development will also be slow. There are lots of ways for children to learn language that don’t rely on motor skills.

Clinical bottom line

The relationship between motor development and language development is complex.

Motor development doesn’t cause language to emerge. But motor skills are one of several sets of abilities that are involved in language development. While motor skills normally play a role in language development, they are not necessary. If a child’s motor skills are delayed, they can still learn language.

New motor skills, such as sitting upright, crawling and walking, can provide lots of opportunities for a child to practice and refine skills that are important for language development. A speech pathologist who is up to speed on the research will view delayed motor milestones as a risk factor for language delay, in part because it may mean the child has had fewer opportunities to practice and refine some of the skills relevant for language development.

Principal source: Iverson, J.M. (2010). Developing language in a developing body: the relationship between motor development and language development. Journal of Child Language, 37, 229-261.

Image: http://bit.ly/1THvfM0

Banter Speech & Language

Mark Pagel – how language transformed humanity

3 January 2015 by David Kinnane Leave a Comment

Mark Pagel is an evolutionary biologist based in the United Kingdom. We’re attracted to his conviction and the humanism on which his theory appears to be based.

Key turns of phrase, ideas and theories we took away from this TED talk include:

speech as “discrete pulses of sound” used to transfer ideas via language from human to human;

language as “genes talking” – e.g. a baby hollering to its mother to communicate hunger seen, from an evolutionary point of view, as a mechanism by which the baby gets food to come to him or her;

language as potentially subversive, as reflected in the story of the Tower of Babel and in laws about censorship, defamation, profanities in public, as well as taboo words;

the shocking reality that people, throughout history, have been imprisoned or even killed over a “puff of air emanating from [their] mouths”;

humans unique ability to learn new skills by watching and copying others, to accumulate knowledge and to benefit from other people’s inventions and ideas – what anthropologists call “social learning”;

social learning as “visual theft”, and the dilemma humans faced as a result, either to:
- retreat into small groups to protect their ideas; or
- co-operate and exchange ideas through language;

about 200,000 years ago, humans elected to co-operate and this triggered an explosion in the spread of humanity across the globe in parallel with the development of languages;

even the simplest acts of exchange require language;

there may be 8,000 active languages on earth. Paradoxically, some of the greatest diversity of languages occur when people are the most packed together, e.g. in Papua New Guinea;

individual languages may have evolved to allow groups to “ring themselves off” from nearby outsiders to defend the group’s intellectual property;

that the European Union spends more than $1 billion on translating the 23 official languages used by the 27 member states;

whether, in the age of Facebook and globalisation, we can afford different languages, and whether a single language is inevitable; and

genes don’t of themselves explain the development of language, although important research into genes like FoxP2 and its potential role in the fine oral motor control needed for speech continues.

Banter Speech & Language

Can language development tips help ESL learners learn English?

27 October 2014 by David Kinnane Leave a Comment

Living and working in the multicultural area that is the Inner West of Sydney means we often work with children who speak English as a second (or third or fourth) language.

We’ve written about the difference between true language delays and English as a second language (ESL) issues. In our experience, some children have both issues. We’ve also dedicated several posts to explaining evidence-based principles for language therapy for children with language delays. But can these principles also assist children with ESL issues?

A team of researchers from the United States says “yes”.

In a paper published in August 2014, Haruka Konishi from the University of Delaware and her colleagues identify 6 principles of language development that have implications for how we should go about helping second language learners. The paper uses a fair amount of abstract language and jargon. Paraphrasing its core message into Plain English, the researchers advocate building 6 language development elements into ESL teaching:

1. Increase the amount of language the child hears. For ESL learners, more exposure to fluent English is more likely to help them acquire English skills than less exposure. This does NOT mean that you should stop speaking with your child in his or her first language – especially if you don’t speak fluent English yourself. But, if there are opportunities in your local area for your child to participate in English speaking playgroups, sports teams, or other social activities where English will be spoken by native speakers, seize them!

2. Use the child’s interests to facilitate their learning. One reason our client questionnaire contains lots of questions about your child’s interests and hobbies is that it allows us to tailor therapy activities to their interests. Research supports the idea that appropriately aligning therapy to your child’s natural interests is more likely to lead to better language outcomes, which makes sense for ESL learners too.

3. Teach the child by interacting with him or her. Don’t just rely on passive drilling techniques like flashcards. We’ve written about the limits of flashcards and worksheets. It’s far better to help children with language delays, then to constantly test and re-test them. Play-based activities that capture children’s attention through action can often give children more opportunity to acquire language in a functional way that transfers more readily to the “real world”. Teaching key verbs through action involving the child is a good example of this.

4. Do activities that require your child to communicate with you meaningfully. Don’t just drill grammar in a vacuum. Set up the environment so your child has an incentive to use the target words and grammar in a way that has some meaning to them in the real world (e.g. requesting something he wants but can’t reach, or describing something only she can see).

5. Children need lots of different examples from different people in different places to learn. Hearing different words and grammar used by several fluent English speakers in different contexts helps children learn language.

6. New words (vocabulary) and grammar (syntax) should be worked on together. Learning more vocabulary enhances a child’s knowledge of syntax/grammar, and vice versa.

The authors conclude by asserting that “putting these principles into practice will increase language competencies on ESL children and will thus put them on the path to greater academic success”. In my view, most of the principles summarised above are sensible and are unlikely to detract from any ESL program. Most of these principles are no doubt part of most education and speech pathology professionals’ practice.

It’s worth remembering that ESL issues and language delays are very different beasts, even if they can present with similar features in English. This means that treatments that target language development may not always achieve the same results for children who are not language delayed.

And, at the risk of repeating myself, this study does not support sacrificing a child’s first language at home to improve his or her English skills.

Principal source: Konishi, H., Kanero, J., Freeman, M, Michnick, G., & Hish-Pasek, K. (2014). Six Principles of Language Development: Implications for Second Language Learners. Developmental Neuropsychology, 39(5), 404-420.

Image: http://tinyurl.com/m3ardye

Banter Speech & Language

development of language

Why does it matter?

So how can we do it in the real world?

Why do speech pathologists ask questions about motor development when assessing children for language disorders?

1. Motor development does not cause language to emerge

2. Language and motor development are not completely unrelated

3. New motor skills can contribute to language development

4. Motor skills are not essential for language development

Clinical bottom line

Footer

Join the conversation