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Analysis of recordings from children’s homes reveals that certain types of voice interactions between adults and children are associated with a larger childhood vocabulary. Lukas Lopez of the University of California, Merced and colleagues present these findings in the open access journal PLOS ONE on November 25.
Previous research has shown that, at home, face-to-face voice interactions with caregivers who engage in child-directed language promote children’s vocabulary development. Laboratory studies suggest that different types of infant vocalizations and caregiver responses may have different effects on vocabulary, but few investigations have attempted to translate these findings into a realistic home setting.
To fill this knowledge gap, Lopez and colleagues closely analyzed portions of one-day audio recordings from the homes of 53 13-month-olds. The recordings were captured from wearable LENA recording devices, which are widely used to measure voice interactions with children. The researchers also asked the children’s caregivers to report the size of their vocabulary.
Statistical analysis revealed relationships between vocabulary size and different types of interactions captured in the recordings. In particular, children tended to have a wider vocabulary if they produced a greater number of word-like stammering sounds and, in return, received a greater amount of responses from adults that incorporated sounds similar to their stammering. The authors speculate that this may be due to the fact that adults find it easier to respond meaningfully to stammering that sounds closer to real words; Adult imitation of the infant’s babble (with reuse and expansion into whole sentences by the adult) can also help children develop a broader vocabulary.
These new findings are in line with previous findings from similar studies performed in laboratory settings and could help inform the development of new strategies to assist children struggling with vocabulary development.
Future investigations could expand this study by incorporating vocabulary measures that are not based on caregiver relationships, or by following children over time to observe the long-term impact of different types of voice interactions.
The authors add: “By simply talking to your child, we have found that parents who respond to their children’s chatter with word and sentence corrections have children who say more words.”
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Quote: Lopez LD, Walle EA, Pretzer GM, Warlaumont AS (2020) Adult responses to infantile prelinguistic vocalizations are associated with infant vocabulary: a home observation study. PLoS ONE 15 (11): e0242232. https: /
Financing: ASW’s contribution was supported by the National Science Foundation (BCS-1529127; SMA-1539129) and the James S. McDonnell Foundation Scholar Award in Understanding Human Cognition.
Conflicting interests: The authors stated that there are no competing interests.
In your coverage, use this URL to provide access to the free article available in PLOS ONE: https: /
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