The purpose of this blog is to pull back the curtain on what we do and to provide the behind the scenes information that you may not know to ask or that you wouldn’t necessarily know to ask as a parent. First off, if I am going to reveal some of our SLP job related deepest darkest secrets:) then I might need to tell you a little about myself.
I started my career as a speech-language pathologist in a medium sized district in the Seattle area. I am still employed with the school district and work in the middle school setting working with students ranging from medically fragile to typical developing peers working on /r/’s and /s/’s. In addition to the school setting, I started my own private practice through the use of teletherapy (check out my blog Tele-What? to learn more). You may say I was a little crazy to start the private practice because it was dreamed up when I was hugely pregnant with my second son. We won’t tell you the secret is it took us two years to get it going and we will just pretend that it really started while I was 7 months pregnant…it’s a better story, right? Fast forward to now, the private practice is growing, I have two sons who are growing way too fast, I purchased a “Boss Lady” shirt to wear around the house because it makes me feel slightly more ‘with it’ in the midst of a hectic life…never mind it’s hilarious because it is far from my personality to wear a shirt like it, and I am greatly enjoying sharing my knowledge to the parents I meet. I feel like I can really relate to the parents I meet because I am in the midst of the hecticness of young children, a full-time job, a husband, and holding down a household, all while navigating the world of making sure my children receive the educational/medical/personal needs that they have. My career has also helped out as we found out my husband has a significant medical issue and we as a family are navigating a world that is new to us as many of you face when your child needs to receive services from a speech-language pathologist or other related service provider. Enough about me…you may learn SLPs can talk, as one teacher jokes with me all the time, “all you do is talk” and I remind him, “it’s kind of an important job description.”;)
So where do we start?? Let’s start with how language in our children begins.
You may think that communication and language start when those highly anticipated first words emerge (ex. Mama, dada), however, the first secret is…
Language and communication starts immediately!
Babies are communicating from the start. Any parent knows that babies cry to let you know there is something that they need, but what a parent might not know is this is in fact language learning. From the time they are born and in the first three months of life, babies startle at loud sounds, start to coo, and start to do that extremely anticipated first smile!
The first year of life is an amazing language rich time. Babies go from crying to cooing to talking in their first year! It’s is absolutely amazing how much they are learning. So, what can you do as a parent to foster their language learning? Talk, talk, talk!!!! It is well known in our SLP community that the more words they hear (from a human and not TV…more on this later), the better prediction of their future language skills. I can remember perfectly a time with my first born in Fred Meyers. I was grocery shopping and my son must have been about 8 weeks old. I was going down the canned food aisle and I was narrating (aka explaining) everything I was doing. “Mommy is trying to think of what I need, oh maybe we should get tomato soup today…”. If there was someone walking by, they may have thought I was a little interesting, but I knew as an SLP the best thing I could do for my son’s language skills was to talk, talk, talk.
A study by Hart and Risley (1995) looked at the amount of words heard by a child and their language skills in a longitudinal study. This means that they looked at the development over a long period of time and not just weeks. They had three groups: professional educated parents, working class parents, and welfare families. What they concluded was, “the more parents talked to their children, the faster the children’s vocabularies were growing and the higher the children’s IQ test scores at age three and later. As well as, a child with “talkative” parents heard 45 million words spoken to them during their first four years, while a child with “taciturn” (reserved or uncommunicative) parents heard 13 million words, resulting in a cumulative 30-million-word gap after 4 years.
There is some criticism on this research and the methodology used, however, if we look at the information and a few key take aways we can increase our knowledge in language acquisition. From an SLP standpoint, we need to take in consideration the socioeconomic background of a child when looking at if there is a language disorder when comparing to a child’s peers. As parents, the take away is that talking to your child and providing them with high amounts of quality language is important for their language acquisition. However, do not give yourself a hard time if you are in a lower socioeconomic bracket, are a single parent, work long hours, etc. What you can do is, read your child a book before bed, narrate what you are doing while you are making dinner, grocery shopping, getting ready in the morning, doing chores, etc. To start out, pick one part of your day to narrate and have fun!
(Hart & Risley, 1995) Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children
My second secret to reveal is… devices and TV’s are not good language learning tools:
As an SLP I am stunned to see baby items, especially infant items, with an iPad mount. As a parent, I get it! I am known to sit my kids, even my two-year-old, (which research suggest should not receive screen time) in front of the TV because mommy needs some sanity while trying to hold all of life’s needs together. Here is a snip it from two research studies to help you understand the importance of adult led conversations on language learning:
Study 1:
Patricia Kuhl, a leading researcher in the field of language acquisition, presented 9-month old American babies with an unfamiliar language—Mandarin Chinese. In one experiment, babies were allowed to interact with a real, live Mandarin speaker. After 12 sessions, these babies showed an enhanced ability to discriminate certain speech sounds that are common in the Mandarin language.
But when the experiment was repeated with another set of infants who watched only televised language tutors, the results were different. The babies exposed to Mandarin via TV were no more likely than control infants to discriminate Mandarin speech sounds (Kuhl et al 2003).
In both experiments, the Mandarin speakers gazed directly at the babies, discussed toys, and used that special, “baby-friendly” style of speaking known as “infant-directed speech.” The difference between experiments was the social factor. As Kuhl notes, “infants are apparently not computational automatons—rather, they might need a social tutor when learning a natural language” (Kuhl 2004).
Kuhl PK. 2004. Early language acquisition: Cracking the speech code. Nature Neuroscience 5: 831-843.
Kuhl PK, Tsao FM, and Liu HM. 2003. Foreign-language experience in infancy: effects of short-term exposure and social interaction on phonetic learning. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 100(15):9096-101.
Study 2:
Results:
The average daily TV watching time of 2-year-old Korean toddlers in this study was 1.21 hours. After all confounding variables were adjusted, toddlers with over 2 hours and less than 3 hours of TV watching time had 2.7 times more risk (RR = 2.74, 95% CI: 1.13–6.65) of language delay than those with less than 1 hour of TV watching time. Those with more than 3 hours of TV watching time had approximately 3 times (RR = 3.03, 95% CI: 1.12–8.21) more risk (p<0.05). In addition, the risk of language delay increased proportionately with the increase in toddlers’ TV watching time (p = 0.004).
Conclusion:
Two-year-old Korean toddlers’ average daily TV watching time of more than 2 hours was related with language delay.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4365020/
So…what should you do from a SLPs perspective? Limit the screen time and try to avoid screen time for children younger than two. This is also consistent with recent recommendations from the medical community. Also, be the social communicator with your child as research suggests this is important for language acquisition.
If you are concerned about your child’s language development, please contact your pediatrician and check into getting a referral for speech therapy. Early intervention is key! Here is a link to a checklist to determine if there are early ‘warning’ signs that may warrant further investigation. If you check ‘no’s and your child is past the age indicated in the category, please contact your pediatrician or contact me and I can help you navigate if this should be looked into further.
https://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/speech-and-language
As always, your dedicated SLP,
Dayna Sanders, MA, CCC-SLP
Other Resources on language development:
https://www.linguisticsociety.org/resource/faq-how-do-we-learn-language
