Parental Involvement During Child Language Development
Children between 18 and 36 months of age sleep on average 12.5 hours per night (Galland et al., 2012). With 168 hours available, a child between the ages of 18 and 36 months will spend approximately 87.5 hours sleeping, and 80.5 hours awake each week. Dependent upon each family-specific situation the child may spend a varied percentage of the hours awake in a business-run childcare facility, with a relative providing a childcare environment, at play-dates interacting with other children their age, or with one or more parents. The average children will hear 1,500 words per waking hour, and based on this data the average child will hear nearly 30 million words by the time they are 4 years of age (Hart & Risley, 1995). The averages found by Hart & Risley (1995) were based on data gathered from parents of all walks of life and levels of talkativeness. Dependent on the type of communicator the parents were and how much they interacted with their children, data showed average word ranges from 600 – 2,100 words heard per waking hour, and 13 million – 48 million words heard by the age of 4. The discrepancy between the low average and the high average is significant; however, it is something that parents can have complete control over during their time with their children.
Pregnancy and delivery do not have to be atypical for a child to develop a language delay or disorder. There are various reasons why children develop language disorders, including pre-natal, post-natal, biological dispositions, and chance events. These reasons also encompass environmental factors, such as biological factors, cognitive factors, and behavioral features. Parents may become concerned when it appears that their child is not developing language at a rate similar to his or her peers. What they may not realize is how important their own involvement is in their child’s language development – even before the child begins verbalizing in a meaningful and symbolic way. The following text contains descriptions of research studies conducted to analyze various aspects of child language development, descriptions of language stimulation techniques, and parental involvement and influence on child language development. Following each study description is a summary of “Key Points”, highlighting the key aspects of each study’s findings in an easy to read format. A section titled “Play-Based Direct and Indirect Language Stimulation Approaches” is found on another part of this website, detailing various techniques parents can use at home to encourage their child’s language development.
The following are separate PDFs of literature reviews detailing the importance of parental involvement during the development of a child's language. They include the following authors (and paraphrased descriptions of the research):
- Acredolo, Goodwyn, & Brown (2000): Impact of Symbolic Gesturing on Language Development
- Hart & Risley (1995): Parental Communication Styles
- Paul & Roth (2011): Predicting Outcomes of Communication Delays in Infants and Toddlers and the Overview of Early Intervention
- Roberts & Kaiser (2011): Effects of Parent-Implemented Language Intervention. Roberts & Kaiser (2012): Meta-Analysis of Parent-Implemented Language Interventions
- Yoder & Warren (2001): Parent Response and Prelinguistic Milieu Teaching Methods