Why Parents Talk To Their Toddlers Essay

4. State three reasons parents should talk to their infants.
• Adults talk to and interact with infants from the day they are born. Parents should talk to their infants for many different reasons. Some of these reasons consist of vocabulary development, development in conversational settings, and eye contact / shared reference. These reasons create a positive relationship with infants’ use of vocabulary as toddlers and also create meaningful content of interactions within conversations.

5. Explain how adult-to-child speech is adapted to the needs of the toddler.
• Adult-to-child speech is adapted to the needs of a toddler because this speech is usually shorter in length and less complex grammatically. There is some indication that mothers’

Explain why eye contact and shared reference are critical to a child’s acquisition of conceptual knowledge.
• Eye contact and shared reference are critical to a child’s acquisition of conceptual knowledge because this interaction pattern underlies symbol formation (the association between the word and the referent). As a child matures cognitively, the word (verbal symbol) for an object elicits the concept without the presences of the actual referent and eye contact remains important to early communicative

When adults read to their children, they can adjust their comments and questions to reflect the linguistic and cognitive levels of their children. When reading with younger children, they focus on vocabulary development. When children are being read to by adults, the can acquire new vocabulary, become engaged in a book by asking questions or answering questions, and learn book handling skills. Toddlers can also talk about the illustrations that are in the book and can be asked questions about the illustrations in order to express their syntactic knowledge by using phases and short sentences when responding to these