Want to boost your preschoolers’ language skills? Reminisce with them
Talking about the “good old days” could be the key to boosting a preschooler’s language skills, a recent study shows.
Reminiscing about past events with preschoolers presents young kids with high-quality speech from parents as good as or better than sharing a book or playing with toys, researchers found.
“Talk in reminiscing is characterized by longer and more complex sentences than talk in many other settings,” said senior study author Erika Hoff, a professor of psychology at Florida Atlantic University.
For the study, researchers observed Danish parents as they interacted with their 3- to 5-year-old children either by reminiscing, sharing a wordless picture book or building with LEGO bricks.
Analysis of conversations from those activities revealed how parental speech differed in each, as well as how much the kids spoke in response.
Reminiscing compared to toy play produced parental speech higher in grammatical complexity and prompted more utterances from children.
Researchers also found no difference between mothers and fathers when it came to the speech they shared with kids.
The study shows that the activity a parent and child are sharing matters when it comes to demonstrating language, researchers said.
“I would suggest to parents that it’s not just important to spend time with your children. What you’re doing when you’re spending time with them also is important,” Hoff said in a university news release.
“It’s good to carve out some time just to have a conversation,” she added. “If you like reading books, read books. If you would rather talk about planning the future or talking about the past, do that. Make time to have conversations with your children.”
The study was recently published in the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology.