With a child’s oral vocabulary at age two (speaking & understanding) predicting academic and behavioural outcomes in later years, parents can ask how to teach their baby about sound and meaning. Talking to your baby [with hearing devices on] is the secret!
Toddler Babble Is Language Progress
By some estimates, over 90 percent of a child’s vocabulary is developed just by engaging with their parents — so the single best thing an adult can do is talk. A lot. Talk with your child, even if she hasn’t yet reached language milestones that would enable her to respond.
Apps like BabyTalk let parents track their baby’s word development and vocabulary level, and to share this detail with health visitors and/or other practitioners. Consequently, we can expect two year olds to have bigger vocabularies for receptive and expressive language.
Two-Year-Olds With Larger Vocabularies
1. Children who knew more words at 24 months scored higher on reading and math tests in kindergarten than those with smaller vocabularies as toddlers.
2. Knowing more words as a 2-year-old enables children to better understand math lessons with their larger vocabulary and awareness of early maths concepts (patterns, quantities).
3. Children with larger early vocabularies were less often described by teachers as showing problematic behaviours, better at regulating their attention and persisting at difficult tasks.
Building Older Toddlers’ Brains
Vroom is one app that sends parents daily tips to build their toddlers’ brains. For example, if you tell the app you’re outside walking with the children, prompts for playing word games en route will be sent to your phone. Similarly, if you instruct the app that you’re driving in the car with the kids, the app will send tips for conversational exchanges as you drive.
