You have been invited to be a research assistant for a study that will attempt to improve infants' language acquisition. Based on what you have read in this chapter, explain what behaviors you would want parents and infants to engage in and why those behaviors would speed language acquisition.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Student examples will vary. A sample answer follows. I would encourage parents to talk to and play with their children as much as possible. Hart and Risley estimated that parents say 300 to 400 things to their children each hour. The more verbal stimulation and social interaction infants get, the more likely they are to acquire language quickly.
Also, I would encourage parents to use simplified speech when talking to their infants. According to Dominey and Dodane, speaking slowly and exaggeratedly to infants helps them learn language.
Finally, I would instruct inexperienced parents in the typical benchmarks for language acquisition. If parents know that children typically are not able to form full sentences and questions until about age three, for example, then they will not become frustrated when their two-year-old fails to do so.