Repeating words to infants boosts future language skills

While hearing your parents rehash the same old jokes and anecdotes in adulthood can be downright annoying, a new study reveals that repeating words to babies can pay off in their toddler years and beyond.

Researchers from the University of Maryland and Harvard University have released findings showing that the way parents communicate with their child at seven months old, specifically the parents' use of repetition, has an effect on the size of the child's vocabulary as a toddler.

"Parents who repeat words more often to their infants have children with better language skills a year and a half later," co-author of the study Rochelle Newman, professor and chair of UMD's Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences (HESP), said in a media release. 

"A lot of recent focus has been on simply talking more to your child — but how you talk to your child matters. It isn't just about the number of words."

Researchers tracked the child-directed speech of parents to their prelinguistic infants, measuring the tots' ability to understand speech at seven months, and then later reviewing the child's vocabulary at age two.

The toddlers who presented with stronger language skills differed in two ways: their parents had repeated words to them more often, and they had a better grasp of what was being said as infants.

"It takes two to tango," said another of the study's authors Dr Nan Bernstein Ratner, Professor of Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences at the University of Maryland.

"Both the child and the parent play a role in the child's later language outcomes, and our study is the first to show that."

Researchers are confident that families will immediate benefit from the findings, which encourage parents to consciously repeat words to young infants to maximise language development benefits.

This study appears online in advance of its publication in the Journal of Child Language.