Why the way we talk to children really matters
促进孩子大脑发育 每位父母都要学习的对话技巧

Conversation runs out quickly when talking to a newborn. They don’t say anything back. They won’t groan when you tell them it’s going to rain, or smile when you tell a joke.

新生儿刚出生，你和他/她说话不会得到任何反应。你说天要下雨了，新生儿不会发出叹息之声；你讲一个笑话，他们也不会被逗笑。

At the same time, those early weeks are shrouded in a cloud of exhaustion. My baby didn’t sleep when he was meant to, which meant I couldn’t either. It’s no wonder that conversation wasn’t exactly flowing.

在这个宝宝新生的最初几周时间，父母往往累得筋疲力竭。我的宝宝本该睡觉却不睡，搞得为人母的我也无法安然入眠。所以也自然无心情与体力同我的新生宝宝说话交流。

It starts to feel easier when they become more responsive, but it still didn’t come naturally to me to “coo” in response to my baby’s gurgles, or speak in “baby-ese” with big, loud, slow vowel sounds. I would often look in awe as other, seemingly more parental types, would have whole conversations with my baby.

到宝宝开始对外界有一些反应之时，与宝宝的交流变得比较容易，但我仍然无法很自然地对我宝宝的咯咯之声回之“咕咕”之声，或者以大而响亮并且缓慢的“童言童语”与宝宝说话。当有人更像为人父母者与我的宝宝说个不停之时，我会感到敬畏不已。

A few months in, as babies start to respond more with babbles and giggles, it becomes easier. But studies show that some parent still do not speak to their children much, and that this can have lasting negative consequences – consequences even visible in the brain.

几个月过去，婴儿已能够在逗弄他们时用牙牙之声和咯咯的笑声来回应，与婴孩的沟通变得更加容易。但研究显示，此时仍有父母很少与他们的宝宝说话，但欠缺对话可能会对孩子产生久远的负面后果，其不良影响甚至在大脑的发育中也显而易见。

It was in the mid-1990s that a worrying discovery was made about a stark difference in language achievement in children. Researchers Betty Hart and Todd Risley went into homes of families from different socioeconomic groups, spending an hour each month recording them over more than two years.

在1990年代中期，人们发现了一个令人担忧的现象：儿童的语言学习能力差异极大。研究人员波蒂·哈特（Betty Hart）和托德·雷斯利（Todd Risley）用两年多时间上门访问不同社会经济群体的家庭，每个月摄录这些家庭的活动一个小时。

Analysing the data, they found that children from the poorest backgrounds heard one-third as many words per hour as those from higher income backgrounds. Scaling up, they proposed that by the time the children were four years old, there would be a 30-million word gap between children from poor backgrounds compared to those in wealthier, professional households.

这两名研究者分析其收集的资料后，发现最贫穷家庭的孩子每小时听到的单词数量是高收入家庭孩子的三分之一。他们据此认为，到这些孩子四岁的时候，贫困家庭的孩子与富裕及专业人士家庭的孩子之间会有3000万词汇量的差距。

This study was far from ideal. It had a small sample size, and it’s not clear if the word gap is as large as the researchers first suggested. Other critics have since shown that low-income children hear many more words than Hart and Risley reported when factoring in language they overhear from conversations both inside and outside the home. Responding to these critics, another group highlighted that “young children do not profit from overheard speech about topics of interest to adults”.

但这项研究远非理想，因为调查取样范围很小，而且所谓词汇量的“差距”是否真如两位研究者所说会大到如此之地步，也不清楚。其他批评者随后指出，低收入家庭的孩子在家中和家外听到大人谈话而接触语言之时，所听到的单词要比哈特和雷斯利两人的报告所说的要多得多。另一组研究者回应上述批评时则强调，“儿童不会因听到大人谈大人感兴趣的话题而学到东西。”

If this “word gap” does exist, it is problematic because language is known to be one of the most important predictors of how you are going to do later in life, from your earliest school years to university and in turn, your career. In order to read, learn basic numeracy and even to articulate memories, you need language.

如果“词汇差距”确实存在，那对人生的影响就可大可小了。众所周知，从你幼时入学到大学深造，然后入行就业，语言能力是预知你这条人生道路的最重要因素之一。无论是阅读，学习基本的计算，甚至是清晰无误的记忆，你都需要语言能力。

“If that’s not where it needs to be, you’re already starting at the race behind,” says Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, who directs the Temple University Infant Language Laboratory in Philadelphia.

费城天普大学（Temple University）婴儿语言实验室主任凯瑟·赫什-帕塞克（Kathy Hirsh-Pasek）表示：“如果幼时必须拥有的能力而你没有拥有，你已经输在了起跑线。”

This lag also plays out in the brain. Neuroscientists are now able to show how the brain responds to early language exposure. One group, led by Rachel Romeo, a neuroscientist and speech language pathologist at Boston Children’s Hospital, showed that conversational interactions can have a visible benefit on brain development. The team recorded conversations in families’ homes monitoring both the amount of language they were exposed to and the number of conversational turns. Children who had more turn-taking conversations were better at language comprehension tasks.

语言能力的滞后也表现在儿童的大脑中。神经科学家现在能够展示大脑对早期语言能力的反应。波士顿儿童医院的神经学家和语言病理学家瑞吉尔·罗密欧（Rachel Romeo）领导的一个小组发现，与儿童对话交流对儿童的大脑发育有明显的好处。研究小组记录了家庭中的谈话，监测孩子接触到的语言量和谈话次数。谈话次数多的孩子其语言的理解能力也较好。

These children also had stronger white matter connections in the brain in two major areas important for language, an increase that could speed up processing in these areas. This, says Romeo, shows that conversational turns contribute to brain development. “We found that more conversation correlated with stronger connections in this pathway, which in turn related to children's language skills,” Romeo says.

在这些儿童的大脑神经中枢，两个影响语言能力的重要区域的脑白质的连接比较强，连接增强可以加速这两个神经区域的信息处理。罗密欧说，这表明对话的转换次数高有助于大脑的发展。他说：“我们发现，交谈次数越多，这条神经通路中的链接就越强，而这又影响到儿童的语言能力。”

Indeed, a large body of evidence shows that it is not passive hearing – or even the amount of words a child is exposed to – that matters most. Instead it is the quality of the conversation that is important. That is, the back and forth, turn-taking nature that requires listening and responding. It’s what Hirsh-Pasek and her long-time collaborator Roberta Golinkoff refer to as a “conversational duet”, because “you can’t sing it alone”. In fact, another study found that if a conversation is interrupted by a phone call, the child does not learn a newly presented word, but will learn it if the conversation is not interrupted.

确实，大量的证据显示，影响孩子语言能力最重要的不是被动的听他人谈话，甚至也不是其接触到的词汇量。相反，重要的是对话的质量。也就是说，需要来回转换着说，既要倾听，也要回应。赫什-帕塞克和她的长期合作伙伴罗伯塔‧格林科夫（Roberta Golinkoff）称之为“对话二重唱”，因为“你不能一个人唱”。事实上，另一项研究发现，如果谈话被电话打断，孩子不会学到一个新出现的单词，但如果谈话没有被打断，他会学到这个单词。

Romeo’s team went one step further in a small follow-up study that helped parents understand the importance of turn-taking conversations. In this group, they found increases in grey matter in language and social regions of the children’s brains.

瑞吉尔‧罗密欧的研究小组在一项小型的后续研究中，更进一步去帮助为人父母者认识与孩子交流对话的重要性。他们发现在这个小组中，儿童大脑涉及语言和社交区域的灰质有所增加。

“That’s not a coincidence,” she says. It makes sense that the social and language areas of the brain are “coming together” in these child-parent relationships, as language underpins our social relationships, and both are fundamental for how we learn. “We have this human desire to communicate,” she says. “On top of that we build our language skills and those language skills add a foundation for higher level cognition.”

罗密欧说：“这不是巧合。”在这种亲子关系中，大脑的社交和语言区域“联系在一起”是有道理的，因为语言支撑着我们的人际关系，而这两者都是我们学习的基础。她说：“作为人类的成员，我们都有交朋友和与人交流的欲望。除此之外，我们还打造我们的语言技能，而经打造的语言技能亦为提升我们的认知能力打下了基础。”

Meanwhile, another group, this one at the Princeton Baby Lab, monitored babies and experimenters’ brains to find that when they were engaging in interactive play, such as singing or reading, their brain activation patterns started to converge. In other words, their brains “become coupled together”, explains Elise Piazza of the Princeton University Neuroscience Institute, the lead author of the work. At other times when taking part in separate activities, the “neural synchrony” between their brains disappeared, she says.

与此同时，普林斯顿婴儿实验室（Princeton Baby Lab）的另一组研究对婴儿和实验者的大脑进行了监控，发现他们在进行诸如唱歌或阅读等互动游戏时，其大脑活动模式开始趋向一致。该研究的第一作者，普林斯顿大学神经科学研究所的爱丽丝·皮亚撒（Elise Piazza）解释说，这个现象换句话来说，是指他们的大脑“连接在一起”。她说，如他们分别参加其他活动，他们大脑之间的“神经同步”就会消失。

“It’s as if you become so tuned in that you’re operating not as two people, but as one. That’s where we believe the learning gets heightened and takes place, and that’s what conversation brings you,” Hirsh-Pasek says of the work.

赫什-帕塞克谈到这个大脑的神经同步说：“就好像你两人协调同步到不像是两个人，而是两人合体为一人。这就是我们相信学习得到加强和发生的地方，这就是谈话带给你的。”

Socioeconomic status

社会经济地位

Given how important conversations are from such a young age, how worried should we be about the “word gap” – and where does it come from?

既然有问有答的对话从幼年开始已如此之重要，那么我们是否应该对孩子之间的“词汇差距”感到担心？搞清楚这个差距又从何而来？

Even if Hart and Risley’s study wasn’t perfect, the idea that a significant socioeconomic gap exists has been replicated by dozens of studies. In 2008, for example, Meredith Rowe of Harvard University found that types of conversations do differ significantly between low- and high-income families – in part due to the differing levels of education reached by the parents in these groups.

尽管哈特和雷斯利的研究并不完美，但数十项研究也得出同样的家庭社会经济地位与语言能力差距有关的看法。例如，哈佛大学的麦瑞迪斯‧罗维（Meredith Rowe）在2008年的研究发现，低收入家庭和高收入家庭之间，谈话类型确实存在显着差异，部分原因是这些家庭的父母所受教育高低程度不同。

In other words, “parenting knowledge” contributes positively to vocabulary development, says Rowe. In this study, higher-income parents used longer sentences and more vocabulary than the lower-income parents. “The key finding here was that the influence of poverty on how parents communicated with their children was explained by how much the parents knew about child development,” she says.

罗维说，这即是说，“父母养育儿女的知识”对幼儿的词汇发展有积极的作用。这项研究发现，收入高的父母比收入低的父母使用较长的句子和较丰富的词汇。她说：“其关键的发现是，贫困对父母与孩子沟通方式的影响可以用父母对孩子发育成长的认识程度来解释。”

If there is any association between socioeconomic status and verbal abilities, it may be because poverty is linked to both lower levels of education as well as to greater stress. Both factors mean the quality of conversations can suffer.

如果社会经济地位和语言能力之间存在关联，有可能是因为贫困既与教育程度较低相关，也与生活压力较大有关系。这两个因素都意味着父母与孩子交流对话的品质会受到伤害。

But socioeconomic status isn’t determinism.

但家庭的社会经济地位并非决定因素。

In one 2015 study, Hirsh-Pasek and colleagues looked at the speech of 60 children, all from low-income families, at age two; they returned one year later to see how these children had developed. As anticipated, the children who were taking part in more conversations at two had more advanced language one year later. Those who had fewer conversations scored worse on language ability.

赫什-帕塞克及其同事在2015年的研究中，观察了60名儿童两岁时的讲话，这些儿童都来自低收入家庭。一年后，他们再观察这些孩子的成长。如其预期，两岁时参与较多对话的孩子一年后的语言能力有较大幅度的进步，而那些与家长交谈较少的孩子语言能力就会差一些。

As these children were all from lower-income backgrounds, the results show that poverty alone is not what predisposes a child to poorer language skills.

由于这些儿童都来自低收入家庭，研究结果表明，贫困本身并不是导致儿童语言技能较差的原因。

“It’s not just about whether you were born into an under-resourced environment, but it's how you interact with your child in that environment that seems to make a difference,” says Hirsh-Pasek.

赫什-帕塞克说：“孩子语言能力不仅与是否出生在资源匮乏的环境有关，还与父母与孩子在那种环境中的互动有关，而这似乎才是产生差异的原因。"

Though a word gap can have lasting consequences, the good news is that all parents talk to their children at least some of the time. If parents understand that quality interactions are more important than quantity, then all children could benefit.

虽然词汇差异可能会对今后人生有持久的影响，但好消息是，所有的父母都或多或少会与孩子交谈。如果父母明白有质量的交谈比交谈数量更重要，那么所有的孩子都会受益不浅。

The more social experiences they have, whether with their parents or with any other caregivers around them, the more they will learn, she adds.

赫什-帕塞克补充说，孩子经历的人际交往越多，无论是与父母还是与任何看护照料者的交往，他们学到的东西就越多。

There are other ways to help speed this process along, too. Parental coaching is effective, but it is time consuming and expensive. Fortunately, there are other simple, tried-and-tested ways that help encourage more quality conversations.

还有其他方法可以加快孩子的学习。家长的教导非常有效，但有效的家庭教育需要耗费大量时间和金钱。幸运的是，还有其他简单的、已证明行之有效的方法可有助于鼓励与孩子作更多高质量的对话。

Hirsh-Pasek and colleagues have shown that in under-resourced communities in some of the poorest neighbourhoods of Philadelphia, putting prompts in supermarkets increases meaningful conversation by as much as 33%. These could be as simple as colourful posters asking questions like “Where does milk come from?” and “What is your favourite vegetable?”.

赫什-帕塞克及其同事们发现，在费城一些最贫穷社区的资源不足的社群中，超市如放置一些问题提示可以使有意义的谈话增加33%。这些问题可以是“牛奶从何而来？”，或“你最喜欢什么蔬菜？”

I visited several sites in Philadelphia – including at a bus stop, as well as a playground at a library and at human-sized board games in Philadelphia’s Please Touch children’s museum – where Hirsh-Pasek and her team are trying another approach. Here they use games to encourage several important aspects of learning, from the social to the cognitive, from impulse control (hop scotch) to executive function (problem-solving games). Crucially, they were carefully placed in areas where people already gather in groups. And though the games are geared towards children, they were remarkably fun for us adults too.

我参观了费城的几个地方，包括一个公交车站，一个图书馆的游乐场，还有费城的“欢迎触摸儿童博物馆”（Please Touch children's museum）如人体大小的棋盘游戏。赫什-帕塞克和她的小组正在这个儿童博物馆尝试另一种教育方法，使用游戏来鼓励儿童学习的几个重要面向，如从社交到认知，从冲动控制（跳房子）到执行功能（解决问题的游戏）等。关键的是，这些游戏精心地安排在孩子们群集之处。尽管这些游戏是为儿童而设计，但对我们成年人来说也非常有趣。

The project, called “Playful Learning Landscapes”, involved collaborating with city councils and architects to “transform everyday places into learning opportunities”. What’s more, close monitoring by nearby researchers showed that some of these projects helped increase conversations by 30-55%. “As an added gift, when you make these environments interesting, their parents are more likely to put their cell phones down, look in the eyes of their child and have a meaningful conversation,” says Hirsh-Pasek. “Imagine what we could do if we made the world just a little bit more fun.” With enough will, the researchers say it should be easy to recreate similar spaces in many other cities.

这个计划被称为“寓教于乐”，与市政府和建筑师合作，“将日常场所转化为学习机会”。更重要的是，在旁边密切监测的研究人员发现，其中一些游戏帮助提高了孩子30-55%的交谈机会。赫什-帕塞克说：“另外的好处是，当你让这游戏环境变得愉快有趣之时，孩子的父母较可能放下手机，看着孩子的眼睛，与孩子做有意义的交谈。让我们这样想象，要是我们能让这个世界多一点乐趣，我们能做些什么。”研究人员表示，只要有足够的意愿，在许多城市重建类似的寓教于乐的空间并非难事。

In the UK, the government has launched a related project online, where simple prompts encourage parents to talk to their children more. Hungry Little Minds is a three-year campaign with the aim “to encourage parents to engage in activities that support their child’s early learning and help set them up for school and beyond”.

英国政府在网上启动了一个相关的计划，以简单的提示鼓励父母多和孩子交谈。这个为期三年，名为“求知若渴的小脑袋”的活动，“鼓励家长参与支持孩子幼儿期学习的活动，以帮助孩子为进入学校和以后的人生做准备”。

For some, the stress of day-to-day life can leave less time for talk and play. But it is now clear that subtle tweaks in how we speak to children – and how we listen – can literally grow their brains for the better.

有些家长迫于日常生活的压力会减少与孩子谈话和玩耍的时间。但现在很明显，我们对孩子说话和倾听方式的细微调整确实能让孩子的大脑发育得更好。

Armed with this knowledge, I now find myself thinking about my baby’s brain patterns as I coo and speak to him, telling him snippets about my day but also asking him questions to see how he responds. Often I’m greeted with a toothless grin. Other times he doesn’t respond at all. But even so, now I know that his brain may well be growing because of it, something all of us, whether parents or caregivers, can play a crucial part in.