Word: agee
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...early as 14 months of age, children in different socioeconomic-status groups may be socialized to communicate more or fewer meanings via gesture," the authors wrote. And those early differences in gestures may help predict the later disparities in vocabulary ability when children show up for school. The current study found that at 54 months old, children from higher-income families understood about 117 words on a comprehension test, compared with 93 for children from lower-income families...
...school, some of them speak a lot more fluently than others. Psychologists also know that children's socioeconomic status tends to correlate with their language facility. The better off and more educated a child's parents are, the more verbal that child tends to be by school age - and vocabulary skill is a key predictor for success in school. Children from low-income families, who may often start school knowing significantly fewer words than their better-off peers, will struggle for years to make up that ground. (Read about childhood obesity...
Indeed they do, say psychologists Susan Goldin-Meadow and Meredith Rowe of the University of Chicago, who published a study in the Feb. 13 issue of Science. The researchers found that at 14 months of age, babies already showed a wide range of "speaking" ability through gestures, and that those differences were correlated with their socioeconomic background and how frequently their parents used gestures to communicate. High-income, better-educated parents gestured more frequently to their children to convey meaning and new concepts, and in turn, their kids gestured more to them. When researchers tested the same children...
Here's how: at 14 months of age, pointing toward an object is the way most kids use gestures. If a parent responds to that gesture by verbally identifying the object - by saying, "That's a doll," for example - children get a head start on growing their nascent vocabularies. "That's a teachable moment, and mothers are teaching the kids the word for an object," says Goldin-Meadow. She also believes that lively gesturing (like clapping) could allow kids to better understand new concepts (like happiness) simply by giving them a visceral way to express them...
That last theory offers the possibility that teachers may be able to use gesture to help school-age kids solidify old ideas and learn new ones. In separate research, Goldin-Meadow found that when children were asked to solve and explain a series of math problems, those who were asked to gesture while they did so were more likely to learn new problem-solving strategies and perform better on future math problems than were kids who did not use gestures. Goldin-Meadow believes that prompting children to gesture gives them the ability to express ideas they had never been able...