Language Nutrition

The Importance of Cooking the Right Recipes for Communication

Nutrition science has recently adopted the phrase “food is information,” to explain how food has the ability to give directions to our body. However, the inverse of this is also true — information is food. Sensory inputs are constantly reshaping the networks in our brain in ways that help us interact successfully with our environments. Language is one of the most powerful and informative of these sensory inputs because it both gives us a window into the people around us and gives us tools to share our internal worlds with others. 

In the same way that food provides us with the necessary building blocks for our bodies, language input in the environment (e.g. caregivers talking to their children) provides the building blocks for our neural language systems. Therefore, adequate language nutrition for our kids is necessary to build their language "bodies.”

Language is a rule-based system for sharing symbolic information between a sender and a receiver (e.g. speaker and listener). Symbols are often sounds, letters, gestures, or marks that represent something else. Language-based symbols (words) must carry consistent meaning for populations of people: without meaning, words don’t have much value. As we all know, the caregivers role is paramount in teaching language. They are the primary source of language nutrition and are actively (be it conscious or otherwise) choosing the diet plans for their children.

Failure to thrive describes a condition in which children have arrested physical growth due to inability to obtain the adequate nutrition. It often co-occurs with an underlying diagnosis, and if the child does not receive proper nutrition before the age of 1, they will likely develop cognitive delays and may die. Fortunately, lack of language input won’t kill a child, but, similar to FTT, children who do not get proper language nutrition before the critical language period are at risk for significant language difficulties and stunted cognitive development. During this critical period of language development, children’s brains are doing amazing things like finding patterns and statistical distributions amongst large amounts of stimuli. Even for doing something as seemingly simple as learning sounds, children are met with an intimidating task. Children need to parse a ‘continuous stream of sounds’ (Kuhl, 1996) into meaningful units, or phonemes. In acoustic analysis, there are no time intervals between words and the barriers between phonemes are undefined. From birth, babies are able to perceive all of the world’s phonemes, but with exposure to a native language, they begin to only make distinctions between phonemes in their target language. The classic example is the ‘r’ and ‘l’ distinction which does not exist in Japanese. This means that, after about 12 months, Japanese babies will not perceive a difference between ‘r’ and ‘l.' This ability to parse speech information is just one of the many things children are doing to figure out what language is meaningful in their environment, and it requires lots and lots of input, or language food for your kids. 

Of course, just as in the world of developmental nutrition, there are some guidelines for what type of language to feed developing children. Infant directed speech (IDS), or “motherese,” is one way in which children can stomach the diversity of language input that arises in their environment. IDS is characterized by simpler sentences, slower rate, and more variable prosody. In the example of parsing acoustic information in the previous paragraph, segmental cues in IDS for vowels become further apart in acoustic space and may enhance speech category learning (Kuhl et al., 1997). IDS is analogous to infant formulas designed to optimize a child’s nutrition and allows children to focus on meaningful parts of the stimulus. IDS is the bridge towards the “solid food” of adult speech. These bridges are, in fact, necessary steps in the process towards developing adult language. The late 19th century psychologist, Lev Vygotsky, described a principle known as the Zone of Proximal development to emphasize the importance of these bridges across all types of learning. This principle describes how copying and following adult examples of skills outside of the child’s mastery can help a child gain competence in these new skills. With regards to language, this means that being in interaction with your child, modeling developmentally appropriate language (i.e. simple), and helping them to imitate this language, is the way to train them to develop competence in this area. This language does not necessarily have to be in the form of speech, but can include gesture (i.e. sign language), picture symbols, and/or written communication. Sometimes children can be picky eaters, and it can help to diversify their diet plan! 

So, how can we choose the right language diet plan for our children? One meaningful difference in the language and nutrition analogy is that there is no such thing as too much language input. Language thrives in social interaction, especially with the caregiver. When you are attending to the same thing, interacting, and providing rich language input, your child is learning and growing their language body (Kuhl, 2010). However, there is also a difference between rich and poor nutrition for your child. Even though I love hot cheetos, I certainly wouldn’t feed my kids cheetos for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Especially during early development, some types of food are more important for development. A small group of words known as “core vocabulary,” make up roughly 80% of everyday communication and should be at the heart of your communication recipes. Many clinicians reported that when these core vocabulary words were added to augmentative communication systems of children with moderate to severe intellectual disabilities, “the frequency with which they used these boards increased from 2 to 41%” (Adamson et al., 1974).

Another example of poor language nutrition is speech that is not directed at the child. Simply talking while your kids are around is not enough. According to Roy et al., 2015, the "quantity of speech directed toward the child predicts development more effectively than total speech overheard by the child.” The time and space where you feed your kids is also important. According to Schwartz and Terrell, researchers found that children learned words significantly better across distributed exposures (i.e. way better to show a word once a day over 4 days than 4 times in one day). You wouldn’t feed your child just one huge meal once a week, right? Moreover, Roy et al., 2015, found that “words used in distinctive spatial … contexts are produced earlier, suggesting they are easier to learn.” Just like having meals at particular places in the house (i.e. the kitchen table), words are best learned when tied to specific places in the environment. Using all of these concepts together (i.e. core vocabulary, distributed exposure, and spatial context) might look something like this — Set up a routine in the morning before eating breakfast where you can go to the bathroom and wash hands before eating. You can model requesting something like turning on water for washing hands by modeling “want water,”and have the child imitate you. This is known as a language routine, and it is one of the vital elements of a communication recipe.

Evidenced by the connection between language concepts and concepts from nutrition (e.g. FTT, distributed exposure, dangers of poor nutrition, etc.), we can use this analogy to help us think more clearly about language development. Importantly, learning language does not necessarily require the presence of a trained professional (e.g. SLP) -- the role of the caregiver is of primary importance and many studies suggest how important parent training is for a child’s communication. For example, Oono et al (2013) found that after a systematic review of 17 studies involving parent-training communication interventions, the results showed an increase in parent-child interactions and language comprehension for children. Our new teletherapy platform and parent training approach will give you a wide range of communication recipes and can help you provide the best language nutrition for your child. Stay well out there and remember to feed your kids!