The Pause that Teaches

11/23/2015

Raise your sail one foot and you get ten feet of wind.
Chinese proverb

"Uhs" and "ums" that fill pauses when adults speak to toddlers may actually aid the toddlers in expanding their vocabularies. Celeste Kidd and other researchers at the University of Rochester found that such pauses often occur before adults use a word that is infrequent or unfamiliar in their speech or prior to using a word for the first time in a conversation. In their research, reported in Developmental Science, Kidd found that when such a pause occurred, the toddlers paid significantly more attention to the unfamiliar for the next two seconds.

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