Promoting Infant-Directed Speech in Ghana

While parents universally use "baby talk" to soothe an infant or get her attention, engaging in a second form of infant-directed speech (IDS) - talking to young children with complete, if simplified, sentences and a rich variety of words -- varies by socioeconomic status (SES) within societies and across societies. Preliminary evidence collected from Burkina Faso and Ghana, as well as anecdotal experiences in Kenya and Uganda, are consistent with this: It is less common for parents in sub-Saharan Africa to talk to their infants than it is among parents in the US. Because IDS promotes cognitive development of children, gaps in IDS compound the disadvantages that children in poorer families face.

The most likely explanation for the IDS deficit among the poor is inaccurately low expectations about the pace of child development. A large body of literature in the US has shown that the lower the parents' SES, the lower their expectations about when children will master certain cognitive skills, e.g. speaking in a partial sentence of 3 words or more.

The study is a randomized evaluation of a low-cost intervention that encourages mothers and other caregivers to talk to infants, or to engage in what is known as infant-directed speech (IDS) as a way of promoting language and brain development in Tamale and surrounding areas, Ghana.

Parental beliefs about and practices of IDS will be evaluated through data obtained from a series of questions on these topics at baseline, during a short phone follow-up survey, and at endline. This will mainly be self-reported although we hope to explore the observation of said practices at endline. Results of the treatment arm will be compared to that of the comparison group to determine if the intervention is effective. To assess IDS behavior and child language development at endline, the LENA system (Language ENvironment Analysis) which produces two key measures It produced two key measures: adult word count (language the child hears) and conversational turns (the sounds/words the child produces in conversation with adults/others) will be compared among groups. Conditional on funding, there may be a 2-year follow-up survey (i.e. second endline) to measure children's cognitive development.