Eye Contact Key to Infants' Speech Development

Dr. Kim Mulvihill ReportingWhen your baby babbles, do you pay attention? New research suggests you should, as well as talk back.

Eleven-month old Vinnie is chatting up his buddy Owen about choo choo trains. Problem is, his vocabulary's a bit limited.

Christine Sellai: "A lot of times he'll just squawk. So we call him 'chicken boy' because he'll squawk like a chicken sometimes."

But new research shows how all that squawking, and gurgling and babbling can change in the blink of an eye.

If infants learn a particular skill before their first birthday, they will understand nearly twice as many words as the other babies. We're not talking about math or mozart. When it comes to learning language, the eyes have it. In fact, the more your eyes are involved, the more words your baby will come to know.

Carmen Houston: "When you're looking at something and they're looking at something at the same time, that's the first beginnings of interaction, and from there is where more building blocks for more language and more comprehension and eventually expression."

Researchers studied nearly 100 healthy babies at ages: nine, ten and eleven months. How well a baby learned to track the gaze of an adult to an object, like a cell phone, that's then followed by a babble of recognition, gave the infant a big advantage to understanding language

Carmen Houston: "You're actually talking to each other nonverbally about the ball."

Carmen Houston is a bay area speech pathologist. She says not only is eye contact key, so is interpreting for them.

Carmen Houston: "You're taking the turn for the child and saying what you think the child would say if they had words."

Infants who became adept at this skill ended up with 40 percent more words than the other babies at 18 months.