LONDON: An advice for parents - gestures like waving arms and making funny faces can help your tiny tot learn to talk fast, a new study has suggested.
An international team has carried out the study and found that boys and girls whose parents gesticulate a lot have bigger vocabularies when they start school, according to a new report in the 'Science' journal.
Researchers claimed that simple gestures from nodding and shaking of the head to indicate yes and no, to flapping of the arms to indicate flying, could make all the difference - when it comes to teaching kids to talk.
"For example, in response to a child's point at a doll a mother might say 'yes, that's a doll', thus providing a word for the object that is the focus of the child's attention," the researchers said. They have based their findings on an analysis of the actions and gestures used by 50 toddlers and their parents as they played together.
All the boys and girls, aged around 14 months, used an average of 21 different gestures and 13 different words. Their parents used 40 different gestures and more than 350 different words in the experiment.