When 19-year-old Aleysha Ortiz told Hartford City Council members in May that the public school system stole her education, she had to memorize her speech.

Ortiz, who was a senior at Hartford Public High School at the time, wrote the speech using the talk-to-text function on her phone. She listened to it repeatedly to memorize it.

That’s because she was never taught to read or write — despite attending schools in Hartford since she was 6.

Ortiz, who came to Hartford from Puerto Rico with her family when she was young, struggled with language and other challenges along the way. But a confluence of circumstances, apparent apathy and institutional inertia pushed her haphazardly through the school system, according to Ortiz, her attorney and district officials.

Those officials, in statements that her attorney says display “shocking” educational neglect, have acknowledged that Ortiz never received instruction in reading.

Despite this, she received her diploma this spring after improving her grades in high school — with help from the speech-to-text function — and getting on the honor roll. She began her studies at the University of Connecticut this summer.

Ortiz can’t read even most one-syllable words. The words she can read were memorized during karaoke or from subtitles at the bottom of TV screens and associating the words she saw with what she heard, she said.

“I was pushed through. I was moved from class to class not being taught anything,” Ortiz told The Connecticut Mirror during a series of interviews. “They stole something from me … I wanted to do more, and I didn’t have the chance to do that.”

Ortiz was diagnosed with a speech impediment and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in early childhood and has been classified as a student with a disability for “as long as I can remember,” she said.

Ortiz also wasn’t taught how to tell time or how to count money. She can barely hold a pencil because of unaddressed issues with hand fatigue and disputes about school-based occupational therapy, she and her attorney said. She learned basic math, like addition, but has no other math skills.

Accommodations in her Individualized Education Plan, which spell out what services students will receive that school year, allowed her to audio-record classes and meetings with school leadership because of her inability to read or write in high school.

In recordings shared with the CT Mirror, made from March through June of this year, district officials acknowledged that in 12 years, Ortiz never received reading instruction or intervention. The CT Mirror also reviewed Ortiz’s educational records, including her recent IEPs and other documents.

“In my review of Aleysha’s IEP, she was never provided reading instruction,” Noreen Trenchard, a special education administrator for the district, said at a May 29 Planning and Placement Team (PPT) meeting. “What is most concerning to me, honestly, at this time, is … with all of that information prior to today, no direct reading instruction was provided for her, and no PPT was requested to add that to an IEP. … That’s very concerning, very, very concerning.”

Trenchard did not respond to a request for comment.

Ortiz said her mother’s ability to advocate for her was limited because of language barriers, insufficient translation services, and because the family didn’t know their legal rights to challenge district decisions.

Ortiz filed for “due process” against the district in late June, which is a legal procedure in special education that’s triggered when families feel their rights were violated.

Ortiz’s lawyer, , said the young woman’s story may be one of the “most shocking cases” of educational neglect she has seen in 24 years.

“It is really shocking, and it should never have happened and shouldn’t be happening,” Spencer said. “Her whole future is going to be impacted.”

Ortiz repeatedly described her special education experience with one word: traumatic.

She said she was unlawfully restrained, spent months in classrooms without a special education teacher or paraeducators, and was ridiculed by untrained staff who would laugh at her.

Her time in Hartford Public Schools was defined by feelings of isolation and loneliness as she sat in the back of classrooms for years and wished she would be able to do what the other kids were doing, she said.

While other students made friends and learned basic math and reading skills, Ortiz said she was stuck tracing letter worksheets on her own from first grade well into her middle school years.

Since first grade, she said, teachers, school leaders and district administrators failed her.

In a recording of a June 6 meeting with Trenchard, the district’s special education administrator, Ortiz can be heard saying she was denied the right to a fair education when teachers didn’t teach her how to write, when disability testing wasn’t done accurately and when she felt shamed by educators after she brought up how her IEP wasn’t being followed correctly.

“People didn’t forget about me — no — people chose not to [educate me]. People chose not to [change] my IEP. People chose not to do this and that and this and that,” Ortiz said at the meeting. “I’m the one paying the consequences, while those people are still getting their checks.”

Ortiz tried to teach herself and make up for the areas her formal education lacked, but through those efforts, the 19-year-old said, she also lost the chance to just be a kid.

“Basically [in high school], I would go to class. I would record and try to memorize everything the teacher said and what I wanted to write. Then, when I went home, I would stay and hear the recordings. I basically went to school two times in one day,” Ortiz said.

“I wanted to join clubs, but I couldn’t do that because I didn’t have the time. … To this day, I’ve never been out to the movie theater with friends, ever,” Ortiz said. “I didn’t have time to have fun. It was either enjoy myself or fail my classes, and maybe if I was more ahead in reading or writing, I would’ve had time [to make friends].”

Ortiz’s story can’t be defined as a student who fell through the cracks — several people knew how her education was being neglected and did nothing, Spencer said.

“She’s had so many teachers. I don’t know how everybody failed her,” Spencer said. “I don’t know how the district could have passed her through. I don’t understand how this happened. It’s negligence, in my opinion.”

The district declined to “speak specifically to student matters,” because of “state and federal legal obligations,” after requests for comment by the CT Mirror, particularly in regards to why it took so long to find a problem with Ortiz’s academic progress and whether officials were aware of similar situations happening with other students in Hartford.

But in a meeting on June 6, Trenchard acknowledged that educators may have violated Ortiz’s IEP, which is a legally binding document under the  and outlines the services and accommodations that will make a student with a disability successful in a classroom.

“And truthfully, from what I’ve seen, I see that you didn’t even have an appropriate IEP,” Trenchard said.

“People got to you too late, which has been the story of your life here,” a Hartford Public High School administrator can be heard telling Ortiz in the recording from the meeting on June 6, despite Ortiz saying she had raised concerns for several years and they were never formally addressed.

Ortiz was able to graduate because she had met all her credit requirements, but she says she was only able to “survive” high school through the use of speech-to-text applications and a calculator.

And though limited, the accommodations helped Ortiz become an honor-roll student and led to her acceptance to several colleges, including the University of Connecticut-Hartford, which she began attending part-time in August.

Ortiz’s success may be unique, but her challenges in the district are not, several current and former staff members from the school district told the CT Mirror.

“I think this happens a lot through Hartford schools,” said a Hartford paraeducator who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation. “I don’t think a lot of kids in Hartford get their services. She’s not the only one. … Any school [in the district], you’ll find kids, even that are not in special ed, that don’t even know how to read and write — they just pass them over.”

“Unfortunately, the way the district runs, it’s short-staffed. It’s fast-paced,” said a social worker who worked with Ortiz in high school and also requested anonymity for fear of retaliation. “While Aleysha is a very sad and touching story, it is one of many in the district that get overlooked.”

Ortiz and her attorney think so too.

“One of the reasons I didn’t drop out was from anger — and knowing that I might not be the only one, but you don’t hear it around,” Ortiz said. “With me, people knew about it and didn’t want to do their job, and knowing this — it must be happening in other places.”

“It’s happening all the time, and it’s not just Hartford,” Spencer said.

Aleysha’s story

At the age of 32, Carmen Cruz decided to migrate from Puerto Rico to the South End of Hartford with three of her four children, including Ortiz, who was 5 at the time, the second-youngest.

Ortiz’s mother declined interview requests, but Ortiz said her family came to the United States because services for students with disabilities were limited in Puerto Rico.

“We heard Connecticut had the best education and things like that, which is one of the reasons we came to Hartford,” Ortiz said. “We came to get better opportunities.”

In testimony to state lawmakers for more school funding earlier this year, Ortiz described preparing for her first day of first grade at Burr School, when the school educated grades K-8. That day was full of nerves but also tinges of excitement.

Ortiz only spoke Spanish, and learning English with a speech disability would be challenging. But Ortiz said her mother thought she would get the proper services and support to make sure she was successful.

“The first day of school, I was holding my mom’s hand and didn’t want to let go,” she said in the testimony. “I finally did, and I believe it was the biggest mistake of my life. … From the first day, I struggled so much.”

Despite bringing a signed document from the Puerto Rico Department of Education outlining the need for occupational therapy, the service was never provided to Ortiz in Hartford Public Schools, according to her IEP and audio recordings.

For many of her primary school years, Ortiz admits, she struggled with behavioral issues, including throwing things in a classroom, screaming and running away. As she’s grown older, Ortiz said, she realized those behaviors were rooted in anger that manifested from an inability to communicate.

Throughout elementary school, Ortiz was often isolated from classmates and engaged in activities that didn’t pertain to learning, including organizing books, sweeping, resting her head on the desk and drawing pictures in the back of the room, she said. Through fifth grade, the only school work she was assigned was tracing letters on worksheets.

“Instead of teaching me, they would tell me ‘Here, you go play games over there.’ And I’d see the other kids and would get angry,” Ortiz said. “I would just look and stare at the other kids doing their work. … It got to a point where I was the bad kid, and it felt good … because even though I was not like the other kids, at least I was something. And that, for me, was what mattered. I was something to someone [even if it meant getting in trouble].”

Ortiz described several instances where she was removed by security guards by force, including a prone restraint practice where she would be forced onto her stomach and a knee was put on her back to the point that, she said, she couldn’t breathe.

Harford Public Schools did not comment on Ortiz’s allegations, but said, in general, “physical intervention and seclusion are only used as a last resort and emergency intervention, by certified personnel, for students, after other verbal and nonverbal strategies have been attempted and only when the student presents immediate or imminent injury to the student or to others.”

Ortiz said that wasn’t her experience.

“Instead of the security guards trying to have a conversation with me, they would literally just remove me by force,” Ortiz said. “I remember the principal came in, and she was like, ‘That’s not how you do it! That’s not how you do it! Check if she has marks.’ … I was traumatized. … and I was [thinking] ‘Wow, this is how America is?’”

When Ortiz began to learn more English skills in third grade, she said, she developed a relationship with a homeroom teacher, but her communication efforts were shut down after hearing educators discuss how they couldn’t understand her.

When another teacher asked the homeroom teacher if they knew what Ortiz was saying, the homeroom teacher responded, ‘Oh, I don’t understand what she’s saying, I just say yes to whatever she says,’ Ortiz said.

“Just because I’m a special education student doesn’t mean I’m deaf … it’s why I stopped talking,” Ortiz said. “Those things made me feel trapped, insecure and everything. I thought I could talk to someone, then that happened.”

In fifth grade, intervention efforts were short-lived because there wasn’t enough extra staff support, Ortiz said, adding that she didn’t receive her first paraeducator until sixth grade and, even then, she spent most of her middle school career without a special education teacher.

By seventh grade, Ortiz recalled that principals said they “shared custody” of her because she spent more time in the front office than a classroom.

“Instead of sending her to class, the principal had her with her all the time,” the paraeducator told the CT Mirror.

That year, Ortiz was in a classroom “not a lot, maybe four times,” she said.

The COVID-19 pandemic hit at the end of Ortiz’s eighth-grade year.

Throughout the summer, preparing for high school, Ortiz went to local libraries and tried to use picture books to teach herself how to read. When she wasn’t successful, she got through online learning during her freshman year with Google Translate, which can scan a photo and read the text out loud.

“The way I did assignments was very difficult. When I was given something to read or write, I would use Google,” Ortiz said. “If the teacher said ‘Aleysha, can you read this aloud?’ … I would turn my computer off and pretend like it died, so I didn’t have to read it. … Or with the camera off, I would repeat [what the translate app said]. That’s literally how I survived ninth grade.”

Sophomore year changed everything.

It was Ortiz’s “first time doing the same work as everybody else,” she said.

“I love learning because I never had the opportunity to learn. People be like, ‘Aleysha, why do you like to go to school all the time?’ And it’s because it’s something new — the amount of times I did the same thing over and over, it’s crazy,” Ortiz said. “Sometimes I do complain, because we learn something new every day and it’s hard to get it, but it’s better than doing the same thing every day.”

Small wins in the classroom built her confidence enough that it allowed her to open up to trusted adults in positions she once felt betrayed by in elementary school. As more people learned her story, a team of staff members gathered behind her and pushed for more services, intervention and support her junior and senior year.

But by then, she was always told any intervention was “too late.”

“Since [my junior year], I told my case manager, I want to learn how to write, and she’d tell me, ‘In college, they don’t do that. They go in there, record and leave, they do the same thing you do,’” Ortiz said. “I’d say ‘Yeah, but I still want to know how to write. It’s my right. I wanted to learn,’ but [I was told] there wasn’t time, and there weren’t teachers to sit down and teach me.”

“There’s a lot of students, and unfortunately, there’s situations like Aleysha, where she has a village behind her, advocating, pushing — and [proper services] still [were] not happening,” the social worker said.

A district’s failure

Ortiz has recorded more than 700 audio files on her phone.

In her last four months in the public school system, more than a dozen of those audio recordings were either PPT meetings, requests for disability testing or administrators reviewing the results of Ortiz’s academic progress with her.

The conversations were often riddled with , with several instances of people speaking over one another or Ortiz leaving the room in tears.

“There was a lot of pushback stating that [the district doesn’t] provide that at the high school level, that they would need to get creative in how they could provide these services to her, and there was always kind of a lingering talk of something would be done, but there was never anything proactive being done,” the social worker said.

Meetings particularly ramped up as Ortiz got closer to graduation and as she was trying to navigate her transition into higher education.

But it always felt like there wasn’t enough time for intervention.

“I feel like right now people are like, ‘Well, she’s graduating,’ and they just move on. They just forget about [what’s happening to me],” Ortiz said in a PPT meeting on May 29. “I’ve been asking, I’ve been doing everything for years and years. I sat here for 12 years. And right now it’s like ‘Well … we should have done this … but we didn’t.’”

One point of contention centered around school-based occupational therapy.

For years, Ortiz had complained of pain in her hand and an inability to hold a pencil for longer than a few minutes. In March, Ortiz’s case manager agreed to consult with an occupational therapist to see what recommendations they had.

But by May 29, district officials declined to have a formal occupational therapy evaluation.

In an emailed statement to the CT Mirror, a spokesperson from Hartford Public Schools said, “If there is no relevant data to support a request for an evaluation, a PPT can determine that a particular type of evaluation is not appropriate at that time.”

“The purpose is to be able to function in a school environment, which Aleysha has been able to do,” a district official said at the May 29 PPT, despite protests from teachers and school staff that Ortiz is only able to perform in a school environment with “incredible difficulty.”

At the meeting, district officials recommended that Ortiz type assignments on a computer going forward.

“People expect me to use a computer for the rest of my life,” Ortiz said.

The underlying concern in all the meetings, in addition to her inability to write, was also the lack of progress in her reading ability.

Ortiz and other staff members repeatedly requested dyslexia testing with the notion that, if she couldn’t receive intervention, then at least having the diagnosis could open the door to more resources after high school.

Those requests were declined by administrators, who instead reviewed previous data, then completed a series of comprehensive testing to “know exactly where we’re at in instruction,” Trenchard said at a meeting on June 13.

In May, Trenchard, the district’s special education administrator, began to review Ortiz’s case. When she went over reading results that were conducted earlier in the school year, she called them “surprising.”

“[The scores] are low low, like they were surprising to me. It would make sense that reading is hard for you, but it looks like things pretty much across the board are hard,” Trenchard said at a meeting on May 20. “You don’t know how to [read, write or do math] because nobody ever taught you. … I wish we met each other earlier … because it bothers me to hear about it and to just see that for years what was missing.”

Trenchard, at a meeting on May 29, said Ortiz’s difficulties in , which are the processes of using letter/sound knowledge to write and read words in a text, could be “symptomatic of dyslexia” but could also be “symptomatic of not having received instruction.”

“And in my review of Aleysha’s IEPs, she was never provided reading instruction,” Trenchard said, adding that she didn’t believe Ortiz was dyslexic because “there are many missing pieces toward even leaning toward that diagnosis.”

Spencer, however, argues that the district violated its legal obligation to provide dyslexia testing because there was a reasonable belief that it could have been an issue.

“If she was showing no reading issues, and all the testing showed she was fine, and she was on grade level, and she just wanted to get the testing — then they could have an argument,” Spencer said. “But, when it’s a suspected area, it must be tested. … There’s no way a reasonable person would have overlooked this.”

Ortiz received a comprehensive reading evaluation on June 6 and scored “very poor” in every category. Ortiz needed to be taught every reading and spelling skill, according to the test results.

And beyond failing to provide basic education, the district may have also failed to provide an appropriate IEP, and with the limited accommodations that were written, they were not consistently implemented or provided, Trenchard said in one of the recordings.

At Ortiz’s last PPT meeting on June 14, just two days before graduation, district officials recommended that she defer her diploma and take 100 hours of reading intervention over the summer at the district’s central office.

Without speaking to Ortiz’s case, Hartford Public Schools told the CT Mirror that recommendations are made “on an individualized basis by the student’s PPT,” and that a student’s exit criteria could be reviewed or revised “up to and including the day of graduation if necessary.”

Ortiz and several of her teachers shared a hesitancy about the deferment plan, especially in regards to uncertainty from the district about who would provide direct instruction to Ortiz if she stayed back amid millions of dollars of budget cuts in the upcoming school year.

“The bigger question is who is doing this? … As of right now, we are working with very minimal staffing, and our special ed staff is doing everything they can, but there’s no one here,” a teacher at the PPT meeting said.

“You can’t require me not to take my diploma and expect me to go along with whatever you say, knowing damn well we don’t have the people here,” Ortiz said at the meeting. “You’re saying we have the teachers training, we have the people here — where are they? If they are here, and they are training, where are they?”

Ortiz was also set to begin a mandatory transition to college program at UConn that ran from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. throughout the summer. The district did not provide any further accommodations or compromise for reading intervention, according to the audio recording of the meeting.

Ortiz ultimately decided to accept her diploma. By the time she had graduated from Hartford Public Schools, she hadn’t been tested for dyslexia and had never received reading intervention.

Systemic shortfalls

At the same time that Ortiz, her advocates and district leaders met about additional accommodations and intervention services, the district also announced a looming  for the upcoming school year.

 200 special education teachers, 360 paraeducators and 150 counselors, social workers and school psychologists were employed across the district’s schools in 2022-23.

At Hartford Public High School, which Ortiz attended, there were 21 special education teachers, 19 paras and about 15 social workers, counselors and school psychologists in . With over 109 students with disabilities enrolled at the school, social workers could be assigned dozens of cases.

“At the end of the 2022-23 school year, we were short-staffed multiple social workers in the building. Myself, alone, was required to service 50 or more students,” said Ortiz’s former social worker, who added that she ultimately left the district because of the workload.

“[A big part of why I left] comes down to not being able to fully provide children with what they need, and becoming a part of the failure,” she said. “I was part of that team of service providers who didn’t always meet Aleysha where she needed perfectly every month. … There were times I wouldn’t see her for two weeks. … It wasn’t fair to her, but due to the system of the school and the district, we did the best we could, but that’s not the answer we should be giving, especially for students like Aleysha.”

Ortiz was assigned a handful of different social workers during her time at Hartford Public High School because of staffing turnover, the social worker said.

“There’s plenty of students who are kind of slipping through the cracks,” she added.

When asked about student-teacher ratios in special education, Hartford Public Schools said “caseloads are specific to each school,” and depends on “each PPT according to each student’s individualized needs.”

With the expiration of federal COVID-19 relief funds in September, the district cut school staff by 8% by eliminating 229 roles, a majority of which were temporary or non-certified employees like social workers, paraeducators, resource teachers, student engagement specialists and family community school support providers who were hired during the pandemic.

Hartford Public Schools, after its final budget passed in July, lost a total of about 30 counselors, psychologists and social workers.

A spokesperson from the district said that paraeducator staffing has increased from 457 in 2023-24 to 460 in 2024-25, with an increase of 44 special education para positions and a decrease of 41 in all other para positions.

Despite the increase, school staff and education stakeholders say they still anticipate drawbacks in the classroom, including a growing difficulty to provide individualized services and larger classroom sizes for already struggling teachers.

Staffing levels at schools are “disconcerting,” Spencer said.

“They were bad before COVID, but they are really bad right now,” Spencer said. “Schools are not implementing IEPs, are not identifying children, they’re not providing the staff that are required, and it is a real crisis.”

A spokesperson from Hartford Public Schools said that “staff turnover for any position causes a ripple effect for schools, not just special education.”

“Hartford Public Schools is actively working to fill special education vacancies via targeted approaches such as building partnerships with universities, cultivating internal pathways for paraeducators interested in becoming teachers, utilizing social media and attending job fairs,” the spokesperson said.

A  from the state Department of Education showed the problem is not just in Hartford but that school staffing shortages are occurring across the state.

Ortiz was front and center in funding advocacy her senior year through letters to the city council, , state Department of Education and a senior capstone project titled “Special Education: A systemic failure.”

“I should have had the help of a special education teacher, a paraprofessional, lessons designed to meet me where I was and challenge me, speech therapy, and occupational therapy. I felt like [no one] cared about my future, because I didn’t receive those supports. I now realize that this was due to a lack of funding and the inability to keep good teachers and staff,” Ortiz wrote to state legislators.

Ortiz told the CT Mirror that she shared her story so her experience doesn’t repeat in other children.

“It’s knowing that more kids are falling through the cracks of the system, and we are still making it seem like everything’s great, that we’re doing better for the next generation, and I always ask ‘When?’” Ortiz said. “The amount of times I would try to look for stories that can relate to me, so I could be like ‘OK, I’m not the only one.’ I would try to do that, I would Google people that went to college and did not know how to read. I couldn’t find anyone. … So maybe if I am the first, and I know I’m not, maybe people can be like, ‘That person made it.’ ”

When parents learn their child has a developmental disability, they often have questions about what their child may or may not be able to do.

Children with developmental disabilities, such as Down syndrome, often have challenges and delays in language development. And for some families, one of these questions may be: “Will speaking two languages be detrimental to their development?”

However, studies consistently demonstrate exposure to an additional language, including a minority language, . This highlights the importance of giving children the opportunity to become bilingual.

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Many parents feel speaking one language would be easier than two. Some may feel for a child with a developmental disability. This is a belief which is also sometimes held by teachers and clinicians who may be consulted on their view towards bilingual exposure.

With good intentions, paediatricians, speech–language therapists, teachers or social workers to avoid using a heritage or minority language in the home, as children will also be exposed to the majority community language.

Research also shows children with disabilities may have in a second language.

However, bilingualism is possible for children with developmental disabilities, as our research on children learning both Welsh and English shows. Children who are able to access bilingual provisions may also benefit. In fact, research shows bilingualism may have a .

Bilingualism in Wales

The most recent census data for England and Wales suggests from 19% in 2011 to 17.8% in 2021. The largest decline was in those aged between 5 and 15 years old.

While these latest figures are unexpected and , the age group with the highest percentage of Welsh speakers was also children between the ages of 5 and 15. This gives a promising outlook for the future of the Welsh language.

Crucially, converging evidence shows bilingualism does not cause .

Parents may have reservations about Welsh-medium education if they do not speak Welsh themselves, for example. Parents of autistic children or children with developmental disabilities may have further reservations still.

Once again though, studies show for these groups either. This includes children with more

Why parents should embrace bilingualism

Regarding children with Down syndrome, . Indeed, our research suggests families should embrace bilingualism. We recruited children with Down syndrome alongside typically developing children who were either acquiring only English, or were exposed to both English and Welsh. These children completed a range of specialist tasks to assess their cognitive and language skills.

We found Welsh-English bilingual children with Down syndrome had comparable English skills in important language areas to children with Down syndrome who had only been exposed to English.

Meanwhile, the bilingual children were also developing skills in their additional language. Those also acquiring Welsh had similar abilities in that language as younger children without Down syndrome, who were at the same level of development.

Children with Down syndrome should therefore be supported in accessing similar educational provisions as more typically developing children. In the context of Wales, this could mean accessing Welsh-medium schools or being included in second language classes.

In Wales, parents can opt for their children to receive Welsh-medium education, regardless of their home language. Children who receive Welsh education can flourish if they have access to bilingual education.

Research on typically developing bilingual children and adults suggests there may be other . These include better mental skills, creativity and even the possibility of being , such as Alzheimer’s disease.

Being bilingual opens up a range of opportunities such as , and .

Research shows some of these benefits, such as enhanced thinking skills, .

Giving children the opportunity to develop abilities in two languages also enables them to be able to choose what language they want to communicate in. It may also make them feel connected to their community.

These findings challenge the view that bilingualism is detrimental to children’s development. In contrast, including children with developmental disabilities in bilingual provisions gives them the chance to blossom alongside their typically developing peers.

As a result, families should feel empowered to reach informed decisions for themselves by considering the potential opportunities being bilingual may provide.

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the .

In July 2022, Stechuk was part of the UnidosUS team that conducted parent focus groups at its affiliate , which promotes school readiness for Latino children, in San Antonio, Texas. The parents whose children were receiving speech therapy described how therapists instructed them to use English only at home. One mother of a child with a hearing disability reported being told: “Try speaking to him in English. Don’t bring in any Spanish right now…. You don’t want to confuse him since he’s just starting to hear.”

Late last year, Stechuk and colleagues presented these findings at a session of the National Head Start Association Parent and Family Engagement Conference. They asked participants if speech therapists or other professionals had told them that growing up with two languages is “confusing” for children, and the response was immediate. “At least a dozen hands went up,” he recalls, and many personal stories came out.

“Some schools or early intervention personnel are still treating bilingualism as some kind of problem or disability,” Stechuk says.

UnidosUS’s recently published captures many more of these miscues, identifying three counterproductive myths that persist in spite of research that’s been around for decades:

• Myth #1: Young children can be “confused” by more than one language
• Myth #2: Multiple languages may compete with each other in the child’s brain
• Myth #3: Latino children with disabilities are “better off” if parents stop speaking Spanish in favor of speaking English.

When therapists offer misguided advice, Stechuk explains, there’s a danger that Latino families will question their own experience, possibly curtailing their interactions with their young children. Three out of four of these parents who participated in the UnidosUS focus groups, he says, are reading to their children on a daily basis, making time for this activity even when juggling multiple jobs and responsibilities. The therapists’ advice to stop speaking Spanish could actually undermine the communication skills it is intended to help.

“Shining a light on these issues is an important part of advancing a Prenatal to 3 movement of Latinx/a/o communities” says Amilcar Guzmán of the , which supports the work of UnidosUS. “Capturing the voices of Latina parents is central to creating the supports necessary to enhance the lives of historically underinvested communities.”

Both/And

“Latino families recognize the long-term benefits of bilingualism,” Stechuk says.  “The heritage language is an asset children can draw upon throughout their lives.” Code switching, part of that, is widely understood as an effective communication strategy.

This is also the official position of (ASHA), which “as a normal phenomenon engaged in by many fluent bilingual speakers.” A definitive text the ASHA cites, , states unequivocally: “This is not to be considered indicative of a language disorder.”

Evidently, however, at least some of ASHA’s 223,000 members and affiliates — audiologists and speech-language pathologists as well as the scientists and students who research how humans communicate — aren’t getting the message. The question is how to make sure that more professionals make better use of the brain science behind bilingualism.

“ASHA recognizes multilingualism as an asset,” says Megan-Brette Hamilton, chief staff officer for multicultural affairs at the organization. “It also recognizes that all children, with and without communication disorders, can become multilingual communicators in supportive, language-rich environments.” Hamilton adds that while many children are learning and speaking English in their educational settings, they still need to be able to communicate with their family and community and maintain a connection to their cultural-linguistic heritage.

“It’s not an ‘either/or’; it’s a ‘both/and.’”

Hamilton says the association advocates for an additive view of bi/multilingualism, and many clinicians partner with bilingual service providers or interpreters/culture brokers so both English and a child’s heritage language are supported in service delivery. “ASHA also makes it a point to provide its members with professional education that assures they consider and use current evidence-based practices that address and promote all languages of exposure.”

Stechuk notes that engaging colleges and universities who train speech language therapists, to make sure all early intervention practitioners take the evidence into account, is also a critical next step.

Difference vs. Disorder

Viorica Marian, professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders at Northwestern University and author of the forthcoming , says the research suggests that bilingualism confers all sorts of advantages. “Upper and upper-middle-class families view it as an asset,” she says, “but the nice thing is that everyone can reap the benefits of bilingualism.”

She contends that the English-only advice that many specialists dispense “is about bias, not data” and a misunderstanding of “difference” versus “disorder.” Just because people do things differently from us doesn’t mean they’re doing them wrong. In fact, we monolinguals might have something to learn. Marian’s includes these facts in a section on “What Clinicians Should Know”:

• Bilingual children develop an earlier understanding of taxonomic relationships than their monolingual peers (e.g., car and bus are vehicles).
• Linguistic input co-activates both languages in bilinguals; when bilinguals hear or read words in one language, partially overlapping linguistic structures in the other language also are activated.
• Bilinguals have greater gray matter density than monolinguals in certain left hemisphere regions.

“If the brain is an engine,” she wrote in a , “bilingualism may help to improve its mileage, allowing it to go further on the same amount of fuel.”

Confusion about Linguistic Confusion

Children manifest learning and speech disabilities regardless of bilingualism, says Fred Genesee, professor emeritus of psychology at McGill University. “Bilingualism doesn’t exacerbate disabilities, and it doesn’t make the impairments better, either.”

Genesee has also been researching bilingualism for decades. He traces the origins of the bias toward monolingualism to longstanding nationalistic, xenophobic beliefs and to flawed academic methods, specifically citing the German linguist Werner Leopold, who wrote about his own daughters’ linguistic confusion in the 1940s. (.)

“It’s unlikely the brain is so limited,” Genesee says, noting that subsequent research has found that even newborns can distinguish between two languages, based on the rhythmic pattern (also known as prosody). His (2015) maintains, “Children who acquire two languages from birth achieve the same fundamental milestones in language development with respect to babbling, first words and emergence of word combinations as monolingual children within the same time frame despite the fact that they have less exposure, on average, to each language than monolinguals.”

Artificial restrictions on bilingualism, Genesee says, can jeopardize parent-child relationships as well as the neurocognitive benefits of rich language exposure or what he calls “vitamins and minerals for the brain.” Language is a key component of culture, literacy, communication, among other nutrients a young mind needs.

“The heritage language,” Genesee says, “is a part of who they are.”

Lim, an education technology entrepreneur and TED Fellow, watched as her mother would answer questions every day about how to support their child’s learning, parent-teacher conferences and cultural barriers around school jargon.

Growing up in an immigrant family, Lim resonated with their struggles and later explored solutions to family-school partnerships as the founder and CEO of , a communication app that helps multilingual and underserved families connect with their child’s teachers.

“Education is one of the biggest issues we need to solve in this country,” Lim tells ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ. “And how can we solve this through technology?”

TalkingPoints has supported more than 600 schools and districts – over 3 million families and teachers, where 70% of students served are students of color and 89% come from Title I schools.

Lim delved into this further at the conference during her TED Talk: “.”

“We’re playing the role my mom had for the school and my friends’ families — the communicator, the explainer, the coach, the translator and the go-between,” Lim said in her TED Talk. “When teachers and families work together everyone wins.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ: What key takeaways would you want someone watching your TED Talk to understand about you and TalkingPoints?

I think the biggest takeaway about me is that my personal background drives a lot of the talking points in my TED Talk. I’m Korean and moved to England when I was eight. My mom became that communicator, translator and go-between in the public elementary school I went to. I saw the impact that had on me and my sister’s education, so I think a lot about that when it comes to family-school partnerships as the central driver of student success. 

But it’s not just the experience of myself. Research really shows that when families and schools partner with each other and build relationships that are meaningful and collaborative, that really drives student learning and well being. 

ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ: How does it feel to be the only education leader selected as part of the class of 2022 TED Fellows Program?

I’m really excited and inspired to be part of this program and to talk about the state of education in the U.S., especially when it comes to highlighting the mass media’s view around education, the achievement gap and the potential of families driving student success. I’m also excited to have this platform to bring to life the research we have at TalkingPoints. You might have seen in my TED Talk about the 40 million children that come from under-resourced and/or immigrant families. People gasped at that number as well as the two year achievement gap and the trillion dollars lost in the economy.

I think education is one of the biggest issues we need to solve in this country, and we haven’t found the silver bullet to the learning and opportunity gap. COVID-19 really exacerbated it and there’s a long way to go. With the leaders in the TED community, we’re able to connect with others also trying to solve these complex social problems.

ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ: You mentioned how COVID-19 exacerbated the learning and opportunity gap for students. Did COVID-19 have an impact on TalkingPoints ability to tackle this?

When COVID-19 hit us in March 2020, we actually saw a 20x increase in communication volume. Within the span of three to six months, we saw a fixed increase in the number of families that we were reaching. And all the school districts that we were partnering with started reaching out saying that they needed TalkingPoints for the entire school district instead of just a subset of students. 

We also did a research report that said family-school partnerships was more important than ever during COVID-19 to drive student learning and well being. It was a silver lining moment for us in terms of how we can serve these communities and really get TalkingPoints in the hands of many more school districts and families who need it. But more importantly, it highlights how family-school partnerships continue to be a critical component to student learning.

ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ: Tell me more about TalkingPoints growth. How have languages expanded since the organization was founded?

In terms of languages, we started off with around 20. Now we’re offering translations in more than 125 languages with support from real human translators for instant translations. We also include dialects that are not supported by other apps, like Dari which is a language spoken in Afghanistan, Odia which is an Indian dialect, Kata which is a Russian dialect and Uyghur which is spoken in a region of China. 

We have also piloted a language for Cape Verdean Creole. We’re the only organization to support a language like that. Boston Public Schools were really excited about it because they have a significant Cape Verdean population and have been really struggling to support that set of families and students in the past. We’ve really expanded and plan to expand even further down the line.

ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ: What would you say has been the most impactful story you’ve heard from someone that uses TalkingPoints?

So we had a teacher based in Georgia. She’s an elementary school teacher and she’s taught in the same elementary school for more than 10 years. She used to teach kindergarten three years ago, but last year she started teaching third grade. Because of this, she ended up teaching the same kid that she used to teach in kindergarten. She wrote to us specifically to say that the mother of the student, who is a Spanish speaking student, has never felt so included in their school community after using TalkingPoints. 

If you think about it, this is a natural A/B experiment so to speak. It’s the same school, the same teacher, the same student and the same family. This is a really special story because we can attribute the impact of TalkingPoints specifically to this before and after story. It’s really, really touching and amazing. And the fact that the teacher specifically wrote to us to tell us that at the request of the mother is also special. That’s one story I love sharing.

ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ: What does the future look like for TalkingPoints? For instance, do you see TalkingPoints delving into other ways to engage and connect families?

I think there’s a couple of things to know. We’re already working on a lot of exciting things around in-house research to see what the impact of TalkingPoints has on student outcomes. For example, we have research coming up that actually shows a direct-causal relationship to engage families around improving student achievement, grades across subjects, attendance and student discipline. I’m really excited to share that. 

We’ve also been working on making sure that the family-school connections are equitable and accessible to all. TalkingPoints is open to all adults who support student learning within a school system – including teachers, counselors, bus drivers, coaches and psychologists, so a student’s full learning team can engage with families regularly. 

We also have reading flags whenever a teacher is writing above a fifth grade reading level. We offer suggestions to simplify so parents can understand them better. We also have tools for families to demystify education terms, like Individualized Education Program (IEP) or parent-teacher conferences. Like what are they and why are they important? As well as allowing families to engage with their teachers via video with closed captions translated. 

So I guess the reason I bring this all up relates directly to the future of TalkingPoints. We are on a mission to systematically remove the barriers to family-school partnerships. We are looking to develop a next generation platform that gives coaching and support to teachers, school administrators and families to talk to each other in a positive, connecting way.

ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ: As a Korean immigrant, what does it mean to you to be a part of the education technology space?

My personal experience and identity really drives the way that I think about the role of education technology as a tool. It can really unlock behaviors and thoughts that schools and families can have to drive student success. But it has to come from an inclusive, accessible and equitable lens. The way that education technology is designed, thought about, used and implemented can be a make or break moment. If done well, there’s incredible potential to improve student success. But if not, it can further widen the learning loss gap we’ve seen from COVID-19. 

As a Korean immigrant, I think a lot about product development and education technology that is inclusive, accessible and caters to the needs of under-resourced and immigrant students and families. That goes not just for me but a lot of our TalkingPoints team. They’ve grown up as English language learners, come from immigrant families, are first generation college goers and have taught in the classroom. Our team really understands the communities we serve and how we think about our vision to further support them.

Typically, about experience a developmental delay. But children born during the pandemic, a 2022 study has found, have of developmental delays in communication and social development compared to babies born prior to the pandemic.

The reason, some researchers believe, is related to , among other factors.

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Delays in communication can mean a child learns to talk later, talks less or uses gestures like pointing instead of talking. Social developmental delays might be present when a child doesn’t respond to their name when called, doesn’t look at what adults are paying attention to in the environment, or doesn’t play with other children or with trusted adults.

It’s hard to say if children who suffer from these delays can be caught up or if they will require continued services or special education into elementary school and beyond. The more severe the delay, the more likely the child will need ongoing specialized services.

One way to be more certain is to talk to your child’s pediatrician about whether your child is meeting certain developmental benchmarks. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, also recommends that parents contact their state’s and say, “I have concerns about my child’s development, and I would like to have my child evaluated to find out if he/she is eligible for early intervention services.”

In the meantime, parents and early childhood teachers can support language development for children who may suffer from delays by providing rich, responsive interactions and conversations.

As a who specializes in language and literacy skills for young children with learning disabilities, here I offer five evidence-based strategies that parents and teachers of children with pandemic-related developmental delays can use to support the growth of their child’s language skills and later school performance.

1. Get children talking

Language is how we share experiences. However, children with developmental delays may not talk very much. Adults can , which helps children develop the ability to communicate and interact with others.

One way to do this is to create situations in which the child has to talk to get something they want. For example, at home, put a favorite toy or snack in a clear sealed bag or plastic container so the child can see the item but cannot get it themselves without asking for help. At preschool or day care during snack time or free play, provide the student with two choices and have them say which choice they want. For children whose speech is hard to understand, any noise or attempt at talking is a good sign. The important part is that they are trying to talk, not that the words come out perfectly. If the child’s speech is unintelligible, have them point and talk at the same time to show their choice.

2. Expand on children’s speech

Providing is critical for supporting the language development of children with developmental delays.

One way to provide rich language is by responding to what the child says and then adding on details or adjectives. For example, if a young child sees a dog and exclaims, “Doggy!”, an adult could expand on that speech by saying, “Yes! There’s a big brown dog.” The adult is acknowledging what the child said and providing more language for the child to hear and respond to while sharing the experience of seeing a dog.

3. Be a warm and attentive conversation partner

When adults provide warm, supportive interactions, children go on to have , better vocabulary and reading ability in first grade, and better mathematics performance in third grade.

Being a supportive partner means . For example, play with toys the child chose or enact pretend scenarios the child came up with. During conversation, talk directly to the child about a topic the child chose and take turns talking. Don’t worry about correcting the child or guiding the interaction. It’s OK if you’ve talked about the dog across the street a thousand times. Each interaction builds language skills. Stay positive and engaged.

4. Share a book

Shared book reading is a technique where the adult actively involves the child in the storytelling experience. Children who participate in frequent shared book reading have larger vocabularies, use more complex language and have .

Start by asking open-ended questions like, “What do you think will happen next?” Talk to the child about their real-life experiences similar to the book, like, “Remember when we went to the park? What did we do there?”

Point out words and letters while reading aloud to help children develop their awareness of print. Talk about interesting words in the story and define new words. Children often like to read the same book over and over, so there will be many opportunities to use these strategies during story time. Don’t worry about using them all at once.

5. Talk about words

Help children develop a better awareness of the connection between words and how they sound. This is an important skill that .

Clap or count syllables in words, such as “cupcake” or “butterfly.” Tell nursery rhymes and have the child say which words rhyme or come up with other words that rhyme. Talk about the sounds you hear at the beginning or end of words, such as the “t” sound in “tiger” or the “m” in “room.” Children are slowly learning that spoken language is made up of words and sounds that can be represented by written letters. This knowledge is the gateway for learning to read and write.

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the .

This dearth of dads in language learning needs to change, says Dr. Naja Ferjan Ramírez, director of the University of Washington’s Language Development and Processing Laboratory. But just knowing that things need to change doesn’t mean it will be easy.

Infant directed speech refers to the high-pitched, singsong, slowed-down way adults talk to babies that signals to them that “This conversation is for ˛â´ÇłÜ.” Sometimes called “parentese,” it typically involves eye contact, interactive play and shared attention. Researchers agree that children’s language development is a social process; it takes place within the web of relationships and interactions that make up the child’s daily experience. Adults talking specifically to babies in this context communicate affect — how they turn their heads, widen their eyes, smile, wait for a response — and engage the infant’s attention, facilitating both social interaction and language learning.

Though research over several decades has focused largely on the contributions of mothers, a quick scan of family dynamics in the U.S. makes it clear that there’s more to the story. Women’s careers have expanded, and fathers have become more directly involved in their babies’ upbringing. With the pandemic, those demographic changes that were accelerated in many families, profoundly shifted mothers’ and fathers’ interactions within the family structure.

“In many families, due to the pandemic, dad’s job ended up being more flexible than mom’s, or for whatever reason (sometimes COVID-induced unemployment), fathers were home, in some cases more than mothers,” says Ferjan Ramírez. “For some families, that was a huge shift. Not for everybody, certainly, because we know women have been affected by the pandemic too. But in many families, there was a dramatic shift in the types of child care responsibilities that dads took on.”

It was an adjustment for families, she says, but also for researchers who had been asking mothers almost exclusively to bring children into their lab appointments.

“If the dads are going to bring the children in,” she says, “maybe we need to rethink the types of activities we’re asking parents to do with children when we’re studying them in the lab. Maybe we shouldn’t ask everyone to sit on the floor and read a book but should include some things the dads like to do. Why not study their language interaction during rough and tumble play or soccer, for example? Nobody has done that in the past, but we should because we really don’t know what happens.”

Fathers Have Their Own Way with Words

Including fathers in the research is essential not only because they are central to children’s web of social relationships, but also because fathers bring unique characteristics to IDS. Studies have observed that fathers use a higher number of rare words and fewer common words than mothers. Though fathers typically use fewer words with their infants, their speech is more diverse and more challenging to the child. Recent studies have found that fathers used significantly more wh-words (why? what?), asked more questions and asked for clarification more often than mothers. Posing wh-questions elicits a verbal response from the child which researchers believe helps foster their reasoning abilities in addition to building vocabulary.

Other studies have found that fathers’ use of such diverse speech was a unique predictor of their children’s overall language at 24 months and one study observed that in an economically and culturally diverse sample of families with children from 6 to 36 months, fathers’ use of wh-questions during book reading was significantly associated with children’s vocabulary when they entered kindergarten.

None of this is to say that fathers’ IDS is superior to that of mothers, but that their approach to their infants’ language learning matters and ought to be considered in the research. That may sound like a foregone conclusion, but as Ramírez points out, it’s complicated, starting with LENA (Language Environment Analysis), the recording device that captures and analyzes conversations between babies and their caregivers. Analyzing recordings from children’s ordinary interactions with all the caregivers in their lives, LENA’s software analyzes the number of words spoken by women and those spoken by men. One large study reported that mothers accounted for 75% of adult words spoken around children from 2 to 48 months. However, follow-up research assessing LENA’s reliability found that when male speakers used a higher pitch to address their infants, they were more likely to be wrongly tagged as female.

Because multiple studies have noted this error, researchers looking to distinguish mothers’ and fathers’ speech are encouraged to supplement LENA with manual annotations — a process Ramírez points out is slow, labor-intensive and expensive.

When researchers did make this adjustment, they found that mothers still verbally interact with their babies up to two times more than fathers do — a gap that’s especially pronounced in the baby’s first six months — but not 75% as previously reported. Researchers also found that when fathers interact one-on-one with their infants, they engage in equal amounts of IDS as mothers, but when mother comes into the picture, fathers speak significantly less. Some researchers propose that mothers act as “gatekeepers” and automatically assume the more active role with their babies or that fathers feel less responsible for holding up their end of the conversation when mom is present. Either way, the more accurate measurement of of IDS fathers’ engagement underscores that infants learn language within a social construct, and scientific research into parents’ effect on language development needs to acknowledge these complexities, Ramírez says.

“If you understand that mom takes over the conversation when she’s around,” she says, “it will be important in research to make sure we sometimes study dads without mothers present, as well as studying the triadic interactions of mother, father, child.”

New Approaches Needed

If fathers are to be included in language-learning research, she says, studies must be set up differently. In North America, where paternity leave is still an outlier, fathers may not be as free to come to the lab during weekday daytime hours, so labs will need to extend their hours to accommodate their different schedules. Labs also need to consider fathers’ different behavioral styles, she says. Studies have shown that fathers tend to engage in more energetic, playful, stimulating physical interactions with their children than the mother’s “smoother,” more flowing interaction.

“My husband would prefer to bounce a ball with our kids, while I might prefer to read,” Ramírez says. “That’s not a bad thing, it’s just different styles. But what that means is that it’s not as simple as, ‘Hey, let’s invite the dads to the labs.’ We really have to rethink how we’re going to do this so dads feel welcome and valued. This means developing new protocols, which shouldn’t be based on maternal templates alone.

“But to develop a protocol for studying language during soccer play, for example, requires extra resources and additional funding, in addition to first having to convince the funders that it’s necessary from a scientific perspective.”

Ramírez has firsthand knowledge of what an uphill battle that’s likely to be. When she sent out her on fathers’ IDS and its influence on language development for peer review, one reviewer’s comments were, “Why do you care about this? Is studying dads really going to make the needle budge? Why are you even writing this paper?”

“They eventually reconsidered, and the paper got published,” she said with a laugh. “But comments like this demonstrate that including fathers in research is still not a given in academia.”

Given the dramatic difference fathers’ infant-centered speech can make in the child’s vocabulary building and cognitive development, research must do better if it’s to adequately reflect contemporary language learning. Further study might reveal significant differences in paternal IDS that current research has not discovered and could lead to coaching sessions and interventions much more finely tuned to how fathers actually interact with their children.

This dearth of research is even truer of families headed by LGBTQ parents and same-sex couples, who are under-represented practically to the point of invisibility in the research. Ramírez’ will soon launch a study on infant language development in same-sex families, using LENA recordings and eye-tracking to analyze the preference for male vs. female parentese.

“Future research might consider parent gender as fluid rather than binary,” Ferjan Ramírez says, “and that’s going to require different strategies, more resources and a different approach to recruit and welcome parents to the lab. But until that’s done, we really can’t claim to fully understand the role of parents in children’s language learning.”

Both research teams used the nonprofit LENA’s to glean their findings. The wearable device delivers detailed information on what children hear throughout the day. It measures the number of words spoken near the child in addition to the child’s own language-related vocalizations.

It also counts child-adult interactions, called “conversational turns,” which both research groups say are critical to language acquisition.

“It is the conversational turns that drive brain development,” said Brown’s Sean Deoni, adding he’s concerned for the long-term success of children born after the pandemic began. 

The joint finding is the latest of discovered when researchers compared babies born before and after COVID. 

Deoni is principal investigator at Brown’s Advanced Baby Imaging Lab. He and other staffers there first spotted the problem when they noticed that children who visited the lab after March 2020 took longer to complete cognitive tasks.

“They were not as attentive, or at least not performing as well as we normally have seen,” Deoni said. It was this change that prompted him to take a new look at various data points gathered from the nearly 800 children his facility has worked with in recent years. After examining their neuroimaging and neurocognitive results, he and his team found child motor and language scores decreased sharply in 2021 and 2022, prompting them to search for an explanation for the decline.

The inquiry led them to analyze information gathered from children ages 12 and 16 months who were born before 2019 — well before the COVID outbreak — and after July 2020, months into its spread. The results showed a major drop in verbal functioning between the two groups. Those born after COVID demonstrated slower verbal growth over time.

Tests showed, too, these babies experienced a significantly slower rate of white matter development versus the children from studies done before the pandemic.

“White matter is basically the wiring of the brain,” Deoni said. “It’s what carries information throughout the brain and to different cortical regions where it is processed. White matter damage, for example, is a hallmark of multiple sclerosis. Reduced white matter development is associated with reduced cognitive development.”

Deoni and his team also found a significant drop in adult words per hour and conversational turns between the two groups of children. The deficit will have a significant impact on kids he said, citing his own group’s earlier research. 

Neither research team focused on the cause of the drop in caregiver interactions with babies, only the outcome, though Deoni cited the heightened stress, depression and burnout associated with the pandemic as possible explanations. 

Jill Gilkerson, a linguist specializing in early language acquisition and LENA’s chief research and evaluation officer, said the reasons might differ from one household to the next. 

“I don’t think we are going to be able to find a single cause to point to, and I’m not sure that we need to,” she said. “We hope this data validates concerns caregivers may be having, helps them know they are not alone in those feelings and furthers the conversation about the need to invest in support for families at every level.”

LENA’s study showed child vocalizations dropped significantly across all groups of children, but particularly among those from the lowest socioeconomic level. The frequency of caregiver/child conversations also decreased dramatically, particularly among children from the poorest families, it found.

“It’s often the case that when these adverse events happen, it’s those who are already the most vulnerable that are hit the hardest… and I think that we are seeing this here,” Gilkerson said.

The connection between economic security and language acquisition was very much a pre-pandemic concern as well. A found that children growing up in low-income households hear 30 million fewer words than their peers from high-income backgrounds. A 2018 study raised questions about the extent of the gap, but the science is clear that children’s first three years are the most critical time for brain development.

LENA, based in Boulder, Colorado and founded in 2004, aims to improve children’s futures through early talk technology and data-driven programs. Its software measures a child’s language environment and provides feedback to parents and professionals vested in preparing them for school.

Its study of 136 COVID-era babies included only those who started gestating on or after the start of the pandemic in mid-March 2020: All were born after December 15 of that year. The findings from this group were compared to a pre-COVID pool, which captured recordings between 2017 and March 2020 and included 494 kids.

These language deficits, once shared with caregivers, are possible to correct. But, Gilkerson said, it’s important for groups like hers to suggest practical, easily applicable solutions.

“We need to … provide parents with strategies for integrating talk — interactive talk, quality talk — with their children during their regular routine,” she said, rather than add a new task to their already stress-filled lives.

LENA’s latest research builds off earlier findings the group published in the journal in October 2018: That study showed early talk and interaction, particularly for children ages 18 to 24 months, can predict school-age language and cognitive outcomes. In that paper, LENA examined day-long audio recordings for 146 infants and toddlers completed monthly for six months.

LENA’s Language Environment Analysis software measured the total number of adult words and adult-child conversations. LENA conducted follow-up evaluations at 9 to 14 years of age. It concluded that adult-child conversations influence a child’s IQ, verbal comprehension and vocabulary scores 10 years later.

And while it’s true, both researchers acknowledged, that children are resilient, recent data does not yet reflect the bounceback from the pandemic.

“We are not seeing them hit a floor and all progressively get better,” Deoni said. “We are seeing them continue this downward trend.”

And it’s not just a language acquisition problem. Reduced verbal development is being driven by poor motor development, Deoni said: This early foundational skill could have a lasting impact on children, one that can be hard to correct for as they age.

“I’m worried about how we set things up going forward such that our early childhood teachers and early childhood interventionalists are prepared for what is potentially a set of children who maybe aren’t performing as we expect them to,” he said.

Turns out, that’s not necessarily so. According to a recent study, Latinx fathers actually do speak to their infants in “parentese,” that unique style of speech known and loved by babies everywhere. And that’s a very good thing, says Dr. Naja Ferjan Ramírez, assistant professor in Linguistics at the University of Washington, because such speech supports the babies’ language learning and brain building. Mostly, dads don’t know that.

The importance of speaking with infants in this special way is backed up by a large body of research showing how much impact caregivers’ social interactions have on babies’ cognitive and linguistic development. In speaking  — pitching their voices higher, slowing their speech and exaggerating their intonation — caregivers emphasize language for babies in a way that tells them, “This is for you, I’m speaking to you,” and elicit the kind of call-and-response “”feedback loop that’s the keystone to the child’s language development.

Recent studies highlight the important role fathers play in their infants’ language learning, but Ramírez has observed a persistent gap in the literature concerning the contributions of mothers and fathers. That gap is especially notable, she says, when it comes to infants of bilingual and culturally diverse background, such as Latinx babies.

In what Ramírez and her fellow researchers believe is the first study comparing the amount of mother and father parentese in a bilingual context, 37 families with bilingual, Latinx infants were set up with special Language Environment Analysis () recording devices. Often referred to as a “talk pedometer,” the LENA recording device captures and analyzes the back-and-forth talk among children and their caregivers, without identifying individual words.

Researchers asked the parents to put the devices on their babies on a typical weekend when both parents were home and not working. The device then “listened to” and analyzed when language was directed at the child and by whom. Prior to the listening sessions, the researchers surveyed the fathers about how often they performed specific parental responsibilities, such as changing diapers and singing to their children, plus additional questions on language development.

Once the LENA recordings had been analyzed, the results were unequivocal: Every father spoke parentese. Both mothers and fathers spoke directly to the children in Spanish and English; language-mixing was common in both, and all the fathers engaged in the parentese that elicited turn-taking and infant responses.

“I’m impressed that every single dad in the study used parentese,” says Ramírez. “This is something we’ve seen in non-Latinx dads and now we’ve observed it in our study of Latinx dads too. The proportion of how much they use parentese varies from family to family, but they all use it.”

Ramírez, lead author on the article, “,” which details this research, has investigated infant language-acquisition for years and has become acutely aware that most research thus far has focused exclusively on mothers. Traditionally, fathers have been considered “secondary caregivers” who were less involved in childrearing and often not on the research radar. But the world is changing in countless ways and two of those ways that Ramírez has her eye on are the increasing involvement of fathers with their children and the demographic shifts in the U.S. which predict that Latinx families will account for more than 30% of the population by 2050.

“In some states, like California, more than 50% of the kindergarten classes within the next 10 years is going to be of Latinx descent,” she says. “So, we need to expand our understanding of bilingual language acquisition, and we need to develop a better knowledge of the social differences with Latinx families — if there are stricter gender roles or different attitudes toward the role of father, for example — so that whatever interventions we design are culturally informed and sensitive.”

“Also,” she says with a laugh, “I have a personal connection to this situation. My husband is Dominican, and I’ve been observing Latinx families from the ‘inside’ for years.”

One of her primary observations is that two important cultural beliefs in Latinx culture — machismo and familismo — are at odds with each other, particularly when it comes to men’s interactions with their children. Machismo is the cultural view that values strict gender roles and defines men as being strong, masculine and dominant, encouraging an authoritarian style of parenting and less direct involvement with their babies. Many scholars and members of the Latinx community suggest that this portrayal of Latinx fathers is outdated and inaccurate, but it does persist — even in the way men sometimes view themselves. However, as Ramírez has observed personally and in her research, machismo is trumped again and again by the more-abiding value of familismo, the commitment to family as a source of loyalty, closeness, connection and strength.

“So, the main message we got from our study is that, yes, these dads are very much involved in and part of their babies’ lives,” she says, “and they adjust their speech in their interactions with their infants.”

One remarkable, though maybe not completely surprising, aspect of this and other studies of fathers’ interaction with their infants is the ratio of speech babies hear from their mothers compared to their fathers. On average, babies hear two to three times more child-directed speech (meaning language directed to the baby rather than just overheard) from women than from men. In this study, Ramírez, et al, discovered that infants heard on average 18,545 adult words per day: 11,954 from women and 6,591 from men, or an average of 50.4% fewer words from men. Fathers produced on average 43% less parentese than mothers, and the higher the family’s income, the more parentese both parents used. The biggest gap between the amount of language babies hear from mothers and fathers is when the infant is the youngest.

“We’re not 100% sure why that is,” she says. “It may have to do with just the behavioral differences between moms and dads, where dads tend to be more energetic and playful and prefer physical activities little babies can’t engage in yet. There’s also a whole literature on the hormonal differences that exist between moms and dads at this age, so there might also be a biological reason for this. Knowing that is really meaningful for me because if I design an intervention, I will want engage fathers when the babies are really little.”

The study also found that infants whose fathers who were more involved in child care responsibilities tended to hear more daddy-talk, though not necessarily more parentese, with one exception: Researchers saw a strong relationship between fathers’ use of parentese and their awareness of its importance. The more they know about the difference it makes, the more fathers use infant-directed speech. This positive relationship between use of child-directed speech and the parent’s knowledge, beliefs and attitudes around child development has been well-documented in English-speaking mothers, but Ramírez and her fellow researchers say theirs is the first study they’re aware of that demonstrates such an association in fathers.

“This is something I experienced over and over again when I spoke with parents (not just in this study),” she says. “The dads will say, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s how my wife talks, and I don’t know why. It’s annoying. I’m going to talk to my baby like they’re a grownup because I want them to learn language. Then, when you record them, there it is: Parentese.

“When you explain to them what ‘turn-taking’ means and how much it matters to their child’s development, they’ll say, ‘Oh. OK, I think I can do this.’ And then we say, ‘Here’s the recording: You already do. Now let’s think of additional day-to-day situations and routines where you may not yet use it, but you could.’”

Understanding these dynamics matters to linguistics scholars like Ramírez because the knowledge will help shape the type of parent coaching interventions that she creates for her own lab, the Language Development and Processing (LDP) Lab, and the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences (I-LABS), both at the University of Washington. As the demographic shifts now at play in U.S. society continue their seismic activity, fathers increasingly will be viewed not as secondary caregivers, but as parents — and fluent fatherly parentese will be an increasingly important part of infants’ learning and language landscape.

Naja Ferjan Ramírez is a distinguished professor with the University of Washington’s Language Acquisition and Multilingualism Endowment, which provided funding for the study.

For decades, a common belief has held that speaking more than one language in a child’s home confuses the child, makes it more difficult for them to learn English and might even hold them back in school and in life. The unfortunate consequence of this belief has been that some dual-language households have enforced an “English-only” rule around the children, leaving non-English speaking members of the family constrained and the child disconnected from some of the deepest and best of their heritage. Children may end up hearing less language overall if English is not a preferred language of adults in the household — at a time when their brains need language like their bodies need food.

In fact, the opposite is true. Researchers have found in numerous studies that bilingual babies learn English at the same rate as monolingual babies, with vocabularies that equal or exceed those of the English-only babies. Bilingual children have been found to have a more advanced ability to think about language and how it works, and there is some evidence that early exposure to a second language makes learning a third language easier.

Although the research is ongoing, multiple studies have found that juggling two languages from an early age actually enhances the mental skills and self-regulation referred to as “executive function,” which help people plan, solve problems and respond to the world around them in an orderly way. Some even indicate that being bilingual can offer protection decades later against age-related cognitive decline.

All over the world, as societies become more diverse and economies are globally connected, communities are working to create programs to introduce young children to learning a second language. Most are aimed at preschool children to kids in elementary school — a vast improvement on the traditional approach of starting young people on second languages in high school, but still a bit late.

According to Dr. Marley Jarvis, Outreach and Education Specialist at the University of Washington’s , researchers there have found it would make sense to start language learning much earlier: Babies’ brains are wired for language.

“I don’t want to say elementary school or later is too late for learning another language,” Jarvis says. “One of the remarkable discoveries about our brains in the past couple of decades is their plasticity and their ability to change. Everything we do every day is changing our brains. But learning language later doesn’t happen in the same way it does with very young children, so we’re working against ourselves by waiting so long.

“Children are already well-established in their first language before they even hit preschool.”

In fact, Jarvis says, research shows that babies begin to learn language sounds while still in the womb. By the time they’re born they distinguish their mother’s voice from ambient sound and are even able to .

Babies come into this world equipped with one of the most powerful computers known to humankind — already on task analyzing massive amounts of data on arrival. About 800 sounds make up all the languages of the world; each human language only uses 40 or so of those sounds. As babies lie in their little bassinets, they are not only absorbing the sights, sounds and sensual cues from this bright new world, is sorting through those multiple data streams like greased lightning, cracking the code of human language, sorting out which of those human sounds are useful in their environment. By the time they’re 10 months old, babies have “committed” to their native language, specializing in the language they hear around them, and the sounds and syntax of other human languages fade into the background.

In the case of a child surrounded by speakers of two or more languages, that commitment extends to those languages as well. As I-LABS co-director Dr. Patricia Kuhl, an international authority on early learning and brain development, observes in the video “Igniting Bilingual Learning,” babies’ language learning is time sensitive. The human brain will never be better at learning a second language than in the first three years of life.

Some parents fear that exposure to another language will limit the child’s English vocabulary, but researchers have also put that concern to rest with studies that show that bilingual children do not lag behind in the number of words they absorb. In fact, the vocabularies of bilingual children have been found to be than those of single-language children.

“In fact,” Jarvis says, “we have yet to see any evidence that a child is confused by more than two languages (though not all spoken at the same time). We haven’t seemed to find the limit. And they’re pretty good at knowing who is associated with which language. If you have a multilingual family, kids will naturally switch to the language appropriate to each person.”

And, she says, the sorting and switching from one language to another — code-switching — actually helps the baby’s brain become more agile and resourceful. As they sort through their data streams to find which language is being spoken and then respond appropriately, they begin to develop the impulse control and strategic thinking so essential to executive function. Structural brain studies indicate that bilingual adults have greater brain tissue density in areas related to language, memory and attention, with the highest levels of tissue density among those who were exposed to two languages before the age of 5 years.

Research scientist Dr. Naja Ferjan Ramírez, director of the University of Washington’s Language Development and Processing Lab, is Slovenian, married to a native Spanish-speaker, and their 4-year-old son easily switches among English, Slovenian and Spanish. Though he sometimes uses Slovene endings on English and Spanish words, he modulates his language to match the situation he finds himself in. He may throw in a Spanish or Slovene word in his English dialog, but this is because he has a bigger library to choose from. This code-switching is not haphazard, she writes, but adheres to the linguistic logic of the languages he’s using.

Each time he does, like a bodybuilder reaching for a heavier weight, he’s building his brainpower.

For anyone wanting to teach their small children another language, it’s important to remember that the learning takes place in interaction, not in mere exposure to a recitation of words. It’s the social brain, Jarvis says, that’s important in any kind of learning, especially in these early years.

In one , a group of University of Washington students went through an online training program and learned to tutor small children through playful, interactive learning. The students then were sent to Spain to deliver group English sessions daily with Spanish-speaking children in the Community of Madrid’s public infant education centers. The key practices in their training were to address the children often in English and to speak to the children in “parentese” (the higher-pitched, singsong language parents use to signal the child that this communication is for them). The learning context was highly social, with the tutors leading the children in games and activities that prompted face-to-face interaction. Tutors were trained to engage the children in frequent back-and-forth exchanges and to encourage the children to “talk” and interact with them. (I-LABS a series of research summaries with links to studies and practical family activities with tips for caregivers.)

Essentially, Jarvis says, the tutors played with the children in English in a highly social, engaging way for 45 minutes or so a day. The children in this study saw a nearly five-fold increase in their English speaking, compared with children in a control group in the school system’s English program. The children continued to develop in their native language, Spanish, at the same time. The big difference between the programs was the degree of social, back-and-forth, play-based interactions in the UW program.

If we want our children to meet the challenges of an increasingly diverse and global society, being fluent in more than one language will be an important element in that success. Parents who want their children to become the global citizens their brains are born to be can rest easy knowing that starting their children down that path as babies can only strengthen the child’s social and intellectual ability in the years to come.

The good news is that evidence exists, and the tool is readily available. The even better news for parents and caretakers? It’s free and simple: talk, listen and respond to children when they’re babies and toddlers. It’s all about the conversation.

has shown that the amount of interactive talk with adults that children experience in their first three years of life is directly related to their verbal abilities and IQ in adolescence. Researchers with LENA (Language Environment Analysis), a national nonprofit that helps communities accelerate language development in children birth to 3, began studying families in 2006 to observe the amount of adult words and back-and-forth conversations children were exposed to in their daily lives.

“For years, we’ve stressed the importance of what we call ‘conversational turns’ as one of the most predictive measures of child outcomes,” says Dr. Jill Gilkerson, LENA’s chief research and evaluation officer. “We were in a really unique position of having that early data and then being able to locate those kids in adolescence and have them participate in language and cognitive tests. Longitudinal studies are rare in this field and we now have long-term, empirical evidence of the benefits of early language exposure.”

For the original study, Gilkerson and her team enlisted more than 300 families with children 2 to 48 months old to participate in daylong LENA sessions for six months using a device that captured talk between the child and their caregivers. Often referred to as a “talk pedometer,” the LENA device doesn’t recognize individual words, but uses speech recognition algorithms that estimate word counts based on syllables, consonant distributions, duration and other characteristics.

The device weighs about two ounces and is small enough to slip into the pocket of a little vest the child wears. Parents were asked to turn the device on at the beginning of the day, leave it on and let it run out by itself. The information was then transferred to a cloud-processing system where the LENA software analyzed the captured audio and presented clear reports that are shared with parents and caregivers. The audio was deleted right after this processing so there’s never a record of what has been said.

Here’s how it works. The LENA algorithms are trained to identify and differentiate adult and child speech from TV, electronic media and background sounds. It automatically estimates the number of conversational turns between child and adult. The data show that those are the interactions that figure so dramatically in later outcomes: Children who experience more conversational turns as toddlers do measurably better academically and socially as adolescents.

“Conversational turns” refers to the back and forth talk between adult and child — even before the child has actual words. Gilkerson compares it to a verbal “serve and return” like ping pong. Gilkerson’s research and other important studies demonstrate that it isn’t the sheer number of words a child is exposed to but these conversational turns that make the difference in a child’s brain development and language learning. Torrents of words and human sounds wash over a baby from birth: it’s the social interaction that make those words stick — and make the language centers of the baby’s brain light up like a Christmas tree.

“The number of those conversational turns, especially at 18 to 24 months, has been shown to be the most predictive of child language development, as well as long-term cognitive outcomes and language outcomes,” she says. “They’re a measure of what the child is actually engaged in, not just passively listening to adult words, but their actual experience with language.”

The LENA technology offers a particularly hopeful solution to the documented “word gap” between children in lower socio-economic circumstances and middle- to higher-income families. The gap—which say amounts to a 30-million-word advantage by the time better-resourced children reach age 4 — does exist, but the LENA research proves that remedies can be available to every family.

Using the LENA analysis, researchers have been able to provide parents, caregivers and early childhood educators with rapid feedback about their verbal interactions.

“We’re able to show parents information about their LENA day compared to a normative sample,” Gilkerson says. “If it’s low, we can share techniques for improving those interactions, and when they make changes, they can see increases in the objective data, which can be very motivating. On the other side of it, it’s been great to be able to show some families what a wonderful job they’re already doing. Some of them are already really interacting with their children a lot — and it can be validating for them to be able to see that.

“It’s not necessarily the case that all high-income parents are talking a lot with their kids,” she says. “There’s a gigantic range within all socioeconomic groups. There’s a distribution (with more interaction at higher-income levels), but it’s important to know that we can change those trajectories through intervention. We can provide feedback and get those parents engaged.”

Particularly with lower-income parents who may be working multiple jobs and experience a great deal of pressure on their time and resources, Gilkerson and her team stress that incorporating conversational turns doesn’t have to be something “extra” to add to an already overburdened daily reality.

“For a parent who’s working long hours and experiencing a lot of challenges, it might not be top of mind for them to provide a language-rich environment for their child,” she says. “But if we can just educate them on the importance of talking with their child — even when they aren’t yet able to talk to you, it does make such a difference. Even just having a few minutes at the end of the day to sit and read a little. They don’t have to read a book from cover to cover — it’s all about having a conversation about the book. Let them interrupt, ask questions and talk, talk, talk with them. If a parent can do that daily, then they can really improve things for their child.”

LENA has developed comprehensive coaching curriculums that couple with the data from their technology to support parents, teachers and home visitors. The programs are implemented by trusted community partners like libraries, school districts and state agencies. is an evidence-based community program in which parents use LENA’s technology and meet for 10 weekly sessions (virtually or in person) to increase conversation with their young children. A facilitator introduces for talking with their children and the group discusses the tips, then goes home to try them and returns to discuss how the experience went. The program started in 2015 with two sites; it’s now up to 31 active sites, reaching more than 4,800 children.

In addition to being a great way for parents to learn the skills of incorporating quality talk into daily routines with their small children, it’s also a great way to build social capital in the community, she says.

launched in its current form in 2016 and has reached more than 4,700 children so far. The program supports home visitors who work one-on-one with families to increase their focus on talk and positive adult-child interactions. Other LENA tools are also available for speech pathologists, researchers and others who need scientifically reliable speech-language measurements for babies and young children.

, started in 2017, is a research-based professional development program for infant, toddler and pre-K teachers that couples LENA’s “talk pedometer” technology with strengths-based coaching that doesn’t pile more onto their schedules. It is currently operating in 162 centers and has reached more than 9,700 children since its inception.

“I’m most excited about LENA Grow,” Gilkerson says. “If we really want to move the needle and have a large, population-level effect, we want to train the people who will be interacting with a lot of children.

“I’ve been so encouraged by the fact that teachers really love this data. A lot of people in this field are not given ongoing opportunities for growth and professional development. Having someone acknowledge the importance of their work and being provided with a tool that can give them feedback can be very elevating for them. Most of them are attracted to the field because they love being able to help the children in their care.

“There are so many children who spend more than half of their waking hours in childcare or preschool at a time when their little brains are growing so quickly. Think of how many children a childcare professional can impact over their lifetime.”

Organizations globally are now using LENA programs to enrich their communities’ language environments for children and to build early literacy skills, strengthen families and increase school readiness. This offers details.

Think how many children in the world these programs can affect and how many verbally adept, intelligent, socially engaged adolescents — soon to be adults — that translates into. Just think.