When we're speaking to children, particularly when we are attempting to get them to do something, we rarely choose our words carefully. A new study is suggesting that perhaps we should, and the results might be far more favorable.
A new study conducted by a team of researchers at the University of California, San Diego, the University of Washington and Stanford University, claims that something as minor as using a noun over a verb can make a huge difference in the way children react to a suggestion or command.
The researchers conducted two experiments using 150 children ranging in age from 3 to 6. The children came from a variety of ethnic and racial backgrounds and were also selected from middle- to upper-middle-class homes. In each of the two experiments an adult researcher spoke to the children about helping clean up after a play session.
In one instance the adult asked for help cleaning up using the word "help", a verb and in the other he used the word "helper", a noun. In both experiments the kids had to stop playing in order to clean up the mess.
The researchers gathered their baseline data based largely on to what extent a particualr child chose to help the experimenter when "helping" was never actually mentioned.
Children who heard the noun "helper" helped significantly more than children who heard the verb "help". The study added that when the experimenter talked to youngsters about helping, using verb wording, the children didn't help any more than when the experimenter never brought up helping at all.
"These findings suggest that parents and teachers can encourage young children to be more helpful by using nouns like helper instead of verbs like helping when making a request of a child," explained Christopher J. Bryan, assistant professor of psychology at UC San Diego, one of the researchers on the study. "Using the noun helper may send a signal that helping implies something positive about one's identity, which may in turn motivate children to help more."
Bryan has worked on additional studies that focus on the importance of word choice and how people react with both children and adults.
