Why We Connect, Talk More, and Take Turns
Research showed that children who had parents who talked with them often heard 30,000,000 more words by age three. These children had higher vocabularies and achieved more success in school. [Thirty Million Words Project] [The Early Catastrophe]
A landmark study concluded that vocabulary use at 3 years old was predictive of language skills at age nine and ten. [The Early Catastrophe]
Vocabulary use in first grade can predict more than 30 percent of eleventh-grade reading comprehension. [Child Trends Databank]
There is a difference among families in the amount of child-directed conversation that toddlers hear from adults over the course of a day. By 2 years of age, there is a six-month language skills and vocabulary gap between infants who are spoken with often and those who are not. [Stanford News, Language Gap] [Stanford News, Talking Directly to Toddlers]
Research at Stanford University and at University of Chicago show that parents boost their children’s vocabulary development and language skills with frequently talking back and forth. Parents connect by noticing what the child is looking at and then talking about it. That can create a sort of “serve and return” conversation between parent and child.