Stanford psychologist shows why talking to kids really matters

Exposure to child-directed speech sharpens infants' language processing skills and can predict future success. New work indicates early intervention can improve language skills in kids lagging behind. Fifty years of research has revealed the sad truth that the children of lower-income, less-educated parents typically enter school with poorer language skills than their more privileged counterparts. By some measures, 5-year-old children of lower socioeconomic status (SES) score two years behind on standardized language development tests by the time they enter school. In recent years, Anne Fernald, a psychology professor at Stanford University, has conducted experiments revealing that the language gap between rich and poor children emerges during infancy. Her work has shown that significant differences in both vocabulary and real-time language processing efficiency were already evident at age 18 months in English-learning infants from higherand lower-SES families. By age 24 months, there was a 6-month gap between SES groups in processing skills critical to language development.