…it’s probably true for number language too.
University of Pennsylvania researchers have studied the quality of parents’ speech to their toddlers, and its relationship to the children’s vocabulary later on. “Quality” of speech was measured by how well an adult observer could guess a common word uttered by the parent, when the observer could see the parent and child, but with sound muted.
In the researchers’ words:
Strikingly, this parent-input quality difference at child age 14–18 months [about 1.5 years] significantly correlated with the children’s vocabularies at 54 mo [about 4.5 years].
The ways in which parents were talking to their children at age 1 had an effect on the number of words the children knew at age 4.
The way you talk to children like this…
Tabitha at 21 months (a bit OLDER than the subjects in the beginning of the study)
…has a profound impact on what they know when they are like this…
Tabitha at 54 months, the age of the subjects at the end of the study. She is on her way to her first day of Pre-K.
It probably goes for number words and shapes, too.
So let’s get out there and talk math with those little ones!
Count stuff, use number words at every opportunity, point out and talk about shapes. Start them young. And if you haven’t started them young, start now.
It’ll be fun, I promise.
I will help you.
Click here for a newspaper summary.
Click here for a pre-publication version of the paper (PDF, link checked and valid, August 2013).