Many studies have consistently demonstrated that quantity and quality of talking, interacting, and reading with children in the first three years of life are strongly associated with language and cognitive development as well as school readiness and academic performance.

A review of 103 studies by researchers showed that aspects of speech, including the quantity of words, lexical diversity, linguistic and syntactical complexity, intonation, and prosody contribute to the comprehension and production of language through enhancing speech processing, phonemic awareness, word segmentation, and knowledge of grammatical rules. In addition to features of language, the delivery of language contributes to variance in developmental outcomes.

Using infant-directed language, which children can process better, helps them to communicate more readily.

Language delivered in the context of an adult-child interaction characterized by responsiveness and positive regard helps to scaffold children’s learning and encourage verbal behaviours as they develop.

Exposing children to different languages when they are young helps them develop a bigger vocabulary at a later age.

Children with better vocabularies have better language and reading abilities in later life.