English-speaking mothers who begin reading to their children at a very early age have toddlers with greater language comprehension, larger, more expressive vocabularies and higher cognitive scores by the age of 2.
Meanwhile, Spanish-speaking mothers who read to their children every day have 3-year-olds with greater language and cognitive development than those who aren't read to. These results, based on research from researchers at the universities of Nebraska-Lincoln, Iowa State, New York, Columbia and Harvard, and from Mathematica Policy Research, Inc., are published in the July/August issue of the journal Child Development.
The researchers chose their focus because while numerous studies have shown connections between parental reading to preschoolers and children's language development in low-income families, there has been surprisingly little research of low-income children below the age of 3. Yet this is a very important period for the language development required for later reading success.
Researchers studied 2,581 families in the Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project and a control group in 17 communities across the U.S. Within a subgroup of 1,101, they explored in-depth relations between reading and child outcomes for English- and Spanish-speaking families. The children were evaluated at ages 14, 24 and 36 months.
About half the mothers reported reading daily to their children at each age, although slightly more mothers read daily when their children were 2 and 3 than when they were 14 months. White mothers reported reading more frequently than mothers in other racial/ethnic groups, as did mothers of girls, firstborn children and children in the Early Head Start program.