Quality of Words, Not Quantity, Is Crucial to Language Skills, Study Finds By DOUGLAS QUENQUA
New York Times
October 16, 2014
A study presented on Thursday at a White House conference on “bridging the word gap” found that among 2-year-olds from low-income families, quality interactions involving words — the use of shared symbols (“Look, a dog!”); rituals (“Want a bottle after your bath?”); and conversational fluency (“Yes, that is a bus!”) — were a far better predictor of language skills at age 3 than any other factor, including the quantity of words a child heard.
I'd agree with this.
(Taking a wild guess, quite a few factors would matter for whether these conversations take place, how much and in what form. "IQ", SES, availability of appropriate daycare, availability of parents, adequate nutrition and medical care, mindset of the parents all would matter, among other things. I'd guess (again) that the above may be correlated/anti-correlated.
ETA: actually, I do not want to draw "IQ" into this discussion. Among the low-SES families, "good daycare, nutrition, and medical care" would help.)