

That doesn’t mean flash cards for tots, or merely pointing out objects: ‘‘Here’s an orange. That’s a bowl.’’

New research shows that both how much and how well parents talk with babies and toddlers help to tune the youngsters’ brains in ways that build crucial language and vocabulary skills — a key to fighting the infamous ‘‘word gap’’ that puts poor children at a disadvantage at an even younger age than once thought.

The idea is to connect words and meaning, so the brain becomes primed to learn through context: ‘‘Let’s put the orange in this bowl with the banana and the apple and the grapes.’’

‘‘You’re building intelligence through language,’’ is how Stanford University psychology professor Anne Fernald explains it. ‘‘It’s making nets of meaning that then will help the child learn new words.’’


‘‘The advice I give mothers is to have conversations with your babies,’’ said Erika Hoff, a psychology professor at Florida Atlantic University. ‘‘Children can hear lots of talk that goes over their head in terms of the meaning, and they still benefit from it.’’


But it also begs the question of whether children from low-income, less educated families need earlier intervention, such as preschool that starts at age 3 instead of 4, or higher quality day care or even some sort of ‘‘Let’s talk’’ campaign aimed at new parents to stress talking, singing and reading with tots even before they can respond. That can be difficult for parents working multiple jobs, or who may not read well or who simply don’t know why it’s important.


Brain scans support the link, said Dr. Kimberly Noble of Columbia University Medical Center. Early experiences shape the connections that children’s brains form, and kids from higher socioeconomic backgrounds devote more ‘‘neural real estate’’ to brain regions involved in language development, she found.


To understand why language processing is so important, consider this sentence: ‘‘The kitty’s on the bench.’’ If the youngster knows the word ‘‘kitty,’’ and his brain recognizes it quickly enough, then he can figure out what ‘‘bench’’ means by the context. But if he’s slow to recognize ‘‘kitty,’’ then ‘‘bench’’ flies by before he has a chance to learn it.



