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Power of parent talk
Parents can have considerable influence over their children's language and brain development by simply engaging them in conversation, researchers say
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Stay-at-home dad Adrian Sim Wei Lim talking with his two-year-old son Rei Shen Yuxiang.
ST PHOTO: LIM YAOHUI
Thirty million words - that was the eye-popping figure quoted in the mid-1990s by American researchers Betty Hart and Todd Risley, for the word gap that develops by age four between children from low-income homes and their peers in higher socioeconomic groups.
The two researchers, who spent 2½ years studying children, found that a child whose parents are highly educated and working professionals is exposed to roughly 1,540 more spoken words an hour than a typical child on welfare - with some caveats throw in.
