Anderson, J. (2018, April 08). The free and easy way to help kids develop language skills, according to MIT research. Retrieved April 09, 2018

By the age of three, wealthy children hear 30 million more words than their poor counterparts, according to a landmark 1995 study (pdf) by researchers Betty Hart and Todd Risley. The “30 million word gap” has since become shorthand for the gaping inequalities between high and low-income children. Hart and Risley also showed that the number of words kids heard by their third birthday strongly predicted kids’ academic success when they were nine. Clearly, it was important to talk to children—a lot.