Pediatricians at Marshall University have found that daily reading improves language development in infants under one year old. The results of the research were presented in the article, published Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine.
If parents read at least one book a day to their children starting at two weeks of age, by nine months the children showed improvement in language indicators, including improvement in speech comprehension and nonverbal responses to speech.
As part of the study, the scientists examined previous work on the development of language skills in children, and also conducted an experiment involving 34 families. They split into two groups.
The first parents were given a set of 20 children’s books specially selected to support early language development. The families agreed to read at least one book a day and to assess their child’s skills with a special language test. The second parents were not given the book, but they were also tested. The researchers then compared the performance of both groups.