Other policy
Research: Differences in early gesture explain SES disparities in child vocabulary size at school entry
4 Feb 2009
By learning to gesture, toddlers pick up new words more quickly because it prompts parents to name the object being pointed at.
On average, toddlers from well-educated families used gestures to convey 24 different meanings during a 90-minute play session, while toddlers from less-educated families used gestures to convey only 13 different meanings. The children who gestured most as toddlers scored on average 26% higher in the language test than the other children once in school. The psychologists suggest that teaching babies to gesture early on could help to boost their performance at school.
