If your child has a decent enough vocabulary at the age two, then you can be reasonably sure of his or her success in the future, claim researchers. According to a new study, children with better academic and behavioural functioning when they started kindergarten were often found to have had better educational and societal opportunities as they grew up.
The researchers also say that children entering kindergarten with higher than average reading and math abilities are more likely to attend college, own homes, be married and reside in higher-income neighbourhoods as adults. They also discovered that children with larger vocabularies by age 2 were better academically and behaviourally prepared than their peers when starting kindergarten.
Researchers from the Pennsylvania State University, the University of California, Irvine, and Columbia University analysed nationally representative data for 8,650 children in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort. The vocabularies of the two-year-olds were measured via a parent survey and their academic achievement in Kindergarten was tracked via individually administered measures of reading and math. Kindergarten teachers also independently evaluated the children's behavioural self-regulation and frequency of acting out or anxious behaviour.
When researcher again examined the children three years later, they discovered that children who had a wider oral vocabulary at age 2 were better prepared academically and behaviourally for kindergarten with greater reading and maths achievements. They even had fewer acting out or anxiety-related behaviours.
Lead researcher Paul Morgan, who is also associate professor of education at the Pennsylvania State University, said that, “'Our findings provide compelling evidence for oral vocabulary's theorized importance as a multifaceted contributor to children's early development,” as reported in the Daily Mail.
This study was published in the journal Child Development.
