Thanks, PokerDad. And yes, you are very right, early stimulation is very fundamental.
The lady presenter said that growth of white matter in our children’s brains depends on environmental factors such as the number of words the child hears, the diversity of words heard, the complexity of sentences heard, and how much the baby is read to. This corresponds exactly with what I read in a very highly cited piece of research titled ‘Meaningful Differences in the Lives of American Children’ by Hart and Risley.
I first learnt about the book ‘Meaningful Differences’ from Jim Trelease (the read-aloud guru), on his website http://www.trelease-on-reading.com/rah-ch1-pg3.html. PLEASE READ THAT WEBPAGE CAREFULLY. It is an excerpt from chapter 1 of Trelease’s best-selling book- The Read Aloud Handbook. Trelease marks the book Meaningful Differences as ‘Top Secret’.
Trelease also says:
``If I could select any piece of research that all parents would be exposed to, Meaningful Differences would be the one. And that’s feasible. The authors took their 268-page book and condensed it into a six-page article for American Educator (Spring, 2003), the journal of the American Federation of Teachers, which may be freely reproduced by schools.’’
If possible, get the book ‘Meaningful Differences’ via interlibrary loan. The book is one of the most cited researches on early childhood literacy. I have read the book, learnt a lot, and changed my parenting practices accordingly. Then get Trelease ‘Read-Aloud Handbook’. First read the book’s excerpts on the website I gave above, and then get the whole book from your local library.
The major point I got from Trelease’s book was that by reading aloud, you expose the child to more complex vocabulary than if you were talking all day long. Yes, talk is very good for babies, but reading aloud to babies fills in the gaps and introduces the child to rarer words than are found in our daily vocabularies. And you don’t always have to buy the books you’ll read aloud to the baby, you can get them FREE from your local library.
Here is the link to the six-page summary of the Hart-Risley research (which Trelease mentioned) published in American Educator : http://www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/spring2003/TheEarlyCatastrophe.pdf.
PLEASE READ IT. On Google Scholar, this six-page article by Hart and Risley has been cited 225 times by other researchers, so it must be quite influential.
