by Brenda Buzzell
The early years of childhood are a wonderful time to help your children develop vocabulary skills that will greatly benefit their later reading comprehension skills. Research clearly links vocabulary development to successful readers. Children love to use big words, and the words of mature language users, such as precious, enormous, delightful, and exhausting are words that children will later be reading. However, in order to understand what is read, a child needs to know the meanings of 90-95 percent of the words being read (Lyon, 2009).
It is never too early to begin introducing your child to mature words. Hart and Risley’s classic study (1995) showed that starting at 18 months there is a word exposure gap between children of professional parents versus those from families of poverty. By age four this gap has grown to a 32 million word difference.
