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Reading to pre-school children boosts their language skills

Children who are read to regularly by their parents or carers are ahead in their language skills by eight months, suggests a new study.

A team of researchers from Newcastle University found that regularly reading to pre-school- aged children at home positively impacts their ability to understand information.

The research, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, is based on 16 existing studies over the past 40 years across the world in which parents read books or electronic readers to their children who had a mean age of 39 months. The team was unable to find any studies that adopted a randomised or a quasi-experiment parent-child reading intervention in the UK.

Researchers from Newcastle University analysed the findings of the studies and found that regularly reading to children had a positive effect on their expressive language (where a child puts their thoughts into words) and pre-reading skills (such as how words are structured), however the biggest impact was on children’s receptive language skills (the ability to understand information).

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