Rich parents, children speak better

Pointing, waving goodbye and other everyday gestures will help toddlers build their vocabulary. Especially, the child's level of speaking depends on the income of parents, US researchers revealed.

Published in Science today, psychologists say that at 14 months of age, babies who use gestures also tend to come from higher-income families, and have vocabulary richer.

Toddlers often communicate using gestures, such as putting their hands up to hold, long before they actually speak.

It is well known that children born in low-income families often start school with less vocabulary than their richer friends. That's because parents with higher levels of education also have higher incomes, and often read more books or talk to their children, using more complex sentences.

Children who use gestures more often speak better.Photo: Hoang Ha.

Susan Goldin-Meadow and colleagues from the University of Chicago designed an experiment to find out if gestures contributed to this difference.

The team studied 50 families in the Chicago area, filming 90-minute clips of their children and parents while they were doing normal activities at home. The gestures here are not ordinary body language.

They found that the difference in gesture use due to socioeconomic disparities appeared immediately at 4 months of age.

On average, babies from better-off families create 25 meaningful gestures in every 90 minutes of film, compared to only 13 of the poorer group of children.

When examining the vocabulary of children 4 and a half years old, the poorer children scored even worse, about 24 points different.

That's not because wealthier parents use more gestures, Peggy McCardle, from the US National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, which funded the study.

"It's because there are different types of gestures that show different meanings. Obviously better-off parents have better support their children to express those things."

"It doesn't hurt if we encourage parents to talk more and use more gestures with their children," the experts concluded.