These results are quite striking considering that the mothers come from non-professional backgrounds and had no more than 12 years of schooling on average. Another study on low-income mother-child dyads shows that the rate of vocabulary production is also positively influenced by early exposure to diverse words. In particular, children whose mothers consistently used more varied vocabulary had faster and more linear growth in child vocabulary production between 14 and 36 months than children whose mothers consistently used less varied vocabulary (Pan et al., 2005). These findings support the contention that maternal speech quality has powerful benefits in child language acquisition.

A striking feature of the vocabulary development studies recently described is the presence of a loving, supportive environment in which they occur. In other words, the benefits of qualitative and quantitative vocabulary input can be fully realized if they occur in the context of instructive and helpful interaction. For...
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