Babies can say volume without saying a single word. They can
wave good-bye, point at things to indicate an interest or shake
their heads to mean “No”. These gestures may be very simple, but
they are a sign of things to come. Year-old toddlers who use
more gestures tend to have more expansive vocabularies several
years later. And this link between early gesturing and future
linguistic ability may partially explain by children from poorer
families tend to have smaller vocabularies than those from
richer ones. Vocabulary size tallies strongly with a child’s
academic success, so it’s striking that the lexical gap between
rich and poor appears when children are still toddlers and can
continue throughout their school life. What is it about a
family’s socioeconomic status that so strongly affects their
child’s linguistic fate at such an early age? Obviously, spoken
words are a factor. Affluent parents tend to spend more time
talking to their kids and use more complicated sentences with a
wider range of words. But Me