For children between birth and age 3, the most powerful number is 30,000. That's the number of words children need to hear every day from their parents and caregivers to ensure optimal language development and academic success.

Video Transcription

Marc Williams: From the time nine-month-old, Jacob Moss wakes up in the morning. His mom starts talking to him. Cori Moss: We tried to Implement talking to him in every aspect of his day. Marc Williams: Cori and PatriqueMoss volunteered to be part of a language study to track how much they talk with Jacob. They had read about research showing the more talk children here as infants the better. Doctor Khanh-Van Le-Bucklin is a pediatrician and mother of three. She says birth to age three is a critical time for brain and language development. Khanh-Van Le-Bucklin: During that entire period of time even before their very period first word, they are incorporating every thing they are hearing and their brain is taking it in and growing. Marc Williams: The problem for Cori and Patriquewas knowing just how many words Jacob was hearing everyday. To solve this dilemma researchers at Infoture developed the Language Environment Analysis Processor or LENA. LENA not only counts how many words are spoken to a child, but it also tracks conversational terms between parent and child. It also lets parents measure their child's developmental growth. Doctor Jill Gilkerson is Infoture's Language Research Director. She says LENA is like a pedometer for the mouth. Jill Gilkerson: We compare it to pedometers because it's impossible to measure how many steps you take a day. It's impossible to even estimate and we found that parents had really no idea. How many words they were speaking. Marc Williams: Gilkerson and her team are using the LENA to build on the findings documented in Meaningful Differences by Betty Hart and Todd Risley. Hart and Risley found that children who hear 30,000 words a day had higher IQs, perform better on standardized test and did much better academically. Newer research suggest first-born sons have higher IQs than later born sons. Gilkerson and her team were motivated to use the LENA system to find out why. Jill Gilkerson: First-born sons hear more words than later born sons, but the interesting thing in our finding as we are not seeing the same thing with daughters. So there is no difference between the number of words a first-born daughter hears compare to a later born daughter. PatriqueMoss: Okay, Jacob we are going to make you some lunch okay. Marc Williams: So what techniques can parents use to talk more to their children? Khanh-Van Le-Bucklin: It's dinner time we sit with them, at the dinner table and we talk about what foods they are eating what the color of the food is, what the texture of food is, what the food taste like and in that way you increase your language output to your children. Cori Moss: If I am brushing my teeth, when I am putting the toothpaste on the toothbrush I am telling him about it. Mummy is brushing her teeth now, she is going to put her toothpaste on and he is so interested in everything. Marc Williams: As the LENA system helped the Moss family. PatriqueMoss: We really are speaking to him more than we were prior to when we had LENA system in. Marc Williams: In Denver, this is Marc Williams.