Reading bedtime stories to babies and talking to them from birth boosts their brain power and sets them up for success at school, researchers say.

Studies on babies and toddlers found that striking differences emerged in their vocabularies and language processing skills as early as 18 months old.

Children whose parents spoke to them least came out worst in language tests, and at 24 months old some lagged behind their contemporaries by up to six months. The handicap often stayed with the children and influenced how well they did at school over the next six years.

Prof Anne Fernald, a developmental psychologist at Stanford University, said chatting with infants helped them grasp the rules and rhythms of language at an early age and provided them with a foundation to build up an understanding of how the world worked.

Repetition helped children to remember words, while learning relationships between words, such as “the horse pulls the cart”, helped them to construct a picture of the world that paid dividends when they reached school age.

“You need to start talking to them from day one,” Fernald said at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Chicago. “You are building a mind, a mind […]