Talk, talk, talk........17,000 words minumum

A child’s rate of vocabulary growth, vocabulary use, and IQ score was more strongly related to the number of words a parent said per hour than any other
variable including parents’ education or socioeconomic status.

Try for speaking 30,000 words a day to your newborn to 4 year old. It's worth it!

Click to watch this video link: Introduction by Todd Risley, Ph.D.

Filling life up with words is where vocabulary comes from and starting early is critical, according to Todd Risely Ph.D., co-author Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children.

The Power of Talk is a document published online about the research of the LENA (Language Environment Analysis) Foundation. Here's a quote:

They determined that a child’s intellectual success later in life is directly related to the amount of talk the child hears from birth to age three. Research conducted by the LENA Foundation using the LENA System has indeed confirmed many of their important findings.

Key findings to date include:
• Parents of advanced children—children who scored consistently between the 90th and 99th percentiles on independent standard language assessments—spoke substantially more to those children than did parents of children who were not as advanced, confirming the Hart and Risley results.
• Parents estimated that they talked more with their children than they actually did.
• Most language training for children came from mothers, with mothers accounting for 75 percent of total talk in the child’s environment.
• Mothers talked roughly 9 percent more to their daughters than to their sons.
• Parents talked more to their first-born than to their other children, particularly first-born males.
• Most adult talk in the child’s environment occurred in the late afternoon and early evening compared to other times of day.
• Children of talkative parents were also talkative.
• Although the average daily talk for parents who graduated from college was higher than for all other parents, the average daily talk for the upper 50 percent of parents who did not complete high school was significantly higher than that of the lower 50 percent of parents who graduated from college.
• The more television time in a child’s day, the lower his or her language ability scores tended to be.
• Monolingual Spanish-speaking families were similar to English-speaking families with respect to patterns of adult talk.
• Parents of children with autism tended to talk less the more severe their child’s symptoms were. Conversely, the stronger their child’s language abilities, the more they talked.
• Parents are quite variable in the day to day amount they talk to their children, but given the opportunity to receive feedback they are able to increase the amount of talk consistently.