According to a new study published in the Journal, Child Development, early exposure to a language can help your toddler recognize the rules of the language and follow them to fit letters together to make words.
The Research was conducted by the professors from the Washington University in St. Louis in Missouri, the United States. Rebecca Treiman, a co-author of the study, says, “Our results show that children begin to learn about the statistics of written language, for example about which letters often appear together and which letters appear together less often before they learn how letters represent the sounds of a language.”
Another important aspect revealed by this study was learning to read and spell any particular language which helps in understanding the sound of written words.
The researchers asked 179 children of the U.S. to write different spellings, which they later examined. These kids aged between three years, two months to five years and six months were the pre-phonological spellers.
With this experiment, researchers understood that kids wrote letters that weren’t reflected in the sound of the word. They concluded saying that old pre-phonological spellers had more knowledge about English letter patterns than the young pre-phonological spellers.
Treiman further added, “Our results show that there is change and improvement with age during this period before children produce spellings that make sense on the basis of sound.”
In addition to this, the co-authors of the study say that if kids are exposed to written words during the three-to-five-year age, they are more like to have a strong foundation of the language, including reading, writing and spelling the words.