Then you fall behind – that's the grim truth

 The more young people read, the better their vocabulary and the more difficult texts they understand. A positive spiral – or a whirling merry-go-round that is difficult to jump on in the moment. The more young people read, the better their vocabulary and the more difficult texts they understand.

 Because what happens when our children don't read? It starts early. Already at the age of three, the differences between children's vocabularies seem to be established. Around the start of school, the gap widens further – and it continues in the teenage years.

 We talk about two vocabulary spurts during early childhood. One occurs between the ages of one and three, when some children gain a solid head start, The child's linguistic upbringing environment is behind the differences in the first leap, conversation and reading aloud. says Mats Myrberg, professor responsible for the vocabulary project.

 At the age of six to seven, comes another leap. - It is probably connected with the children encountering the written language and starting to read themselves. But the injustice is founded early. When children start reading, they come across a vocabulary that is significantly larger than the vocabulary of spoken language, notes Mats Myrberg.

 An American study from the turn of the millennium showed that the percentage of unusual words that appeared in a children's book was on average about 50 percent more than what appeared during, for example, an entertainment program on television. The results are clearly transferable to today and to Sweden, says Mats Myrberg: in books we come across words that we rarely hear spoken. Around 80 percent of the approximately 130,000 words in the Swedish Academy's dictionary never or rarely occur in everyday speech. If you don't read them, you won't meet them. If you don't get on this vocabulary-rich journey, you'll fall behind. That is the grim truth.

 Every year the vocabulary gap between those who read and those who don't read widens. But correlations can be tricky. Do children who initially find it easier to read read more? In several studies, researchers have controlled for both intelligence and the so-called decoding ability. And yes, those who find it "easy" to read generally read more. But even when you control for these factors, the connection remains: We seem to get better at reading from reading - and reading itself contributes to a larger vocabulary.

 Dawna Duff, linguist at Binghamton University in the United States, followed and tested more than 400 children from the age of 5 to 15 in a study. - Until around the age of nine, children learn new words above all by listening. Then, and for the rest of life, the vocabulary increases mainly through reading, she says. The researchers wanted to find out if vocabulary is related to how well and thus how much children read. They measured how much the students' vocabulary increased during school, and compared it to how well their reading skills were when they were nine. - The students who had good reading skills in grade 4 had a faster increase in vocabulary. There was a big difference, she says.

 But what was a basic good language ability, and what was connected with the children reading many books? To try to isolate the reading effect itself, the researchers took into account the students' measured language skills during preschool, and also their socioeconomic background – a factor that in studies always correlates strongly with children's vocabulary. The higher the socio-economic background, the more words the children know.

 But even when these factors were taken into account, it was seen that reading made a difference to how much vocabulary increased. How well students read at age nine was linked to their vocabulary at 15 – and reading could predict vocabulary as well as their socio-economic background. During our video meeting, Dawna Duff holds her hands up at an angle. - Because it affects over such a long period, the differences increase over time. When the students are 15, there is already a big difference in vocabulary.

 In short, word comprehension and reading comprehension seem to be linked - and increasing exponentially. It's just that Swedish children and teenagers read less and less every year. In the National Media Council's report Children & media from December, 7 percent of 13–16-year-olds stated that they read books or newspapers daily – compared to 20 percent in 2012. It is children of parents with low education who read the least, regardless of age. Among teenagers, 20 percent of those with parents with low education stated that they never read, among those with highly educated parents: 8 percent. How much we read affects our vocabulary. Alice Sullivan, sociology professor at the College of London, has followed thousands of Britons and studied their reading habits over decades in a series of studies. In one study, researchers followed 11,000 children and had them, at the age of 14, take a vocabulary test. The teenagers who said they read "for fun" every day understood 26 percent more words than those who didn't But it didn't stop at word comprehension - math skills also seemed to improve from reading.

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Also check: https://axiom1b.blogspot.com/2021/12/the-origin-and-development-of-alphabet.html