It is a thrill when parents realize how much a child is processing and learning before she utters her first word. Finally, they can talk to their children and be clearly understood. "Please bring your shoes to me so we can put them on"... and lo and behold the child delivers her sneakers. "Will you please pick up your trains off the floor so no one steps on them and breaks them?" And he picks up his trains. The child may not be able to speak yet, but he is accumulating an understanding of many, many words - far more than he will be able to put voice to for months and months.

At first a child may gather meaning through your tone of voice, inflection, gestures and facial expressions. Studies have shown that soothing words and tones register differently to an infant than distressed and angry sounds or words. But it is also stunning to realize how quickly very young children understand the meaning of words themselves. From the earliest days of their lives, children are developing their vocabulary. At this young age, the child's ability to understand words far outstrips her ability to speak words. This is one reason it makes good sense to talk a lot with very young children... they are learning words and meanings long before they can speak!

If children are word deprived-if they don't hear enough words, frequently enough, and the words are not rich enough in meaning and expression of feelings-the child's intellectual and emotional growth can become stunted.

In their book, Meaningful Differences on the Everyday Experiences of Young American Children, Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley observed, recorded, and analyzed more than 1,300 hours of casual interactions between parents and 42 of their language-learning young children. The children's vocabularies were studied from when they started to say words at (about 1 year old) until they were about three-years old. The study also observed the children's interactions their family members-what the researchers identified as the context for their word learning.

What did they find? That the number and diversity of words in children's vocabulary is most heavily influenced by how often they are exposed to words and the child's economic situation.

86% - 98% of the words in each child's vocabulary consisted of words that were also recorded in their parent's vocabularies. And children in economically disadvantaged homes learned fewer words, had fewer exchanges of words with others, and acquired a vocabulary more slowly. By age 4, the average child in a welfare family, concluded Hart and Risley, might have 13 million fewer words of cumulative experience than the average child in a working-class family. And that matters.

Parents can provide a linguistically rich environment if they embrace a few simple techniques when they interact with their children: Talk a lot, use as many words as you can, take opportunities to teach word use and meaning, let your child know words are important and pay attention when you child talks to you.

So, never think a child is too young to understand what's going on (even if only on a purely emotional level) and never think a child is too young to talk to. But once you realize that, you can also ask yourself: What kind of talk? What words? To what end? Almost any talking and words can be a useful learning experience for your child. But an especially useful strategy with your pre-verbal child is labeling her feelings with words. The payoff is terrific if words for feelings can be brought into the conversations at the earliest possible time.