It sounds impossible, doesn’t it? After all, children are barely reading on their own at three, so how in the world can they be speed readers? The answer is found in the way children learn to read, and how they learn language overall, as supported in a recent research study jointly funded by Vanderbilt University, Temple University, and the University of Delaware. The study focused on the effect that reading to children has on their language development, and concluded that the first three years of a child’s life are very important in their ability to skillfully handle language and reading for themselves later on.

If you’re still wondering what this has to do with speed reading, think about it: it’s not just how fast your eyes skim over words on a page, it’s how much of that text you understand, make use of, and remember. Knowing what a word means allows you to comprehend text on a page. When children learn to read, they learn words and their meanings, and the earlier this process starts, the more words they’ll know. The more words they know, the faster they’re able to read. And when a child is able to read quickly, they won’t fall into the slow-reading traps of backtracking and subvocalization that many children develop when they’re taught to read in a classroom situation, where the teacher has to depend on group activities and slow-paced drills to keep all of the class together in the exercises.

This and many other studies emphasize the importance of reading to and with children, even at the very early ages of 8 months or so. While infants may not be able to vocalize, they’re still hearing words and learning to associate those sounds with brightly-colored images on a page, if the parent helps them make that connection. By the time the child starts to associate the sounds and images with the letter patterns of the words, and to start sounding out the words for themselves, they’re already miles ahead of children who aren’t exposed to books until they get to school.

The study also pointed out how quickly children learn when they have the opportunity to participate in conversations and ask questions – in other words, when they’re using words right after learning them. Once again, this individual interaction is much easier in a one-on-one situation, such as a parent reading to a child at bedtime, rather than in a large group situation like a classroom.

Obviously, if you want to help your child be a good speed reader when they’re older, the best thing you can do for them is to start them on the road to reading as early as possible!

Reference: David K. Dickinson, Julie A. Griffith, Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, “How Reading Books Fosters Language Development around the World,” Child Development Research, vol. 2012.