Thursday, United States researchers revealed that babies that used many gesture in order to communicate at the age of 14 months were prone to develop a richer vocabulary until the moment they started school in later life.

Moreover, they informed that infants who had wealthier and better educated parents were likely to use gestures more often, which could come to provide the reason for the fact that some children coming from lower-income families perform rather poorly in school.

Meredith Rowe at the University of Chicago, who conducted the study that was published in the journal Science, stated that the time children entered school, the socioeconomic gap was perfectly visible, especially where their vocabulary was concerned.

Furthermore, it seems that success in school can be predicted by early vocabulary, with previous research having showed that educated parents with an income above average are prone to talk to their children more.

For the study, researchers filmed 50 children and their parents from Chicago, coming from different backgrounds in terms of income and education, and afterwards counted the number of gestures made by the children.

Results showed that 14-month-old children coming from well-off and well-educated families had used gestures having 24 meanings on average during each of the 90 minutes sessions, while babies from lower-income families had conveyed only 13 meanings.

In addition, the videos revealed that wealthier parents had gestured more with their children.

Moreover, when the children in the study entered school at the age of four and a half, those from well-to-do families had scored better on standardized vocabulary tests.