The Important Link Between Early Language Abilities and Reading
Ann P. Kaiser is the Susan W. Gray Professor of Education and Human Development at Peabody College of Vanderbilt University. She is the author of numerous research articles and chapters on language and behavior interventions for young children. She is the primary developer of Enhanced Milieu Teaching, a naturalistic early communication intervention and the co-developer of Toddler Talk, a Tier 1 language and social emotional development model for teachers of young children. Her research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health and the US Department of Education. She has received numerous awards for her research including the American Psychological Association’s Edgar Doll Award for Research in Intellectual Disabilities and the Council on Exceptional Children’s J. Wallin Wallace Life-Time Achievement Award.
Language development in the first years of life lays the foundation for reading. Long before children enter school, they already are learning the complex system of sounds, words, sentences, and meanings that written language will later represent. Research consistently shows children’s language skills in the preschool years strongly predict both their early reading success and their long-term reading outcomes.
Language development emerges from a dynamic interaction between biology and environment. Children come to language learning with remarkable neurodevelopmental readiness, but the linguistic input they experience from adults plays a powerful role in shaping how quickly and successfully language develops. When adults respond to children’s interests, talk about what children are attending to, and gradually expand language to match children’s growing abilities, they create ideal conditions for language learning.
Understanding this early language system is essential for understanding reading. Reading is not a separate ability that emerges suddenly in school; it is another form of language. Written language uses symbols to represent the same sounds, words, and sentence structures children already have been learning through listening and speaking.
Two Developmental Pathways to Reading Difficulty
Research in language and literacy development increasingly shows reading problems do not arise from a single underlying cause. Instead, at least two partially independent developmental pathways can lead to reading difficulties, and they tend to emerge at different points in children’s development.
Pathway 1: The Phonological Pathway to Dyslexia
One pathway begins with weaknesses in the phonological system, which supports how children perceive, store, and manipulate the sounds of language. Early signs often appear in toddlerhood as slow vocabulary growth or late talking, reflecting difficulty forming stable sound representations for words. These early phonological vulnerabilities often become more visible during the preschool years when children struggle with phonological awareness, rapid naming, and learning letter–sound correspondences.
When formal reading instruction begins, these children frequently experience difficulty decoding words, sounding out unfamiliar words, and efficiently recognizing printed words. This pathway is commonly associated with dyslexia, a reading disorder characterized primarily by word-level decoding difficulties. Importantly, children on this pathway may have relatively typical grammar and language comprehension. Their primary difficulty lies in mapping written symbols onto speech sounds.
Pathway 2: The Language Pathway to Reading Comprehension Difficulties
A second pathway involves weaknesses in the language system itself, particularly grammar, vocabulary depth, and sentence comprehension. These difficulties are characteristic of Developmental Language Disorder (DLD).
Children with DLD often show early difficulties with morphology and syntax—for example, using verb endings, understanding complex sentences, or organizing ideas into coherent narratives. These weaknesses may not immediately interfere with early word reading. Many children with DLD learn basic decoding skills adequately during the first years of reading instruction. However, as reading materials become more linguistically complex in second grade and beyond, difficulties with language comprehension begin to affect reading. Texts increasingly require readers to interpret complex sentences, integrate ideas across paragraphs, and understand academic vocabulary. At this stage, children with underlying language vulnerabilities often experience reading comprehension difficulties, even if their word reading is relatively accurate.
Why This Distinction Matters
Understanding these two pathways helps explain why reading problems sometimes appear at different times in children’s school careers. Children with word learning and phonological weaknesses often show difficulties as soon as they begin learning to read. In contrast, children with sentence-level language weaknesses may appear to read adequately in the early grades but later struggle with understanding increasingly complex texts.
Recognizing these distinct developmental pathways highlights the importance of monitoring both phonological skills and broader oral language development during the preschool and early school years. There is compelling evidence that young children’s language and communication at 30 months predict both persistent language difficulties and reading specially for children from lower resource environments or from families with a history of reading challenges. Early vocabulary growth, phonological awareness, grammar development, and narrative skills all provide valuable clues about children’s emerging literacy trajectories. An ideal time for screening is between ages 2–4.
What We Know—and What We Still Need To Learn
Taken together, the research literature suggests three important conclusions. First, language interventions can reliably improve children’s language skills. Multiple randomized trials show caregiver-implemented language interventions can produce significant gains in young children’s expressive language and communication skills. Second, early language ability is a strong predictor of later reading development. Longitudinal studies consistently show vocabulary, grammar, and broader oral language skills account for substantial variance in later reading comprehension and literacy achievement. However, the third link in this developmental chain—whether improving early language directly leads to improved reading outcomes—remains less well established. Few early language intervention studies follow children long enough to measure later reading achievement, leaving the long-term literacy impact of early language gains an important area for future research.
Together, these findings support the view that strengthening early language skills is a plausible pathway for improving later literacy development. There is a critical need for more longitudinal intervention studies that begin in the toddler and early preschool years and track children’s reading outcomes over time to provide guidance for early educators and parents.
I’m excited to be the April EDVIEW360 podcast guest, where I’ll be discussing this topic (and related strategies) in more depth. You can find the podcast link here:
Key References
Campbell, F. A., et al. (2012). Early childhood investments substantially boost adult health. Science, 343, 1478–1485.
Catts, H. W., Hogan, T. P., & Fey, M. E. (2003). Subgrouping poor readers on the basis of individual differences in reading-related abilities. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 36, 151–164.
Collisson, B. A., Graham, S. A., Preston, J. L., Rose, M. S., McDonald, S., & Tough, S. (2016). Risk and protective factors for late talking: An epidemiologic investigation. Journal of Pediatrics, 172, 168–174.
Ehri, L. C., et al. (2001). Phonemic awareness instruction helps children learn to read. Reading Research Quarterly, 36, 250–287.
Hadley, P. A., Harrington, E. K., Preza, T., Jones, M., Zanzinger, K. E. Grauzer, J., Kaat, A. J., Roberts, M. Y. & Kaiser, A. P. (2026, In press). Short-term effects of a caregiver-implemented intervention for preschoolers at-risk for developmental language disorder: A randomized clinical. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research
Heidlage, J. K., Cunningham, J. E., Kaiser, A. P., Trivette, C., Barton, E. E., Frey, J. R., & Roberts, M.Y. (2020). The Effects of parent-implemented language interventions on child linguistic outcomes: A meta-analysis. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 50(1), 6-23. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecresq.2018.12.006
Hulme, C., & Snowling, M. J. (2013). Learning to read: What we know and what we need to understand better. Child Development Perspectives, 7, 1–5.
Language and Reading Research Consortium. (2015). Learning to read: Should we keep things simple? Reading Research Quarterly, 50, 151–169.
Logan, J. A. R., Piasta, S. B., Purtell, K. M., Nichols, R., & Schachter, R. E. (2023). Early childhood language gains, kindergarten readiness, and Grade 3 reading achievement. Child Development.
Sansavini, A., et al. (2021). Developmental language disorder: Early predictors, age for the diagnosis, and diagnostic tools. Brain Sciences, 11, 654.