If words are not repeated in a child's environment, the opposite neurological process occurs: neurons shrink and die away in a process called 'pruning,' which decreases the ability to learn.

In Georgia, 70 percent of children do not read at third grade level, a statistic that has profound implications for the state and individuals involved in terms of educational attainment and lifetime outcomes.

In 1900, the three leading causes of human death were pneumonia, tuberculosis (TB), and diarrhea, and the interventions that dramatically reduced these causes—clean water, sewers, vaccinations, and antibiotics—were responsible for the transformational increase in life expectancy.

Language is the essence of what it means to be human, distinguishing humans from animals which have only noises or gestures for communication.

The Oxford Unabridged English Dictionary contains 600,000 different words that English-speaking people can know, demonstrating the vast capacity for human language acquisition.

Babies are hard-wired to learn different languages, with a huge growth spurt in brain capacity (increase of at least a third) occurring in the last part of pregnancy right before birth.

Babies learn language through interaction with their caretakers (mothers and primary caregivers), making this dyadic interaction the fundamental mechanism of language acquisition.

The 'Talk with Me Baby' initiative is producing videos for WIC clinics to teach mothers about early language development, including specific guidance that babies are born recognizing their mother's voice and that language engagement should begin in utero.

During her own pregnancy, the speaker experienced an acute awareness of her unborn daughter and a shift in attention, where she became concentrated on her pregnant belly and was not interested in anything more than ten feet away—a firsthand experience of the mother-baby bond.

Georgia is at the very bottom of the pack (lowest tenth of the country) in the 'American's National Health Rankings' cluster related to literacy at third grade, with associated problems including high numbers of children in poverty, high failure to graduate from high school, income disparity, lack of health insurance, underemployment, and unemployment.

The 'Still Face Experiment' from the Harvard Child Development Center demonstrates that babies are hard-wired to engage with caregivers and respond negatively when that engagement is withheld, progressing from attempts to elicit response, to frustration, to hopeless crying.

Hart and Risley conducted intensive observational research on 42 families for one hour per month from when children were seven months old until age three, discovering differences in children were NOT due to physical care, race, gender, or financial resources, but rather to the quantity and quality of language interaction with parents.

By the end of age three, children from professional families had heard 30 million more words than children in poverty, with professional families speaking over 2,000 words per hour to their children compared to approximately 600 words per hour for families in poverty.

Professional families engage in constant, interactive talking with their babies using descriptive, affectionate language ('Oh, your diaper needs to be changed. Oh, bless your heart, I'll take care of that.' 'Oh, look at those toes. Aren't those toes wonderful!'), whereas this level of verbal engagement is absent in families in poverty.

Language drives neurological brain development: each time a word is said, it stimulates a neuron; when that word is repeated, the same neural pathway is stimulated again, strengthening it and creating branching capability for learning.

At the end of three years, babies born to welfare parents had learned 500 words, while babies in professional families knew over 1,000 words—a doubling of vocabulary that corresponds to the 30 million word exposure gap.

The Hart and Risley study found long-term effects lasting beyond the initial three years: five years later (at approximately age 8), the vocabulary gap had expanded from the original 500 vs 1,000 words at age 3 to a gap in standardized test performance at third grade.

Children not reading at grade level by third grade are four times more likely to not graduate from high school; children severely behind in reading are six times more likely not to graduate.

The third grade reading problem in Georgia is NOT caused by neighborhood, income, genetics, or lack of other resources, but rather by insufficient early exposure to language—a modifiable, solvable problem.

Georgia is implementing a public-private partnership called 'Talk with Me Baby' involving United Way, The Anne E. Casey Foundation, Public Health, the Department of Early Child Care and Learning, and The Marcus Foundation, designed to change the paradigm around early language development.