Researchers from the University of Oxford, in the UK, have found that infants that take more daytime naps tend to develop a larger vocabulary at an earlier age than their peers by examining sleeping patterns of 246 babies between the ages of 7 months and 3 years for 10 days. Parents also completed a language analysis at the start of the study and three and six months later to determine how many words each child understood from a list 416 words typically learned in infancy. Infants that napped more frequently during the day performed better on both understanding and expressing vocabulary than the others.

This article appears in the December 2017 issue of Natural Awakenings.