In addition to Reach Out and Read's substantial evidence base, consisting of 14 peer-reviewed, published research studies, Reach Out and Read also strives to act as a clearinghouse for important research about early literacy and early childhood development.

In 2008, some of Reach Out and Read's Medical Champions published an article in the Archives of Disease in Childhood that provides an overview of key research on reading aloud to young children and its influence on children's language and literacy development.

Read the entire article: "Reading aloud to children: the evidence."

Below are some of the key findings cited in that article, as well as some other important findings regarding early literacy.

• Children who were read to frequently are nearly twice as likely as other children to show three or more skills associated with emergent literacy. (Digest of Education Statistics, 1998)
• Reading aloud stimulates language development even before a child can talk. (Bardige, 2009)
• Families, and parents in particular, play an important role in this process. For decades, research has shown the children whose parents read to them become better readers and perform better in school. (Snow, Burn, and Griffin, 1998; Saracho, 1997; Moss and Fawcett, 1995)
• Activities such as reading are usually "very child-centered, are conducted in a relaxed atmosphere, and allow for a warm, positive interaction between children and their parents." (Sonnenschein, Brody, and Munsterman, 1996; Strickland and Taylor, 1989)
• Research suggests that quality parent-child interaction is important for children's development of literacy. (Saracho 1997)

• The more types of reading materials there are in the home, the stronger the reading proficiency of students who live there. (Educational Testing Service. America's Smallest School: The Family, 1999)
• States where homes have more reading materials generally have higher average reading proficiency. (Educational Testing Service. America's Smallest School: The Family, 1999)

• 61% of low-income children have no age-appropriate books in their homes.
• Low-income children hear on average 30 million fewer words than their more affluent peers before the age of 4, leading to a language deficit and low literacy. (Hart & Risley, 1995)
• A child from a low-income family enters kindergarten with a listening vocabulary of 3,000 words, while a child of a middle-income family enters school with a listening vocabulary of 20,000 words. (Hart & Risley, 1995)
• The average middle-income 5-year-old recognizes 22 letters of the alphabet, while the average low-income 5-year-old recognizes only 9 letters of the alphabet. (Worden and Boettcher, 1990; Ehri and Roberts, 2006)

• The consequences of a slow start in reading become monumental as they accumulate exponentially over time. (Torgesen, 1998)
• More than one-third of U.S. children enter kindergarten without the basic language skills they'll need to learn to read (i.e. knowing the words on a page move from left to right, or recognizing the letters of the alphabet).
• If a child is a poor reader in first grade, there is an 88% probability that the child will be a poor reader at the end of the fourth grade. (Juel, 1988)
• Three-quarters of students who are poor readers in third grade will remain poor readers in high school.
• 85% of juvenile offenders are illiterate.

"Economic returns on dollars invested in early education are as high as 15-17% per year - higher than other traditional economic development strategies."