A study presented last week at a White House conference on “bridging the word gap” found that among two-year-olds from low-income families, quality interactions involving words-the use of shared symbols (“Look, a dog!”);rituals(Want a bottle after your bath?);and conversational fluency(“Yes, that is a bus!”)-were a far better predictor of language skills at age three than any other factor, including the quantity of words a child heard.