It has found that reading “highbrow” fiction has the biggest impact on later vocabulary skills, and that reading fiction is more effective than factual books.
Also, young people who read quality newspapers made more progress, while tabloid newspaper readers actually made less progress than those who did not read newspapers at all.
The statistical analysis has been compiled by academics from London’s Institute of Education (IoE) and is based on the vocabulary test scores of 9,400 people aged 10, 16 and 42 from the 1970 British Cohort Study. The results show that people who had read for pleasure regularly at age 10 scored significantly higher in vocabulary tests (by 67 per cent to 51 per cent) at age 42 when compared to those who read infrequently.
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