Given that 70 percent of U.S. children attend preschool or day care and kindergartners enter school with widely varying skills in math, researchers set out to discover how preschool teachers in a variety of settings approach math. They found that “math talk,” essentially language dealing with concepts like grouping, estimation, counting, sequencing was pivotal to increasing math skill. The team used speech transcripts and counted the number of math-related interactions and directly correlated the numbers to the growth of children’s math knowledge over the school year.

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Klibanoff, Raquel S. et al Preschool children's mathematical knowledge: The effect of teacher "math talk." Developmental Psychology, Vol 42(1), Jan 2006, 59-69