• Language Priority—making each part of the child’s day an opportunity for talking, listening, responding, and taking turns. The concept of Language Priority acknowledges the pivotal role of language in the young child’s intellectual and social-emotional development. Although all aspects of development contribute to the child’s later success, nothing is more directly linked to how the child will do in school. In the Abecedarian Approach, educators and parents put language at the top of the list of important things to do. We can remind ourselves of this priority by saying, “Language first!” We rely on language every day, in verbal and print forms, to convey ideas, information, instructions, feelings, and we use it to socialize, have fun, and be creative as well! In Language Priority, educators and parents emphasize language throughout the day. They respond warmly whenever children make an attempt to “talk” to them. Young babies’ glances and gestures are accepted as important parts of a two-way conversation. Adults try to create longer “conversations” with individual children. The 3N Strategy (notice, nudge, narrate) is used to turn any event into an occasion for rich, extended language stimulation.
• Conversational Reading—reading books interactively, emphasizing the child’s active role. The adult provides graded or hierarchical prompts, the 3S Strategy (see, show, say) to gradually elicit more developmentally advanced responses from the child. The word “conversational” emphasizes the back-and-forth, reciprocal nature of this type of reading. Conversational Reading, is not like the typical reading of a book where the adult goes through the book reading all the words on each page. It is different because: (1) It goes back-and-forth, like a conversation; (2) It includes spontaneous talk and often does not follow the text of the book; (3) The child (even the youngest) has an important and active role to play. Conversational Reading is modeled on the way parents and children read together rather than the way reading typically occurs in the classroom. In the Abecedarian Approach, every child (age 0-3) is read to individually each day, and pairs of children ages 3-4 are read to each day.
• Interaction Games—playing interactively through adult-child games tailored to the child’s interests and developmental level. The Interaction Games (formerly LearningGames) are a set of individualized, game-like experiences that are shared between an adult and 1 or 2 children. Each child is engaged in at least 1 or 2 game episodes per day. The games include many items that are familiar to parents and teachers. There are 3 types of games: (1) Games that are seamlessly integrated into the routines of caregiving; (2) Games in which the adult joins and enriches in-progress child play; (3) Games in which the adult initiates an interaction, inviting the child to join in. Adults use the 3R Strategy (read, role play, reflect) to become familiar with the games. The games appear easy on the surface but challenge the adult to find just the right level and variation for the individual child. While the action of the game is simple, the significance to the child’s development can be profound. 
• Enriched Caregiving—incorporating educational content and social-emotional connection into the child’s daily care routines such as feeding/eating, changing diapers/toileting, bathing/washing hands, getting dressed/undressed. Adults enhance the basic level of care they provide by emphasizing its social-emotional aspect as well as incorporating explicit educational content such as shapes, sizes, colors, numbers, and processes. The Abecedarian Approach affirms that, in the first five years of life, education and caregiving cannot and should not be thought of as distinctly different activities. The phrase “enriched caregiving” is intended to remind all of us (researchers, parents, caregivers, teachers, and program administrators) that “care” for an infant or young child can and should do several things at once. Care can meet the vital needs that support life and stimulate growth while also being responsive to the individual child’s own preferences, abilities, and life situation. Further, care frequently can be enriched with educational content. Enriched Caregiving is described in the 3C Strategy (care, connection, content). By highlighting the pivotal role of care in the education of young children, the Abecedarian Approach imbues all the child’s day with educational meaning.

Since the Abecedarian Approach focuses on multiple strands of child development, one way to think about the Approach is to consider how the parts of the Abecedarian adult-child curriculum are intended to relate to the observed or hypothesized Abecedarian effects or outputs. Table 1 provides a summary this set of relationships in an Input-Output Map.

Table 1. Abecedarian input-output map.

"“The innovation of the Abecedarian Approach was in bringing together all the elements of high quality and holding them steady over an extended period of time at a level of consistency that would yield significant, measurable, long-term benefits for vulnerable children and families” ^[4][17] (p. 6).

The research demonstrates that, on average, children from low-resource backgrounds who have experienced an early Abecedarian program enter school with a developmental and educational advantage compared to children from similar backgrounds who have not experienced the program and that the advantage accrues to their benefit throughout their school years and into middle adulthood.

3. Cognitive, Social, and Mental Health Effects from Abecedarian Interventions

3.1. Attachment

Because the first Abecedarian study, called the Abecedarian Project, was delivered through group child care, the researchers wanted to know if there was a positive or negative effect from the child care experience itself. At one year of age the infants and their mothers were observed in the Ainsworth Strange Situation paradigm ^[11][20]. This observational study, early in the history of the Abecedarian Project, showed that Abecedarian child care was not associated with increased insecure attachment and did not negatively change, and sometimes enhanced, the associations between the infant-mother attachment and the mother’s involvement and warmth toward the infant during the first year of life ^[12][21].

3.2. Communicative Initiations

In the first Abecedarian study video data were collected on how 20-month-old infants from low resource families use intentional communication in a free-play setting. Children who received the Abecedarian program were compared to randomly assigned children who received other programs or stayed at home. They were also compared to a group of normally developing middle-class infants. The frequency of communicative initiations and the proportion of spontaneous communicative initiations—classified as “showing” and “requesting”—were used for the comparison. Receiving the Abecedarian Approach through child care significantly enhanced both the frequency and the developmental level of the communicative initiations of infants from low-resource families ^[13][23].

3.3. Language Development

A 2019 impact study sought to determine if the classic Abecedarian Approach, in the current time and in an on-going service setting, could improve the early developmental progress of historically underachieving Canadian children, including those of First Nations (FN) status. Both genders in the treatment group experienced net increases over the control group in language development, but the girls did better than the boys. Additionally, it is of particular interest that in the treatment group, the FN children began at a lower language level than the non-FN children, but both groups progressed at about the same rate ^[14].

3.4. Locus of Control

An academic locus-of-control measure ^[15][25], collected during the kindergarten and first grade years on the first two cohorts of the Abecedarian Project, showed that the untreated children had lower perceptions of control over their academic success than did their middle and upper socio-economic classmates. However, for the Abecedarian treatment children, beliefs in personal control over successful academic performance increased to approximately the same level as that of their low-risk classmates. For the treatment children in the study, academic locus-of-control was positively related to task-orientation, less distractibility, and internal motivation ^[16][26]—providing a possible explanation for how beliefs (locus-of-control) may be translated into positive classroom behaviors.