Early exposure to the German language in daycare is valuable for children growing up in multilingual households: Analyses using data from the National Education Panel Study (NEPS) show that children from families where a different native language is spoken benefit from attending daycare at an early age. If they had started daycare before their second birthday, they would have answered nearly ten more questions correctly on a vocabulary test at age seven than children who started daycare later. For children from exclusively German-speaking families, however, no comparable effect is evident.
The findings from NEPS Spotlight No. 24 on vocabulary and kindergarten enrollment are taken from the following publication:
Willard, J. A., Burghardt, L., Kohl, K., & Anders, Y. (2026). Does entering early childhood education as a toddler benefit language and social development until age seven? A propensity score analysis. Applied Developmental Science, 30(1), 88–111.
Subscribe to all NEPS Spotlights: kommunikation@lifbi.de
What are the NEPS spotlights?
This and other NEPS spotlights present selected findings from the National Education Panel Survey, Germany’s largest long-term education study, in a concise and accessible format. They shed light on topics such as the development of competencies over the life course, as well as aspects of personality, educational participation, integration, and civic engagement. Each highlight features a key message, a brief explanation, and interactive graphics that visualize the respective findings. Sources and further information are also linked. The NEPS Highlights are provided by the Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories (LIfBi) and are coordinated with the authors of the original publications. The collection is continuously expanded.
What is the National Education Panel?
The National Education Panel (NEPS) is the largest long-term education study in Germany. It examines educational processes, their conditions, outcomes, and consequences from early childhood through late adulthood. More than 70,000 participants, as well as approximately 50,000 people from their social circles, are surveyed on a recurring basis. The data collected is made available to the scientific community. More than 4,000 researchers worldwide are already working with NEPS data, and to date, more than 1,900 scientific publications have been produced.