The researchers reported a gap of 30 million words between these two groups of children. The “30-million word gap” is a good example—and a mixed blessing. We decided to start when the children were 7-9 months old so we would have time for the families to adapt to observation before the children actually began talking. We base our estimate on the remarkable differences our data showed in the relative amounts of children's early experience: Simply in words heard, the average child on welfare was having half as much experience per hour (616 words per hour) as the average working-class child (1,251 words per hour) and less than one-third that of the average child in a professional family (2,153 words per hour). We see why our brief, intense efforts during the War on Poverty did not succeed. If a pair of dueling reports in an academic journal were all there was to this, the heightened debate over toddler talk and language development might have remained academic. We had dissembled these interactions into several dozen molecular features that could be reliably coded and counted. Dubbed “The Early Catastrophe” by University of Kansas researchers Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley, the differences in language exposure that they observed and calculated among children of various socioeconomic groups is among the most commonly cited pieces of educational research in history, and for good reason: Hart and Risley pronounced themselves “awestruck” at how well their measures of vocabulary and verbal accomplishment at age three predicted language skill at age nine and ten. But we could not accelerate the rate of vocabulary growth so that it would continue beyond direct teaching; we could not change the developmental trajectory. In a 5,200-hour year, that would be 166,000 encouragements to 26,000 discouragements in a professional family, 62,000 encouragements to 36,000 discouragements in a working-class family, and 26,000 encouragements to 57,000 discouragements in a welfare family. For example, Marjorie Faulstich Orellana, a professor of education at UCLA, agreed that “there’s variation in how much adults speak to children,” but cautioned against placing a value judgment on it. After all 1,318 observations had been entered into the computer and checked for accuracy against the raw data, after every word had been checked for spelling and coded and checked for its part of speech, after every utterance had been coded for syntax and discourse function and every code checked for accuracy, after random samples had been recoded to check the reliability of the coding, after each file had been checked one more time and the accuracy of each aspect verified, and after the data analysis programs had finally been run to produce frequency counts and dictionary lists for each observation, we had an immense numeric database that required 23 million bytes of computer file space. Vocabulary use at age 3 was equally predictive of measures of language skill at age 9-10. Most interventions of the time used a variety of methods and then measured results with IQ tests, but ours focused on building the everyday language the children were using, then evaluating the growth of that language. Once children become independent and can speak for themselves, they gain access to more opportunities for experience. Shanahan response: Research can get things wrong. We looked up each potential family in the city directory and listed those with such signs of permanence as owning their home and having a telephone. Data from Hart and Risley, among many others, offered renewed focus on the importance of building strong language as a foundation for learning. The scale of the differences observed by Hart and Risley was so stunning that it propelled their work out of the sleepy world of education research and into public consciousness, launching a raft of programs, policies, and philanthropic initiatives to address the disparity the pair uncovered. Who cares?” Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, the Director of Temple University’s Infant Language Laboratory tells me. This is a shame. We can extrapolate similarly the relative differences the data showed in children's hourly experience with parent affirmatives (encouraging words) and prohibitions. We were also among the many who saw that our results, however promising at the start, washed out fairly early and fairly completely as children aged. While we were immersed in collecting and processing the data, our thoughts were concerned only with the next utterance to be transcribed or coded. One African-American family was upper SES, three were middle, seven were lower, and six families were on welfare. By Betty Hart, Todd R. Risley. Guidance for the Brookings community and the public on our response to the coronavirus (COVID-19) », Learn more from Brookings scholars about the global response to coronavirus (COVID-19) ». We are committed to advancing these principles through community engagement, organizing, collective bargaining and political activism, and especially through the work our members do. You like your juice?” is receiving input that is uncharacteristic of adult conversations, in which decontextualized talk is geared toward other things like movies, politics, work, and so on. We depend on future studies to refine this estimate. “This approach would mislead policymakers, practitioners, and the public. The spontaneous speech data we collected showed a spurt of new vocabulary words added to the dictionaries of all the children and an abrupt acceleration in their cumulative vocabulary growth curves. Aren’t you aware that study has been rejected? The original study that noted a 30 million word gap calculated amount of talk in the highest income families (the “professional” group) vs the lowest income families (the “welfare” group). In recruiting from birth announcements, we had two priorities. Education research tends to get bumper-stickered. They all disciplined their children and taught them good manners and how to dress and toilet themselves. As researchers in the field of language development, we take issue with Sperry et al.’s empirical claims. A linear extrapolation from the averages in the observational data to a 100-hour week (given a 14-hour waking day) shows the average child in the professional families with 215,000 words of language experience, the average child in a working-class family provided with 125,000 words, and the average child in a welfare family with 62,000 words of language experience. Differences in the quantity and quality of child-directed language are associated with differences in children’s language growth—both within and between socioeconomic strata. We observed the 42 children grow more like their parents in stature and activity levels, in vocabulary resources, and in language and interaction styles. The Sperry study suggested that when “ambient” speech is counted—speech among adults in the presence of children, for example—differences between socioeconomic classes are reduced or disappear. Even patterns of parenting were already observable among the children. Our ambition was to record "everything" that went on in children's homes—everything that was done by the children, to them, and around them. Then we sent recruiting letters selectively in order to maintain the gender balance and the representation of socioeconomic strata. Even if our estimates of children's experience are too high by half, the differences between children by age 4 in amounts of cumulative experience are so great that even the best of intervention programs could only hope to keep the children in families on welfare from falling still further behind the children in the working-class families. That is, she told Kamenetz, a “middle-class, mostly white practice.”, In a blog post last June, University of Virginia cognitive scientist Dan Willingham pointed out that, contrary to the emerging “failure to replicate” claim attached to the 30-million-word gap, “the conceptual idea that socioeconomic status and volume of caregiver→child speech has been replicated” numerous times. That controversy garnered new attention in 1995 when researchers Betty Hart and Todd Risley reported that children of highly educated, professional parents heard many more words addressed to them than children of less educated parents. Finally, the Sperry team raises the interesting question of the role of overheard language in the home. At your next professional development session, conference, or perhaps on social media, mention the famous “30-million-word gap” study, which demonstrated that low-income children hear far less spoken language before their first day of school than their affluent peers, setting in motion dramatic differences in vocabulary attainment and academic achievement.
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