in the New York Times:
…Reflexively, the affluent, ambitious parent is always talking, pointing out, explaining: Mommy is looking for her laptop; let’s put on your rain boots; that’s a pigeon, a sand dune, skyscraper, a pomegranate. The child, in essence, exists in continuous receipt of dictation.
Things are very different elsewhere on the class spectrum. Earlier in the year when I met Steven F. Wilson, founder of a network of charter schools that serve poor and largely black communities in Brooklyn, I asked him what he considered the greatest challenge on the first day of kindergarten each year. He answered, without a second’s hesitation: “Word deficit.” As it happens, in the ’80s, the psychologists Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley spent years cataloging the number of words spoken to young children in dozens of families from different socioeconomic groups, and what they found was not only a disparity in the complexity of words used, but also astonishing differences in sheer number. Children of professionals were, on average, exposed to approximately 1,500 more words hourly than children growing up in poverty. This resulted in a gap of more than 32 million words by the time the children reached the age of 4.
October 16th, 2012 | 6:09 pm
The article mentions that a new preschool in a poor neighborhood in Brooklyn will include babies as young as 6 weeks old in an effort to overcome this “word deficit”. The story doesn’t mention whether television viewing makes up for being spoken to by a parent, but my guess is that there’s no subsitute for a live engagement with a person who speaks directly to you.
We so take for granted the debt we owe to our families for the simple ability to learn and think. How sad to think that young children have their entire lives burdened by the simple lack of words.
October 16th, 2012 | 8:25 pm
There is no mention of the type of language children are exposed to. Circumstantial evidence leads me to conjecture that if the child is exposed to cursing they may be more disadvantaged than kids whose households care for the quality of the vocabulary used. In fact, I dare to say that good manners in language make up for a lack of educated parents.
October 17th, 2012 | 7:56 pm
There’s also a chicken or egg question here. Which comes first, lower IQ or not being spoken to with a large vocabulary and asked questions? In other words, do the kids have lower IQs because the parents don’t interact with them properly or do the parents not interact with them properly because they, the parents, have (genetically) lower IQs? The latter would be much more resistant to change. Though it does seem more likely to me.
October 18th, 2012 | 9:22 am
There are some very good comments under the NYT article. Several point out that Asian children from immigrant families, where the parents hardly speak English, tend to be achievers. I would guess that the parents speak in their native language with more words and more complexity than poor black parents speak to their children in English, and that the language capacity the children acquire transfer to English. Both of my parents grew up in immigrant families whose language at home was not English. They both became highly literate English teachers.
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