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Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American
Children is the story of the landmark research study that uncovered
the widely cited "word gap" between children from low-income homes
and their more economically advantaged peers. This groundbreaking
research has spurred hundreds of studies and programs, including
the White House's Bridging the Word Gap campaign and Too Small to
Fail, a joint initiative of the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton
foundation. Betty Hart and Todd Risley wanted to know why, despite
best efforts in preschool programs to equalize opportunity,
children from low-income homes remain well behind their more
economically advantaged peers years later in school. Each month,
they recorded one full hour of every word spoken at home between
parent and child in 42 families, categorized as professional,
working class, or welfare families. Two and a half years of coding
and analysing every utterance in 1,318 transcripts followed. By age
3, the recorded spoken vocabularies of the children from the
professional families were larger than those of the parents in the
welfare families. Between professional and welfare parents, there
was a difference of almost 300 words spoken per hour. Extrapolating
this verbal interaction to four years, a child in a professional
family would accumulate experience with almost 45 million words,
while an average child in a welfare family would hear just 13
million-coining the phrase the 30 million word gap. The
implications of this painstaking study are staggering: Hart and
Risley's follow-up studies at age 9 show that the large differences
in children's language experience were tightly linked to large
differences in child outcomes. As the authors note in their preface
to the 2002 printing of Meaningful Differences, "the most important
aspect to evaluate in child care settings for very young children
is the amount of talk actually going on, moment by moment, between
children and their caregivers." By giving children positive
interactions and experiences with adults who take the time to teach
vocabulary, oral language concepts, and emergent literacy concepts,
children should have a better chance to succeed at school and in
the workplace.
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