Huge ‘word gap’ holding back low-income children may not exist after all
A study contests the idea that poor kids hear fewer words than kids from higher-income families
By
Bruce Bower
5:30am, September 4, 2018
WORD UP A previous report that primary caregivers speak an average of 30 million more words to young children in middle-class and wealthy families, versus youngsters in poor families, doesn’t hold up on closer inspection, a new study finds.
A scientific takedown of a famous finding known as the 30-million-word gap may upend popular notions of how kids learn vocabulary.
Research conducted more than 20 years ago concluded that by age 4, poor children hear an average of 30 million fewer words than their well-off peers. Since then, many researchers have accepted the reported word gap as a driver of later reading and writing problems among low-income youngsters. A Providence, R.I., program inspired by the study, for example, now teaches poor parents how to talk more with their kids.
But here’s the rap on the word gap: It doesn’t exist, says a team led by psychologist Douglas Sperry of Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College in Indiana. In a redo of the original study, virtually no class differences appeared in the number of words addressed to young children by a primary caregiver, Sperry and colleagues report in a study to be published in Child Development.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/word-gap-low-income-children-psychology-reproducibility
