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NPR Ed
Let's Stop
Talking About The '30 Million Word Gap'
Anya Kamanetz
June 1, 2018
Did you know that kids growing up in poverty hear 30 million fewer
words by age 3? Chances are, if you're the type of person who reads a
newspaper or listens to NPR, you've heard that statistic before.
Since 1992, this finding has, with unusual power, shaped the way
educators, parents and policymakers think about educating poor children.
But did you know that the number comes from just one study, begun
almost 40 years ago, with just 42 families? That some people argue it
contained a built-in racial bias? Or that others, including the authors
of a new study that calls itself a "failed replication," say it's just
wrong?
NPR talked to eight researchers to explore this controversy. All of
them say they share the goal of helping poor kids achieve their highest
potential in school.
But on the issue of how to define either the problem, or the solution,
there are, well, very big gaps.
With all that in mind, here are six things to know about the 30 million
word gap.
1. The original study had just 42 families.
During the War on Poverty in the 1960s, Betty Hart, a former preschool
teacher, entered graduate school in child psychology at the University
of Kansas, working with Todd Risley as her adviser.
The two began their research with preschool students in the low-income
Juniper Gardens section of Kansas City, Kan., explains Dale Walker of
the University of Kansas, who counts Hart as a colleague and mentor.
"They definitely worked out of their personal concern and experience
with young children."
Seeing differences between poor and middle-class children by the age of
3, Hart and Risley decided to look for roots even earlier in children's
lives.
Beginning in 1982, they followed up on birth announcements in the
newspaper to recruit families with infants as research subjects.
They eventually chose 42 families at four levels of income and
education, from "welfare" to "professional class." All of the "welfare"
families and 7 out of 10 of the "working class" families were black,
while 9 out of 10 of the "professional" families were white — this will
be important later.
Starting when the babies were 7 to 9 months old, the researchers
visited each house for one hour, once a month, for 2 1/2 years. They
showed up generally in the late afternoon, with a cassette recorder, a
clipboard and a stopwatch and tried to fade into the background. They
were there to record the number of words spoken around the children, as
well as the quality and types of interaction (for example, a question
versus a command), and the growth in words produced by the children
themselves.
2. The study has been cited over 8,000 times.
After 1,200 hours of recordings were collected, the real work began.
Transcribing and checking each moment, with their elaborate system of
coding, took 16 hours for every hour of tape, Dale Walker explains.
Hart and Risley's study wasn't published until 1992, while their book,
Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American
Children, came out in 1995.
From there, it really caught fire. These findings have been cited more
than 8,000 times, according to Google Scholar. The book remains one of
its publisher's bestsellers more than 20 years later. There is a
national research network of over 150 scholars aligned with Hart and
Risley and focusing on young children's home environment.
And the impact of this work spread far beyond the ivory tower. "It's
had enormous policy implications," says Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a
developmental psychologist at Temple University and a senior fellow at
the Brookings Institution.
Something about that figure, 30 million words, held people's attention.
Not only was it big, it seemed actionable.
Speech — unlike books or housing or health care — is free. If we could
somehow get poor parents to speak to their children more, could it make
a huge difference in fixing stubborn inequities in society?
The "word gap" drove expanded federal investments in Head Start and
Early Head Start. Hart and Risley's work inspired early intervention
programs, including the citywide effort Providence Talks in Rhode
Island, the Boston-based Reach Out and Read, and the Clinton
Foundation's Too Small To Fail.
Both researchers are now deceased. But in Kansas City, where it all
began, Dale Walker and others work on research and interventions at the
Juniper Gardens Children's Project.
3. Thirty million words is probably an exaggeration. Maybe the gap is 4
million. Maybe it's even smaller.
That eye-popping figure is one of the reasons the study has been so
sticky over time. But newer studies have found very different numbers.
Since Hart and Risley's study was published, critics have taken issue
with how the data was collected and interpreted.
Simple Number, Complex Impact: How Many Words Has A Child Heard?
"Their study is commendable in many ways, but they just got it wrong,"
says Paul Nation, an expert in vocabulary acquisition at Victoria
University of Wellington, New Zealand.
Nation primarily takes issue with the idea that you can estimate
vocabulary growth from small samples of speech, particularly when the
samples don't contain the same number of words.
He is one of many to have pointed out that the low-income families in
their sample may have been intimidated into silence by the presence of
a researcher, especially someone of another race. Educated parents,
though, might be more likely to show off by talking more when an
observer is present.
Modern technology can get around this observer effect. A nonprofit
called LENA manufactures a tiny digital recording device that can be
worn by children as young as 2 months old. Software then estimates
speech and turn-taking.
While not invisible, it's a lot less intrusive than having a person
sitting in the room. Directly inspired by Hart and Risley, LENA is used
in school-based and home-based interventions dedicated to closing the
word gap in more than 20 states.
Using LENA, scientists published a near-replication of the Hart and
Risley study in 2017, only this study had 329 families, nearly 8 times
more, and 49,765 hours of recording, from children 2 months to 4 years.
Their conclusion? The "word gap" between high-income and low-income
groups was about 4 million by the time the children turned 4, not 30
million by age 3. Only if you compared the most talkative 2 percent
with quietest 2 percent of families did you get a gap nearly as wide as
Hart and Risley's, says LENA's senior director of research, Jill
Gilkerson.
Another just-published study calls itself a "failed replication" of
Hart and Risley.
The researchers analyzed field recordings from five different poor and
working-class communities. They found that the amount of speech
children heard varied from one place to another.
The lowest-income children recorded in South Baltimore heard 1.7 times
as many words per hour as did Hart and Risley's "welfare" group. And in
the "Black Belt," an area in rural Alabama, poor children heard three
times as many words as Hart and Risley's "welfare" group.
The wide variation "unsettles the notion that income alone determines
how many words children hear," lead author Douglas Sperry tells NPR.
4. Some people take issue with the whole idea of a "gap"
Sperry and his co-authors fall into a camp that criticizes the "word
gap" concept as racially and culturally loaded in a way that ultimately
hurts the children whom early intervention programs ostensibly trying
to help.
"To look at income alone obscures real questions about the cultural
mismatch between children of color and mainstream European children and
their teachers as they enter schools," says Sperry. In other words,
it's not necessarily that poor children aren't ready for school; it's
that schools and teachers are not ready for these children.
Marjorie Faulstich Orellana, a professor of education at the University
of California, Los Angeles, has called attention to the "word wealth"
experienced by children who grow up learning a different language or
even a different dialect than the dominant standard English spoken in
school. This would describe not only recent immigrants, but also anyone
whose background isn't white, educated and middle or upper class. When
they get to school, they must learn to "code switch" between two ways
of speaking.
She doesn't disagree that "there's variation in how much adults speak
to children," but, she tells NPR, there shouldn't necessarily be a
value judgment placed on that.
"Should adults direct lots of questions to children in ways that
prepare them to answer questions in school?" she asks, calling that a
"middle-class, mostly white practice."
"There are other values, like using language to entertain or connect,
rather than just have children perform their knowledge. How do we honor
different families rather than have families change their values to
align with school?"
Similarly, Sofia Bahena, an education professor at the University of
Texas, San Antonio, says talking about "word gaps," like "achievement
gaps," is an example of what she calls deficit thinking.
"We can talk about differences without resorting to deficit language by
being mindful and respectful of those we are speaking or researching
about," she explains. "We can shift the question from 'how can we fix
these students?' to 'how can we best serve them?' It doesn't mean we
don't speak hard truths. But it does mean we try to ask more critical
questions to have a deeper understanding of the issues."
Jennifer Keys Adair at the University of Texas, Austin published a
study last year of how the "word gap" rubber is meeting the road of
schools.
She and her co-authors spoke with nearly 200 superintendents,
administrators, teachers, parents and young children in mostly
Spanish-speaking immigrant communities. The educators expressed the
belief that the children in grades pre-K through third in this
community could not handle learner-centered, project-based, hands-on
learning because their vocabulary was too limited. And, the children in
the study themselves echoed the belief that they needed to sit quietly
and listen in order to learn.
Adair says the "word gap" has become a kind of code word. "We can say
'vocabulary.' We're not going to say 'poor' and we're not going to use
'race,' but it's still a marker."
5. The underlying desire to help kids is still pretty compelling, though
Walker says that Hart and Risley were happy to engage with their
critics. "They valued that input and the give and take." But, she says,
they were sometimes "dismayed" at misinterpretations of their research,
such as if people took ideas about the importance of an early start as
justification for not trying to improve student outcomes later on in
school.
Some boosters agree with critics that the "word gap" may need a
reframing.
Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, with her longtime collaborator Roberta Michnick
Golinkoff and other researchers, wrote a scholarly critique of the
Sperry study for the Brookings Institution.
"I am worried," Hirsh-Pasek tells NPR, that downplaying the word gap
will have "dangerous" consequences. "Whenever you send out a message
that 'Hey, this doesn't matter,' the policymakers are listening and
say, 'Hey, that's great, we can divert the money.' "
Sperry's measures included "bystander talk" by multiple people in the
room, including older siblings and other relatives. So did the LENA
study. Hirsh-Pasek says the psychological research is clear that it's
the "dance" of interaction between caregiver and child that is crucial
to learning speech.
While this point is fairly settled among developmental psychologists,
anthropologists may dissent, says Douglas Sperry. In some cultures,
such as the Mayans in Central America, addressing young children
directly is uncommon, yet people still learn to talk, he notes.
Hirsh-Pasek does agree with the critics that framing the issue as a
deficit is wrong. "I'm so sorry that the 30 million word gap was framed
as a gap," she says. "I like to talk about it as building a foundation
rather than reducing a gap."
But, she adds, the sheer volume of conversation directed at children,
not just spoken in their presence, is fundamental to language learning
and later success in school. All the cultural variation in the world
"doesn't negate the fact that when you look at the averages, there is a
problem here."
And what's most important, says Hirsh-Pasek, is that interventions
inspired by Hart and Risley are nudging parents in the right direction.
"We have made changes and movement in kids, in whole communities."
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