Speak Loving Words to Your Children

The Early Catastrophe: The 30 Million Word Gap by Age Three
Taken from Hart, B., & Risley, T. R., American Educator (Spring, 2003)

Very often, poverty plays a role in children not doing well in school. Over the years, many researchers, psychologists and educators have tried to change this development with the use of projects to increase and improve the everyday language that children use. One of these projects included both poor children and a group of professors’ children. The children in the project used many new materials and activities that were focused on language. At the end of the project, the children had learned many new words and they learned these words at a faster rate than they did before. However, the poor children soon forgot many of the new words by the time they were in kindergarten.

The researchers were puzzled and conducted another project to understand why the poor children forgot the new words they had learned. This second project looked at what was happening to children in their homes during the very early years when they were learning language. The results showed that families are very different in the amount and types of interactions and experiences with language they provide their children. This is very important because almost everything that infants learn comes from their families. Also, these early experiences with language are linked to later language use.

Results from the project showed that children from families on welfare knew fewer words than did those children in professional families. Children from families on welfare also learned new words more slowly than did children from professional families. The results also showed that children from professional families heard many more encouraging than discouraging words, but children from welfare families heard far more discouraging words than encouraging words. A summary of the results follows: