066: Is the 30 Million Word Gap real?

You all know that on the show we pretty much steer clear of the clickbait articles that try to convince you that something is wrong with your child, in favor of getting a balanced view of the overall body of literature on a topic. But every once in a while a study comes along and I think “we really MUST learn more about that, even though it muddies the water a bit and leads us more toward confusion than a clear picture.” This is one of those studies.  We’ll learn about the original Hart & Risley study that identified the “30 Million Word Gap” that so much policy has been based on since then, and what are the holes in that research (e.g. did you know that SIX African American families on welfare in that study are used as proxies for all poor families in the U.S., only 25% of whom are African American?). Then, Dr. Doug Sperry will tell us about his research, which leads him to believe that overheard language can also make a meaningful contribution to children’s vocabulary development. I do want to be 100% clear on one point: Dr. Sperry says very clearly that he believes parents speaking with children is important for their development; just that overheard language can contribute as well. And this is not Dr. Sperry out on his own criticizing research that everyone else agrees with: if you’re interested, there are a host of other issues listed here. The overarching problem, of course, is that our school system is so inflexible that linguistic skills – even really incredible ones of the type we discussed in our recent episode on storytelling – have no place in the classroom if they don’t mesh with the way that White, middle-class families (and, by extension, teachers and students) communicate. But that will have to be an episode for another day.   References Adair, J. K., Colegrove, K. S-S., & McManus, M. E. (2017).  How the word gap argument negatively impacts young children of Latinx Immigrants’ conceptualizations of learning. Harvard Educational Review, 87(3), 309-334. Akhtar, N., & Gernsbacher, M.A. (2007). Joint attention and vocabulary development: A critical look. Language and Linguistic Compass 1(3), 195-207. Callanan, M., & Waxman, S. (2013). Commentary on special section: Deficit or difference? Interpreting diverse developmental paths. Developmental Psychology 49(1), 80-83. Dennett, D. (1995). Darwin’s dangerous idea: Evolution and the meaning of life. New York, NY: Touchstone. Dudley-Marling, C., & Lucas, K. (2009). Pathologizing the language and culture of poor children. Language Arts 86(5), 362-370. Gee, J.P. (1985). The narrativization of experience in the oral style. Journal of Education 167(1), 9-57. Genishi, C., & Dyson, A. H. (2009).  Children, language, and literacy: Diverse learners in diverse times.  New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Hoff, E. (2013). Interpreting the early language trajectories of children from low-SES and language minority homes: Implications for closing achievement gaps. Developmental Psychology 49(1), 4-14. Johnson, E.J. (2015). Debunking the “language gap.” Journal for Multicultural Education 9(1), 42-50. Miller, P.J., & Sperry, D.E. (2012). Déjà vu: The continuing misrecognition of low-income children’s verbal abilities. In S.T. Fiske & H.R. Markus (Eds.), Facing social class: How societal rank influences interaction (pp.109-130). New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation. Sperry, D.E., Sperry, L.L., & Miller, P.J. (2018). Reexamining the verbal environments of children from different socioeconomic backgrounds. Child Development (Early online publication).  Full article available at: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Peggy_Miller3/publication/324839950_Reexamining_the_Verbal_Environments_of_Children_From_Different_Socioeconomic_Backgrounds/links/5aec67fda6fdcc8508b77912/Reexamining-the-Verbal-Environments-of-Children-From-Different-Socioeconomic-Backgrounds.pdf Walker, D., Greenwood, C., Hart, B., & Carta, J. (1994). Prediction of school outcomes based on early language production and socioeconomic factors. Child Development 65(2), 606-621.   Read Full Transcript   Transcript Jen:[00:38] Hello and welcome to today’s episode of the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. I think today we’re going to blow a few holes in some classic research. You might have heard of what’s known as the 30 Million Word Gap, which at a high level is the idea that middle class parents talk so much more to their young children on a daily basis than poor parents do, and that this accumulates a gap of 30 million words by the time the children are four years old. So I took a brief look at this study a while back and I noticed that the researchers, Professor Betty Hart of the University of Kansas and Professor Todd Risley at the University of Alaska Anchorage, conflated a couple of important variables in the study, those of wealth and education, which is why I haven’t done an episode on it and whenever anyone asks me about it, I mentioned that the study’s results might be a little bit shaky, but I owe a debt of gratitude to listener Kim from Boston who has a PhD in Curriculum and Instruction and who works to support African American boys and developing literacy for sending me a research paper that describes a replication of the incredibly time consuming study that professors, Hart and Risley did back in the seventies and which came to rather different conclusions. I’m here today with Dr Douglas Sperry, who is Associate Professor of Psychology at St Mary of the woods college in Indiana who coauthored this paper with his wife and colleague, Dr Linda Sperry of Indiana State University and also Dr Peggy Miller of the University of Illinois. It isn’t often that we take the time to dig so deeply into a single paper on this show, but the original study has become such a part of how we think about what it means to be a good parent, so I’m delighted that Dr Barry is here with us today to really dig into these results. Welcome Dr Berry. Dr. Sperry: [02:12] Thank you very much for having me. I appreciate very much the opportunity to talk with you and your listeners. Jen:  [02:18] Thank you. So for those listeners who have sort of heard of the 30 Million Word Gap and they kind of know it’s important to talk with their children, but they might not really know what the study is, could you please describe the parameters of the original Hart and Risley Study? Dr. Sperry:  [02:31] Yes. The original study was a longitudinal investigation of 42 families, and they were divided by social class. Six of the families were in a welfare group. Twenty three of the families were in a group that Hart and Risley ended up calling the working class group, although there is mention of 10 of those families being middle class and 13 being working true working class, but they ended up combining them and that another top 13 families and children who were in the so called professional group, they undertook this study after really a decade or more of work and the Kansas City area around the University of Kansas. Betty Hart in particular had been working in the Turner House Preschool, which is part of the Turner housing project in Kansas City and she also had some of her university students working and the laboratory preschool at the University of Kansas itself. The Turner Housing Project and it’s preschool, was well. The preschool was entirely African American…composed of African American children. Dr. Sperry: [03:42] Whereas the laboratory preschool at the University of Kansas had all children of professors, as is quite common. Anyway with her work at the Turner House Preschool. She noticed that the vocabulary of African American children in that preschool was lagging considerably behind that of the professor’s children at the laboratory preschool. And so in the late sixties and early seventies, she began a series of other interventions expressly aimed at teaching the African American children at the Turner House, more vocabulary, and she noticed that that was quite successful and I should...