The Early Catastrophe : The 3 Million Word Gap by Age 3!

After decades of collaborating to enhance child language vocabulary, Betty Hart and Todd Risley spent 2 1/2 years strongly observing the language of 42 families throughout Kansas City. Exclusively, they looked at household language use in three special settings: 1) professional families; 2) working class; 3) welfare families. Hart and Risley gathered an gigantic amount of data during the study and subsequent longitudinal follow-ups to come up with an often cited 30 million word gap between the vocabularies of welfare and professional families by age three. This number came from the data that showed welfare children heard, on average, 616 words per hour, while children from professional families. Essentially children with college educated parents heard 2153 words per hour. Betty Hart and Todd Risley’s 1995 study that demonstrated that by age 3, most middle-class children had much larger vocabularies than children from low-income families. Middle-class parents speak, on average, 300 more words per hour to their children. The longitudinal research in the following years confirmed a high correlation between vocabulary size at age three and language test scores at ages nine and ten in areas of vocabulary, listening, syntax, and reading comprehension. This study was afterward used to fuel the fire of arguments for early childhood programs such as Head Start.