THE EARLY CATASTROPHE
Ewrite by Carl Peterson
In 1989
Carl Peterson started
the Peterson Reading and 555 programs
that provided auditory examples of key word
lists,
then meaning phrases.
In 1993
he completed Peterson Reading 93
and the first 5 meaning phrase books.
In 1999
he completed
Peterson
pronunciation deficits
and reading philosophies.
Peterson
has written dozens
of
Peterson
is frustrated by his inability
to get mothers more involved.
His free
auditory software
can supplement the child’s word input
24
hours per day.
The
following devastating report
does not have to happen
if the parents play Peterson’s free recordings
for many or 24 hours per day.
The
following copyrighted article is attached
to reinforce CP opinions.
Do not
circulate without permission of the authors.
--------------------------------------
THE
EARLY CATASTROPHE
THE 30
MILLION-WORD GAP BY AGE 3
BETTY
HART AND TODD R. RISLEY
|
Families’ |
||||||
|
|
|
|
Families |
|
|
|
|
|
13 Professional |
23
Working-class |
6 Welfare |
|||
|
Measures
& Scores |
Parent |
Child |
Parent |
Child |
Parent |
Child |
|
Protest
scorea |
41 |
|
31 |
|
14 |
|
|
Recorded
vocabulary size |
2,176 |
1,116 |
1,498 |
749 |
974 |
525 |
|
Average
utterances per hourb |
487 |
310 |
301 |
223 |
176 |
168 |
|
Average
different words per hour |
382 |
297 |
251 |
216 |
167 |
149 |
|
|
||||||
Simply
in words heard,
the average child on welfare was having half as much experience per hour
(616 words per hour)
as the average working-class child
(1,251 words per hour)
and less than one-third that of the average
child in a professional family
(2,153
words per hour).
-----------------------------------------------
During
the 1960's War on Poverty,
we were among the many researchers,
psychologists,
and educators who brought our knowledge
of child development
to the front line in an optimistic effort
to intervene early
to forestall the terrible effects
that poverty was having
on some children’s academic growth.
We were also among the many
who saw that our results,
however promising at the start,
washed out fairly early and fairly completely
as children aged.
In one planned intervention
in
we used our experience
with clinical language intervention
to design a half-day program
for the Turner House Preschool,
located in the impoverished
of the city.
Most interventions
of the time used a variety of methods
and then measured results
with IQ tests,
but ours focused on building
the everyday language
the children were using,
then evaluating the growth
of that language.
In addition,
our study included
not just poor children from Turner House,
but also a group
of
professors’ children
against whom we could measure
the Turner House
children’s progress.
All the children in the program
eagerly engaged
with the wide variety
of new materials and language-intensive
activities
introduced in the preschool.
The spontaneous speech data
we collected showed a spurt
of new vocabulary words added
to the dictionaries of all the children
and an abrupt acceleration
in their cumulative vocabulary growth curves.
But just as in other
early intervention programs,
the increases were temporary.
We found we could easily increase
the size of the children’s vocabularies
by teaching them new words.
But we could not accelerate
the rate of vocabulary growth
so that it would continue
beyond direct teaching;
we could not change
the developmental trajectory.
However many new words
we taught the children
in the preschool,
it was clear that a year later,
when the children were in kindergarten,
the effects of the boost in vocabulary resources
would have washed out.
The children’s developmental trajectories
of vocabulary growth
would continue to point
to vocabulary sizes
in the future that were increasingly
discrepant
from those of the professors’ children.
We saw increasing disparity
between the extremes—
the fast vocabulary growth
of the professors’ children and the slow
vocabulary growth
of the Turner House children.
The gap seemed
to foreshadow the findings
from other studies
that in high school many children
from families in poverty
lack the vocabulary used
in advanced textbooks.
Rather than concede
to the unmalleable forces of heredity,
we decided that we would
undertake research
that would allow us
to understand the
disparate developmental trajectories we saw.
We realized that if we were
to understand
how and when differences
in developmental trajectories began,
we needed
to see what was happening
to children at home at the very beginning
of their vocabulary growth.
We undertook 2 1/2 years
of observing 42 families
for an hour each month
to learn about what typically
went on in homes
with 1- and 2-year-old children learning
to talk.
The data showed us that ordinary families
differ immensely
in the amount of experience
with language and interaction
they regularly provide their children
and that differences in children’s experience
are strongly linked
to children’s language accomplishments at age 3.
Our goal in the longitudinal study was
to discover what was happening
in children’s early experience
that could account
for the intractable difference in rates
of vocabulary growth we saw
among 4-year-olds.
Below
box is inserted later in the article
|
a When we began the longitudinal study, from the and a
series of pictures of the picture that corresponded was highly correlated were averaged over 13-36 months of child age. were
averaged when the children were 33-36 months old. |
Methodology Our ambition was
to record
“everything”
that went on in children’s homes--everything that was done by the children,
to them,
and around them.
Because we were committed
to undertaking the labor involved in observing,
tape recording,
and transcribing,
and because we did not know exactly which aspects of children’s cumulative
experience were contributing
to establishing rates of vocabulary growth,
the more information we could get each time we were in the home the more we
could potentially learn.
We decided
to start when the children were 7-9 months old so we would have time
for the families
to adapt
to observation before the children actually began talking.
We followed the children until they turned three years old.
The first families we recruited
to participate in the study came from personal contacts:
friends who had babies and families who had had children in the Turner House
Preschool.
We then used birth announcements
to send descriptions of the study
to families
with children of the desired age.
In recruiting from birth announcements,
we had two priorities.
The first priority was
to obtain a range in demographics,
and the second was stability--we needed families likely
to remain in the longitudinal study
for several years.
Recruiting from birth announcements allowed us
to preselect families.
We looked up each potential family in the city directory and listed those
with such signs of permanence as owning their home and having a telephone.
We listed families by sex of child and address because demographic status could
be reliably associated
with area of residence in this city at that time.
Then we sent recruiting letters selectively in order
to maintain the gender balance and the representation of socioeconomic strata.
Our final sample consisted of 42 families who remained in the study from
beginning
to end.
From each of these families,
we have almost 2 1/2 years or more of sequential monthly hour-long
observations.
On the basis of occupation,
13 of the families were upper socioeconomic status
(SES),
10 were middle SES,
13 were lower SES,
and six were on welfare.
There were African-American families in each SES category,
in numbers roughly reflecting local job allocations.
One African-American family was upper SES,
three were middle,
seven were lower,
and six families were on welfare.
Of the 42 children,
17 were African American and 23 were girls.
Eleven children were the first born
to the family,
18 were second children,
and 13 were third or later-born children.
What We Found
Before
children can take charge
of their own experience and begin
to spend time
with peers in social groups
outside the home,
almost everything they learn
comes from their families,
to whom society
has assigned the task of socializing children.
We were not surprised
to see the 42 children turn out
to be like their parents;
we had not fully realized,
however,
the implications of those similarities
for the children’s futures.
We observed the 42 children
grow more like their parents in stature and
activity levels,
in vocabulary resources,
and in language and interaction styles.
Despite the considerable range
in vocabulary size among the children,
86 percent to 98 percent
of the words recorded in each child’s
vocabulary
consisted of words also recorded in their parents’
vocabularies.
By the age of 34-36 months,
the children were also talking and using
numbers of different words
very similar
to the averages of their parents
(see the table above).
By the time the children were 3 years old,
trends in amount of talk,
vocabulary growth,
and style of interaction were well established and clearly suggested widening
gaps
to come.
Even patterns of parenting were already observable among the children.
When we listened
to the children,
we seemed
to hear their parents speaking;
when we watched the children play at parenting their dolls,
we seemed
to see the futures of their own children.
We now had answers
to our 20-year-old questions.
We had observed,
recorded,
and analyzed more than 1,300 hours of casual interactions between parents and
their language-learning children.
We had dissembled these interactions into several dozen molecular features that
could be reliably coded and counted.
We had examined the correlations between the quantities of each of those
features and several outcome measures relating
to children’s language accomplishments.
After all 1,318 observations had been entered into the computer and checked
for accuracy against the raw data,
after every word had been checked
for spelling and coded and checked
for its part of speech,
after every utterance had been coded
for syntax and discourse function and every code checked
for accuracy,
after random samples had been recoded
to check the reliability of the coding,
after each file had been checked one more time and the accuracy of each aspect
verified,
and after the data analysis programs had finally been run
to produce frequency counts and dictionary lists
for each observation,
we had an immense numeric database that required 23 million bytes of computer
file space.
We were finally ready
to begin asking what it all meant.
It took six years of painstaking effort before we saw the first results of the
longitudinal research.
------------------------------------
And
then we were astonished
at the differences the data revealed.
Like the children in the Turner House Preschool,
the three year old children
from families on welfare
not only had smaller vocabularies
than did children of the same age
in professional families,
but they were also adding words
more slowly.
Projecting the developmental trajectory
of the welfare children’s vocabulary growth
curves,
we could see an ever-widening gap
similar to the one we saw
between the Turner House children and the
professors’
children in 1967.
While we were immersed
in collecting and processing the data,
our thoughts were concerned only
with the next utterance
to be transcribed or coded.
While we were observing in the homes,
though we were aware
that the families were very different in
lifestyles,
they were all similarly engaged
in the fundamental task of raising a child.
All the families nurtured their children
and played and talked with them.
They all disciplined their children and
taught them good manners and
how to dress and toilet themselves.
They provided their children
with much the same toys and talked
to them about much the same things.
Though different in personality and skill levels,
the children all learned
to talk and
to be socially appropriate members of the family
with all the basic skills needed
for preschool entry.
Test Performance in Third Grade
Follows Accomplishments at Age 3
We
wondered whether the differences we saw at age 3 would be washed out,
like the effects
of a preschool intervention,
as the children’s experience broadened
to a wider community
of competent speakers.
Like the parents we observed,
we wondered how much difference
children’s early experiences would actually make.
Could we,
or parents,
predict how a child would do in school
from what the parent was doing
when the child was 2 years old?
Fortune provided us
with Dale Walker,
who recruited 29 of the 42 families
to participate in a study
of their children’s school performance
in the third grade,
when the children were nine
to 10 years old.
We were awestruck
at how well our measures of accomplishments
at age 3 predicted measures
of language skill at age 9-10.
From our preschool data
we had been confident
that the rate of vocabulary growth
would predict later performance in school;
we saw that it did.
For the 29 children
observed when they were 1-2 years old,
the rate of vocabulary growth at age 3
was strongly associated
with scores at age 9-10
on both
the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised
(PPVT-R)
of receptive vocabulary
(r = .58)
and the Test of Language Development-2:
Intermediate
(TOLD)
(r = .74)
and its subtests
(listening,
speaking,
semantics,
syntax).
Vocabulary use at age 3
was equally predictive of measures
of language skill at age 9-10.
Vocabulary use at age 3 was strongly associated
with scores on both the PPVT-R
(r = .57)
and the TOLD
(r = .72).
Vocabulary use at age 3
was also strongly associated
with reading comprehension scores on the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills
(CTBS/U)
(r = .56).
The 30 Million Word Gap By Age 3
All
parent-child research is based
on the assumption that the data
(laboratory or field)
reflect what people typically do.
In most studies,
there are as many reasons
that<