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 Reading improvement articles since that time.

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.

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THE EARLY CATASTROPHE

THE 30 MILLION-WORD GAP BY AGE 3

 

BETTY HART AND TODD R. RISLEY

 

Families’
Language and Use Differ Across Income Groups

 

 

 

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).

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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 Kansas City, Kans.,
we used our experience
with clinical language intervention
to design a half-day program
for the Turner House Preschool,
located in the impoverished
Juniper Gardens area

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 University of Kansas

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,
we asked the parents
to complete a vocabulary pretest.

At the first observation each parent was asked
to complete a form abstracted

from the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test
(PPVT).

We gave each parent a list of 46 vocabulary words

and a series of pictures
(four options per vocabulary word)
and asked the parent
to write beside each word the number

of the picture that corresponded
to the written word.

Parent performance on the test

was highly correlated
with years of education
(r = .57).

b Parent utterances and different words

were averaged over 13-36 months of child age.

Child utterances and different words

were averaged
for the four observations

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<