THE WORD GAP: 30,000, 000

30,000,000. That is how many fewer words children born into low-income or impoverished families will hear by the time of their third birthday as compared to their peers of higher socioeconomic status. In a 1995 study conducted by Betty Hart and Todd Risley, titled “The Early Catastrophe,” they studied the dinner conversations of 42 families, ranging in race, education, and socioeconomic status, for one hour, every month, for two and a half years. Their findings would launch what has been dubbed the “word gap” from the apathy of education research and policy and into public consciousness.

The “word gap” has since found support in neuroscience research (85% of a child’s brain develops in the first three years of life); been affirmed by several subsequent studies (with other estimates of the contested size of the gap); become the subject of many community initiatives (continue reading for more information); stimulated political attention (The Clinton Foundation’s Too Small to Fail initiative and former President Barack Obama’s plead to #CloseTheWordGap); and has even found its way into mainstream pop-culture (in the colorfully poignant words of Yael Stone’s Orange is the New Black character Lorna Morello, “There’s all these studies that say that if you don’t talk to the baby they end up, like, f**ked up by the time they’re five.”

Mrs. Morello hit the nail on the head with this one. It has been proven that children who fall victim to the word gap enter schooling with “severe delays in language processing, speech production, and vocabulary.” This is most concerning as it maps an exacerbation of the word gap to the reading gap, (one disproportionately affecting students of color, ELL’s, Students with Disabilities, and students with Free or Reduced-Price Lunch). The critical 3rd grade reading gap has been touted as the biggest predictor of future success. In fact, one in six children who are not reading proficiently in third grade do not graduate from high school on time.

When considering the word gap alongside Read Across America Day, which commen

By Matthew Romano

ced in 2003 as a commemoration of Dr. Seuss’ birthday and celebration of the joys and benefits of reading, the two form an almost oxymoronic clash that epitomizes the struggle over the seeming unbridgeable word gap and the transformative power of literature and language, even and especially in the earliest ages. But reading and being read to is just one part of the equation. To conclude that the solution is simply reading would be a fallacious un

derestimation of the gravity of the situation. Since socioeconomic inequality does not exist in a vacuum, neither does the word gap. It is reasonable then that there exists no panacea to be found for this population of our youngest minds. Rather, this chronic pandemic in early education and child development requires a multifaceted approach with early intervention at all levels of society, from parents to politicians.

Parents:

Parents are undeniably one of the most crucial cogs in a, yet to be perfected, wheel rolling towards a world without a word gap. The frequency, tone, quality, complexity, and length of a parent and child’s interactions are a primary determinant of the child’s future success. With this fact in mind, here are a few practices and approaches that parents can make to engage their young child in conversation. (Some are taken from The New Yorker’s Margaret Talbot’s inspirational article “The Talking Cure,” while others are based on anecdote and experience.)

Narrate activities: Everyday activities like cooking, cleaning, shopping, traveling, etc. can be narrated to young children through word or song.

Hit the first serve: In other words, provoke response from your child, even if it is incoherent, through questioning, repeating, counting, or Simon-Says & Monkey-See-Monkey-Do. Babbling, laughing, and even silent gesturing are all crucial to the speech development process.

Read to your child: Kelsie McGrath, a senior Education student at CCNY, recalls listening to audio tapes, sounding out words, manual finger-pointing, high pitch sounds, intonation, questioning, and physical response, as part of her earliest experiences with reading and being read to by her mother, (who also happened to be a teacher).

Unfortunately, these practices are often extremely challenging, if not entirely unattainable, for the parents of the students who need it the most. Parents living below the poverty line often have to work multiple jobs just to provide basic needs for their children; they have to then cook dinner, eat, clean, bathe their children, and get them to bed on time. This grueling mundanity is what leads Richard Weissbourd to suggest, “Maybe what we have to do is come in and bring dinner and help with laundry and free up a parent to engage in more play with their child.”

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