Let's Stop Talking About The '30 Million Word Gap'
Anya Kamenetz,
NPR,
Jun 01, 2018
A number of years ago the government ran a series of ads saying, basically, "talk to your baby". But it isn't the number of words that's important, noe indeed is it clear that there was ever a 'gap' in the number of words some babies hear. If there is a gap, it's much smaller than was reported, and it isn't clear at all that it is correlated with income. But as the article notes, "the 'word gap' has become a kind of code word. We can say 'vocabulary.' We're not going to say 'poor' and we're not going to use 'race' but it's still a marker." That's not to say that talking to your children is unimportant. It is. " the sheer volume of conversation directed at children, not just spoken in their presence, is fundamental to language learning and later success in school.
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