Income and the ‘word gap’
Studies show a link between family wealth, children’s vocabulary and future academic success
Two decades ago, a pair of American academics discovered something they named the “Early Catastrophe.”
The discovery was made by tape recording the conversations of 42 Kansas City families.
The catastrophe? That children in richer households were exposed to a whopping 30 million more words by age 3 than their low-income counterparts.
The disparity didn’t disappear in the classroom. Following up seven years later, the report’s authors said they were “awestruck” at how this initial measure of development predicted later academic performance.
It was a call for swift action: tackle the “word gap” early and give poorer children a better chance of success in school and the workplace.
Now, the question of language and inequality is at the centre of new research efforts by doctors and speech pathologists in Toronto.
South of the border, the city of Providence, R.I., is already tackling the issue with a program that snagged a $5-million grand prize from the prestigious Bloomberg Mayor’s Challenge. It’s called Providence Talks, and instead of clunky tape recordings, it uses a new digital technology called LENA to work with low-income homes.
The LENA device, about the size of an iPod, is essentially a word pedometer. It tracks when kids are actually conversing with their parents and can filter out background speech and electronic noise from TVs and other gadgets. Outreach workers help interpret the results for the families and provide them strategies to improve communication.
In a city with a large immigrant population, where two-thirds of children are entering the school system with literacy below the national benchmarks, manager Caitlin Molina says the program is making a difference. Preliminary evidence from the pilot, rolled out in 2013, shows families with low word counts have seen a 50-per-cent jump.
When the full-blown program is implemented this spring, Molina believes it will help break the poverty cycle for low-income kids.
“We’re really giving them the best opportunity to be successful.” Around the same time as professors Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley were publishing their findings on the 30-million word gap, speech pathol- ogist Dr. Alice Eriks-Brophy was conducting doctoral research in Quebec’s far north.
As she watched children transition from Inuit-taught schools to ones taught mainly by white teachers, she noticed many youth were suddenly being referred for potential speech and language problems.
But instead of disorders, Eriks-Brophy mostly found discomfort. In a new classroom setting focused on individual performance rather than the collaborative approach they were used to, many students felt alienated. For some, silence was the safer option.
“It was a complete mismatch in what skills were valued,” she recalls.
That realization inspired two projects recently launched by Eriks-Brophy, now an associate professor at the University of Toronto’s department of speech pathology, and PhD candidate Hillary Ganek.
Like the Providence initiative, the researchers are making use of LENA technology. But they’re aiming to recruit Toronto-based families of varied backgrounds, to expand the scope of the discussion beyond just income level.
They also want to look at the influence of culture in how parents talk to their kids. It will be the first time LENA has been used to explore the topic. While both acknowledge income level plays a role in children’s development, Eriks-Brophy and Ganek say framing the issue as a “gap” might be the wrong approach.
Ultimately, they hope their research will help speech pathologists and schools be more responsive to cultural variations in language learning, which Eriks-Brophy argues often gives minority children their own unique set of skills.
“It’s not necessarily the case that it’s a (word) deficit or there’s a problem. It’s a difference. And that has to be acknowledged as well.” When Dr. Ripudaman S. Minhas treats families in the city’s low-income Regent Park neighbourhood, he asks some unusual questions.
In addition to inquiring about kids’ allergies and immunizations, he wants to know how many books parents have at home. He wants to know if they have a library card, and how much they sing to their children.
“The idea of this 30-million word gap really rings true,” he says. “Because it’s something that we see every day.”
Minhas’s medical interest in words is an approach endorsed by the country’s top children’s health body. Although there is no specifically Canadian research on the effects of the “word gap,” the Canadian Paediatric Society calls low literacy a “severe and pervasive” national problem.
New programs, such as St. Michael’s Hospital’s Reach Out and Read initiative are taking this to heart. Minhas, a developmental pediatrician affiliated with the hospital, is now also embarking on research into how inner-city families can be supported in creating “linguistically rich” homes.
According to Minhas, an initiative like Providence Talks could be useful in Toronto.
But like Eriks-Brophy, he says the focus on income and word count is too narrow and risks being overly prescriptive to parents.
“I think 30 million as a stat is a great start, to try and get us having these sorts of conversations,” he says. “But it is going to be a balance of both quantity and quality (of words), in terms of having long-term development changes.”
However, the relationship between words and poverty is compelling enough for doctors to be thinking about it in their everyday practice, he says.
“We do see that having a healthcare provider counsel around this, just how to build reading into your daily routine, does have an impact,” he argues.
“It’s that initial investment of time, in changing how we deliver these visits and this care — and the environment itself — that makes the difference.”