Show notes
You all know that on the show we pretty much steer clear of the clickbait articles that try to convince you that something is wrong with your child, in favor of getting a balanced view of the overall body of literature on a topic. But every once in a while a study comes along and I think “we really MUST learn more about that, even though it muddies the water a bit and leads us more toward confusion than a clear picture.” This is one of those studies. We’ll learn about the original Hart & Risley study that identified the “30 Million Word Gap” that so much policy has been based on since then, and what are the holes in that research (e.g. did you know that SIX African American families on welfare in that study are used as proxies for all poor families in the U.S., only 25% of whom are African American?). Then, Dr. Doug Sperry will tell us about his research, which leads him to believe that overheard language can also make a meaningful contribution to children’s vocabulary development. I do want to be 100% clear on one point: Dr. Sperry says very clearly that he believes parents speaking with children is important for their development; just that overheard language can contribute as well. And this is not Dr. Sperry out on his own criticizing research that everyone else agrees with: if you’re interested, there are a host of other issues listed here. The overarching problem, of course, is that our school system is so inflexible that linguistic skills – even really incredible ones of the type we discussed in our recent episode on storytelling – have no place in the classroom if they don’t mesh with the way that White, middle-class families (and, by extension, teachers and students) communicate. But that will have to be an episode for another day. References Adair, J. K., Colegrove, K. S-S., & McManus, M. E. (2017). How the word gap argument negatively impacts young children of Latinx Immigrants’ conceptualizations of learning. Harvard Educational Review, 87(3), 309-334. Akhtar, N., & Gernsbacher, M.A. (2007). Joint attention and vocabulary development: A critical look. Language and Linguistic Compass 1(3), 195-207. Callanan, M., & Waxman, S. (2013). Commentary on special section: Deficit or difference? Interpreting diverse developmental paths. Developmental Psychology 49(1), 80-83. Dennett, D. (1995). Darwin’s dangerous idea: Evolution and the meaning of life. New York, NY: Touchstone. Dudley-Marling, C., & Lucas, K. (2009). Pathologizing the language and culture of poor children. Language Arts 86(5), 362-370. Gee, J.P. (1985). The narrativization of experience in the oral style. Journal of Education 167(1), 9-57. Genishi, C., & Dyson, A. H. (2009). Children, language, and literacy: Diverse learners in diverse times. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Hoff, E. (2013). Interpreting the early language trajectories of children from low-SES and language minority homes: Implications for closing achievement gaps. Developmental Psychology 49(1), 4-14. Johnson, E.J. (2015). Debunking the “language gap.” Journal for Multicultural Education 9(1), 42-50. Miller, P.J., & Sperry, D.E. (2012). Déjà vu: The continuing misrecognition of low-income children’s verbal abilities. In S.T. Fiske & H.R. Markus (Eds.), Facing social class: How societal rank influences interaction (pp.109-130). New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation. Sperry, D.E., Sperry, L.L., & Miller, P.J. (2018). Reexamining the verbal environments of children from different socioeconomic backgrounds. Child Development (Early online publication). Full article available at: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Peggy_Miller3/publication/324839950_Reexamining_the_Verbal_Environments_of_Children_From_Different_Socioeconomic_Backgrounds/links/5aec67fda6fdcc8508b77912/Reexamining-the-Verbal-Environments-of-Children-From-Different-Socioeconomic-Backgrounds.pdf Walker, D., Greenwood, C., Hart, B., & Carta, J. (1994). Prediction of school outcomes based on early language production and socioeconomic factors. Child Development 65(2), 606-621. Read Full Transcript Transcript Jen:[00:38] Hello and welcome to today’s episode of the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. I think today we’re going to blow a few holes in some classic research. You might have heard of what’s known as the 30 Million Word Gap, which at a high level is the idea that middle class parents talk so much more to their young children on a daily basis than poor parents do, and that this accumulates a gap of 30 million words by the time the children are four years old. So I took a brief look at this study a while back and I noticed that the researchers, Professor Betty Hart of the University of Kansas and Professor Todd Risley at the University of Alaska Anchorage, conflated a couple of important variables in the study, those of wealth and education, which is why I haven’t done an episode on it and whenever anyone asks me about it, I mentioned that the study’s results might be a little bit shaky, but I owe a debt of gratitude to listener Kim from Boston who has a PhD in Curriculum and Instruction and who works to support African American boys and developing literacy for sending me a research paper that describes a replication of the incredibly time consuming study that professors, Hart and Risley did back in the seventies and which came to rather different conclusions. I’m here today with Dr Douglas Sperry, who is Associate Professor of Psychology at St Mary of the woods college in Indiana who coauthored this paper with his wife and colleague, Dr Linda Sperry of Indiana State University and also Dr Peggy Miller of the University of Illinois. It isn’t often that we take the time to dig so deeply into a single paper on this show, but the original study has become such a part of how we think about what it means to be a good parent, so I’m delighted that Dr Barry is here with us today to really dig into these results. Welcome Dr Berry. Dr. Sperry: [02:12] Thank you very much for having me. I appreciate very much the opportunity to talk with you and your listeners. Jen: [02:18] Thank you. So for those listeners who have sort of heard of the 30 Million Word Gap and they kind of know it’s important to talk with their children, but they might not really know what the study is, could you please describe the parameters of the original Hart and Risley Study? Dr. Sperry: [02:31] Yes. The original study was a longitudinal investigation of 42 families, and they were divided by social class. Six of the families were in a welfare group. Twenty three of the families were in a group that Hart and Risley ended up calling the working class group, although there is mention of 10 of those families being middle class and 13 being working true working class, but they ended up combining them and that another top 13 families and children who were in the so called professional group, they undertook this study after really a decade or more of work and the Kansas City area around the University of Kansas. Betty Hart in particular had been working in the Turner House Preschool, which is part of the Turner housing project in Kansas City and she also had some of her university students working and the laboratory preschool at the University of Kansas itself. The Turner Housing Project and it’s preschool, was well. The preschool was entirely African American…composed of African American children. Dr. Sperry: [03:42] Whereas the laboratory preschool at the University of Kansas had all children of professors, as is quite common. Anyway with her work at the Turner House Preschool. She noticed that the vocabulary of African American children in that preschool was lagging considerably behind that of the professor’s children at the laboratory preschool. And so in the late sixties and early seventies, she began a series of other interventions expressly aimed at teaching the African American children at the Turner House, more vocabulary, and she noticed that that was quite successful and I should say I neglected to say the first intervention was just to get them to talk more and be more comfortable talking and she got them to talk more, but she still noticed that the vocabulary itself was lacking in the same diversity that the professors’ children had. So they had several other interventions, one of which was, for example, taking the children on various field trips to museums, etc. And still nothing seemed to increase the actual diversity or complexity of the vocabulary, even though the children were talking more. And to quote their 1995 monograph, she writes, the professors’ children simply seemed to know more about everything. so that provided then the impetus for her to begin and for, for her and Todd Risley to begin their very elaborate longitudinal study. Jen: [05:07] Okay. So what they’re basically saying is that they’re trying to reach children in preschool with these interventions and that they’re seeing that maybe they have an effect in the short term, but in the longer term they get washed out. Right? Dr. Sperry: [05:17] Right. And their conclusion was that they had to start in the homes and so they wanted to see exactly what was going on then in these, these different homes. So they began this very lengthy, protracted data collection. It’s still kind of a monument in terms of the amount of data they collected. And I have often stressed when talking about this report that although we’re, I’m sure going to get a chance to dig into some of the problems with the study. I don’t want to just be entirely critical of the study either because it was, it was a very important work and it has obviously fueled a lot of new research and information. But like any study it happens in a context. And the context of this study was the late seventies and the methods that we used in our study weren’t really current then in language acquisition studies. And so those were some of the issues that we’ve taken issue with. Jen:[06:12] So what are some of the contexts, what are some of the things that you saw as as not being really just done then that you that are more current practice now that you were able to incorporate? Dr. Sperry: [06:23] Let me actually correct a little bit. Something I said. We are psychologists. All three of us consider ourselves to be psychologist, but we don’t use relatively typical psychological methods. Our methods from anthropological studies and from our paradigm that we work within is called language socialization and using those methods we adopt them more ethnographic approach to data collection. And this, this represents, I think the first major point of difference between our data collection process and that of Hart and Risley and every case for our five communities that we describe in our recent study, each set of recordings of the actual children and their families. We’re only be gone after extensive field work of probably a year or more working in the communities. So when my wife and I were working in Alabama, for example, for over a year, one or the other of us observed in preschools we taught and the community education center that was entirely African American. Dr. Sperry: [07:22] We tutored children in various school subjects and also in giving them piano lessons and we tried to locate ourselves within the community. That obviously was particularly critical, we felt for the reason that we are European American and we were trying to study African American children in that particular case, but in all cases for our research, we do not try to be a fly on the wall and that’s pretty much what Hart and Risley encourage their families to do. And I think that’s more consistent even with current purely psychological inquiries into language acquisition. Researchers are trying to not be part of the scene. Owing a debt to anthropology, we realize that there’s never a point in time where we’re not going to be part of the scene as long as we’re there, we’re going to be noticed as observers and people are going to be taking us into account and so we make every opportunity then to try to become welcome guests in the environs and one particular difference I think that that may have impacted is that, for example, in the Hart and Risley is case their research, their data collection assistants were asked to not speak unless spoken to and that I think by contrast when we’re in a data collection process, obviously we speak when spoken to, but we also might speak at other times that a regular friendly visitor to your house might speak. Dr. Sperry: [08:54] We don’t in any way attempt to direct the activity of the observations. We try to let the family flow occur as it’s happening, but we don’t try to act as if we’re not there. I think that – well, we’ll never know obviously for sure, but our guests, our intuition is that that might have mostly affected. In particular Hart and Risley’s welfare group. These were six families who were living in the Turner Housing Projects. It was the seventies. The housing projects were not all that wonderful. We can only imagine that a research assistant coming in with a video camera and sitting there for an hour recording their child was very unfamiliar and possibly very uncomfortable for those families and… Jen: [09:40] Despite Hart and Risley’s claim that they essentially blended into the furniture, I think was the one of the phrases they used in one of their papers. Dr. Sperry: [09:47] Exactly, exactly and I don’t think it’s possible to blend into the furniture and we don’t know…Hart and Risley did have both European American and African American data collection assistants and they did try to pair African American assistants with African American families, but that’s not really the point for us, I mean, obviously, as I said, we are European American. We did a large study in an African American community. It’s more just a matter of are you familiar enough with the family and are they familiar enough with you that they can trust you to be doing your best? And I also then contrast how we can imagine the welfare mothers may have felt with how the professional families feel. I think many of your listeners are probably professionals and I think they probably share with me the idea that if I was asked and agreed to have somebody come in and record my children, I would so-called put on the dog when they came. I would, you know, be very talkative and I would be trying to put my child in the best possible light because I would know the data that were being collected Jen: [10:56] For sure. So how much of this data was collected and what kind of data do they analyze? Dr. Sperry: [11:03] In both cases, both their study and our study, we collected videotaping recordings, although probably for us it was easier because of the size of the machines involved in the seventies. They collected for the 42 children, 25 samples on average per child. So they began their data collection and when the children were 12 months of age and they concluded when they were 36 months and they had a total of 1,318 samples. Our data collection was not that extensive. We analyzed 150, seven and a half hours, I should say. They had 1318 hour-long samples. We have various ages, various amounts of sampling, for example, all of our communities were sampled longitudinally, but we analyzed 157 and a half hours total. Our communities…well, this is what’s called the corporate study. What we did, we did not set out to collect these data expressly to do a study that we just published. Dr. Sperry: [12:03] In fact most of the data were collected for our interest in the narrative development of young children. So the South Baltimore children were about 18 or 19 months when their data collection began. Both our Black Belt, Alabama group and the Jefferson Indiana group, were 24 months… The children are 24 months when the data collection began. And Then the two Chicago groups,...
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