Research has long supported the idea that families with higher incomes and education levels talk more with their children and speak to them in complex sentences. A new study by psychologists at the University of Chicago indicates toddlers who use more physical gestures also have more developed vocabularies by the time they reach school age.
“We actually found extra gesturing in these high socio-economic status [SES] families,” Susan Goldin-Meadow, co-author on the study, tells the BBC. “Gesture and speech go hand-in-hand.”
The researchers studied 50 families from diverse economic backgrounds. They recorded video of children with their parent, or primary caregiver, for 90-minute sessions, during ordinary home activities. Fourteen-month-old children from high-income, well-educated families used gesture to convey an average of 24 different meanings during the 90-minute session. Meanwhile, children from lower-income families conveyed only 13.
Their study, in the journal Science, suggests gestures could play an indirect role in word learning by eliciting speech from parents. “For example, in response to her child’s point at the doll, mother might say, ‘Yes, that’s a doll,’ thus providing a word for the object that is the focus of the child’s attention,” they wrote.
(photos by veader and ellecer on Flickr)
Robert:
I would hardly consider the Hart and Risely study support for the statement that “research has long supported the idea that families with higher incomes and education levels talk more with their children…” The study is not bad science, but it is what it is–a fairly small study, with a very limited number of families, recruited in ways that ensure a certain amount of bias (families known to the researcher; families likely to be accessible over the timeframe of the study). The methodology examined patterns of speech in one hour observations of children in their homes with their parent.
The “welfare” group consisted of 7 families, 6 of whom were African American. SES for the other three groupings was determined by parent occupation. While there were African American’s included in all groups, the highest group included only one family (as the lowest group–welfare recipients) included only one white family. This tends to confound the SES findings with socio-cultural features. Heath in 1984 suggested that patterns of discourse with pre-school children have culturally determined markers–for instance whether the distribution of functions such as nurturance and child rearing. In some cultures, where nurturance is not narrowly defined as the role of the biological mother, it may be necessary to look at other interacters throughout the community for evidence of more complex discourse.
While it is hardly new (nor was it in 1984)–the discourse expectations of classrooms may differ from those experienced by non-mainstream children in their home cultures, leading to misinterpretation of expectations, or the inability to interact with adults in ways that meet their needs (linguistic or otherwise).
While I don’t want to discount Goldin-Meadow’s work (or that of Hart and Risely either), I am disturbed when I see the quick adoption of “truths” such as the language gap between upper and lower class children–when the research may not in fact be supporting that at all.
I’ve always suspected that Hart/Risley were on the right track, but that their findings were both 1) possibly contaminated by the fact that middle-class parents may be more likely to know what the researchers were expecting to find, and therefore to alter their behavior (the best study would be if you could secretly bug people’s houses); and 2) the extrapolations were rather absurd. They estimate that professional-class children would hear 45 million words at home in 4 years — which works out to 30,800 words per day, which would mean that professional parents would be speaking to their children at a rate of one word per second for 8.5 solid hours every day.
If that seems believable to you, then I’d like to sell you a television set.
Italian children must be geniuses.
Nah. Just their parents!