ABOVE: The degree of turn-taking in conversation with adults, not the volume of words, drives the development of children’s language skills, a new study suggests.
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In 1995, child psychologists Betty Hart and Todd Risley reported that by age three, children in higher-socio-economic-status households had heard 30 million more words than their counter-parts in lower-socioeconomic-status homes. This so-called word gap has often been invoked to explain why children in the former category tend to display better language skills and perform better in school compared to those from underprivileged homes—with effects that reverberate throughout their lives.
“Language is implicated in school achievement, social emotional growth, in health outcomes [and] in job outcomes when you’re a grown-up,” says Roberta Golinkoff, who leads the Child’s Play, Learning, and Development laboratory at the University of Delaware. “Language predicts all these.”
But researchers have struggled to gain a mechanistic understanding of this phenomenon. “What ...
