Tackling Income Inequality Could Boost Children ’s Vocabulary

By Emily Reynolds In 1995, a seminal book was published suggesting that children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds were exposed to 30 million fewer words than richer children by the age of 4 — the so-called “word gap”. The idea is now widespread and has informed early childhood policy in the United States (though the findings are more contentious than this ubiquity might suggest). But why might these kids be exposed to fewer words? A new study from a team at the University of California, Berkeley, finds that worries about financial insecurity reduced the amount that caregivers spoke to their small children, suggesting that these concerns themselves could be at least partly responsible for the word gap. Participants were 84 caregivers and their three year old children. First, a caregiver and their child were seated across from each other at a table, and while the child completed an unrelated experiment with a researcher, caregivers were placed into one of two conditions. In the scarcity condition, caregivers were asked to reflect on three or four times in the past week when they didn’t have enough of something or when resources were scarce, writing a brief reflection about two of those experiences. In the control condition, caregivers wrote about two things they had done in the last week. When the caregiver had completed the survey, they were left alone with their child and a shape sorting puzzle which allowed, but didn’t obligate, th...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Developmental Language Money Source Type: blogs