Twenty Years After "Meaningful Differences," It'S Time To Reframe The "Deficit" Debate About The Importance Of Children'S Early Language Experience

Fifty years of research have documented a sobering reality: There are substantial differences among parents in how they engage and communicate with their children, and these differences impact the development of a child’s language and cognitive skills. Studies initiated during the War on Poverty first explored how parents’ verbal engagement with young children varied among families differing in education and income, or socioeconomic status (SES) [e.g. Bee, Van Egeren, Pytkowicz Streissguth, Nyman, u0026 Leckie, 1969; Hess u0026 Shipman, 1965; Schachter, 1979]. In their 1995 monograph Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children , Betty Hart and Todd Risley were the first to document huge disparities in the sheer amount of language that caregivers in different families directed to young children. Although they found substantial variability in child-directed speech within as well as between SES groups, the differences between children in advantaged and disadvantaged families were surprisingly large. They also found that those children who did not have the benefits of rich verbal engagement early in life were more likely to be behind in cognitive and language skills in kindergarten and elementary school. Hart and Risley’s [1995] discovery of a 30-million-word gap in language to children from higherand lower-SES backgrounds over the first three years of life is now widely cited in the popular press as well as in academic journals. But for more than a decade, this powerful study was essentially ignored. In the 1960s, claims that some learning difficulties in children from disadvantaged families could be linked to inadequate cognitive stimulation at home came to be known as the “cultural deficit” model [Riessman, 1962]. A fierce backlash emerged in the 1970s, rejecting this view as unsubstantiated by scientific evidence and as deeply disrespectful of minority parents in poverty whose use of language with children was grounded in cultural traditions of parenting different from those in more affluent mainstream families [Fernald u0026 Weisleder, 2011]. Consistent with these criticisms, a dominant view in the field of language acquisition through the 1990s was that focusing on SES differences in speech