One study found that a college professor's kids hear an average of 2,150 words per hour in the first years of life. Working-class children hear 1,250 and those in welfare families only 620.Ok. Questions? This 'data' is going to be used to argue something...but what exactly?
From the Economist.
First of all I did not read the economist article but only the context for the quote.
One commenter on Mankiw's site said:
The insinuation that children ultimately benefit from this is belied by adoption studies.Another:
Read Judith Rich Harris's The Nurture Assumption, where she addresses this example. An alternative hypothesis to the implicit one presented (read to kids and they become smarter) is that the kids inherit a genetic advantage in verbosity. Adoptions studies show very little correlation between the IQ of families and non-biological children, whereas identical twins raised apart have very similar verbal skills.My Response: Clearly the above to comments show there is perhaps more research to be done.
Harris's bottom line: parents can't do nearly as much as they would like to make their kids super smart: there's nonlinear aspect to childrearing.
Another:
if you actually watch the way kids learn language, you'll see why it doesn't make a difference whether parents use 600 or 6000 words per hour, in either case it's way more than enough.My Response: The data and the assumed assertion has nothing to do with learning the language in the limited functional sense of first language native fluency. Rather, it most likely might be assumed that such a phenomenon might be an instrument in the development of intelligence.
Another interesting comment was:
Those taciturn Swedish farmers on the Minnesota prairie must not have been raising their chillens' properly, or something.My Response: the comment does not truly say anything against the assertion from the data.
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Trying to find more about the article I put the quote into Google. There were a number of interesting items:
What’s Holding Black Kids Back?, by
The difference between middle-class and low-income child rearing has been captured at its starkest—and most unsettling—by Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley in their 1995 book Meaningful Differences. As War on Poverty foot soldiers with a special interest in language development, Hart and Risley were troubled by the mediocre results of the curriculum they had helped design at the Turner House Preschool in a poor black Kansas City neighborhood. Comparing their subjects with those at a lab school for the children of University of Kansas professors, Hart and Risley found to their dismay that not only did the university kids know more words than the Turner kids, but they learned faster. The gap between upper- and lower-income kids, they concluded, “seemed unalterable by intervention by the time the children were 4 years old.”Trying to understand why, their team set out to observe parents and children in their homes doing the things they ordinarily did—hanging out, talking, eating dinner, watching television. The results were mind-boggling: in the first years of life, the average number of words heard per hour was 2,150 for professors’ kids, 1,250 for working-class children, and 620 for children in welfare families.Another interesting remark from that article was:
how do you shape children into citizens in a democratic polity and self-disciplined, self-reliant, skilled workers in a complex economy? It didn’t take all that much solicitude to prepare kids to survive in traditional, agricultural societies. That’s not the case when it comes to training them to prosper in an individualistic, commercial, self-governing republic.I only skimmed the article but it probably merits a closer inspection.
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Marriage and Caste in America: Separate and Unequal Families in a Post-Marital Age by Kay S. Hymowitz is a post by Mike Ralls in Mike's Book Notes, that is a very detailed review by page of the above noted author's book.
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Successful Kids Are Talked-To Kids is a Seattle Times article by Carey Quan Gelernter from April 27, 1997. This was a very interesting article, worth reading. It more fully describes the study and the findings referenced in the quote. From the article:
And:By measuring vocabulary growth, because it is strongly associated with rates of intellectual development, they found that by age 4, patterns of growth were already established and intractable.
Loathe to conclude the explanation could be simply heredity, they decided to track the growth rates to their source: what was happening in children's homes, at the very beginning of their vocabulary growth.
For 2 1/2 years, they regularly visited and monitored each word spoken to the child in a chosen group of professional, working-class and welfare families.
When the children were in third grade, their school performance was measured and compared against the amount of language they'd heard before they were 3. Socioeconomic status was an important predictor of which children were doing better in school. But by far the biggest predictor was how much the children were talked to before age 3 - and this was independent of socioeconomic status, and of race.Now, this part is very compelling:
But by far the biggest predictor was how much the children were talked to before age 3 - and this was independent of socioeconomic status, and of race.Now, that is an interesting correlation. Referencing the adoption studies cited in the comments above, it would be enlightening to see comparisons with adoption studies that focus on how much children were talked to before age three to see the results with genetics factored out. That is because it could be that those parents that talk a lot were those possessing greater intelligence and so simply passed on those genes to their kids. Another track would be to study results of experiments where welfare children were talked to a lot before age three. That is, to look at the results of Early Head Start programs mentioned in the article.
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Lost Script, by Mike Metzger of the Clapham Institute, adds something interesting after mentioning the study:
But children of single mothers on welfare hear their mother use only 620 words per hour, according to Ms. Hymowitz. These children find it particularly difficult to thrive in a knowledge-based society. They rarely learn the art of conversation. And conversation, Thomas Aquinas once wrote, is what constitutes civilization.Supposedly, I cannot find the source, Thomas Aquinas wrote: "civilization is constituted by conversation."
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The study mentioned in the quote was one performed by and referenced in the 1995 book, Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children, by Betty Hart and Todd Risley.
The Early Catastrophe: The 30 Million Word Gap by Age 3 is an article by the two of them that summaries their study as well as offering this tidbit:
Vocabulary use at age 3 was equally predictive of measures of language skill at age 9-10.Also: There is an expansive interview with Dr. Todd Risley here.
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