What is the 30 Million word project?
The Thirty Million Words (TMW) initiative, directed by Dr. Dana Suskind, is an innovative, evidence-based intervention program designed to help narrow the language gap between children from lower-income families and those in wealthier households.
Is the 30 million word gap real?
In the 1990s, researchers Betty Hart and Todd Risley studied families from different socioeconomic levels and found that their children were exposed to vastly different numbers of words in their formative years—specifically, 32 million more words for higher-income children than for lower-income children.
What did the research for the 30 million word gap suggest?
The 30 million-word gap was originally developed by researchers Betty Hart and Todd Risley and suggests that children up to age 4 from a lower socioeconomic status heard 30 million fewer words than children from a higher socioeconomic status.
What did the Hart and Risley study reveal?
Hart and Risley [1995] found that families with higher incomes and education tend to talk more with their children than do those from lower SES levels, but they also found that some working-class families talked with their children as much as professionals, and some affluent families talked as little as those in …
How is the 30 million word gap related to poverty?
The finding that children living in poverty hear fewer than a third of the words heard by children from higher-income families has significant implications in the long run. When extrapolated to the words heard by a child within the first four years of their life these results reveal a 30 million word difference.
Which of these is a problem with the idea of a 30 million word gap?
New Questions About the Research But critics of the 30 Million Word Gap warn that the study’s sample of families was far too small to sustain the movement it spawned. They point to issues like the fact that only 29 of the initial 42 families were tracked as their children entered elementary school.
Who does the 30 million word gap effect?
What is the word gap argument?
The word gap argument advocates for getting poor parents and teachers of poor children to speak more words to babies and young children so that they will be academically successful.