Expanding vocabulary, poor children--all about words. . .

The number of words spoken to children early on in life make a world of difference!


Here's a quote from this report on an amazing research project:

But in the end, the finding that most struck people, Hart says, was not about the quality of the speech — how often rich versus poor parents asked questions or positively affirmed their children — but about the quantity.


According to their research, the average child in a welfare home heard about 600 words an hour while a child in a professional home heard 2,100.


"Children in professional families are talked to three times as much as the average child in a welfare family," Hart says.


And that adds up. Hart and Risley estimated that by the age of 4, children of professional parents had heard on average 48 million words addressed to them while children in poor welfare families had heard only 13 million.

Spend a bit more time here and isten to the less than 6 minute report from NPR: