Mind the Gap

Mind the Gap

I was sitting with two of my little friends reading a fable called “The King and His Gold.” In this story, a greedy king is crossing a river with a big bag of gold in his hands. He looks down and sees another king with a big bag of gold and thinks, “If only I had his gold, I would be doubly rich!” He reaches for the other king’s gold and drops his bag into the river. As the gold disappears, so does the other king, who was only his own reflection. The moral of the story is “It is foolish to be greedy.”

Both my little friends enjoyed and understood the story, but when I asked them some questions, I noticed a difference in how they responded.

When I asked the first little girl if there really was a king in the river, she said “No, it was him.” When I asked the second the same question, she responded “No, it was just the king’s reflection.” Both understood the story, but the second used more precise words to answer. This held true for all of the other questions I asked.

Researchers have found a “vocabulary gap” between children from upper socioeconomic status (SES) homes and children from lower socioeconomic status homes. One study showed that, at the age of three, children of college-educated parents had much larger vocabularies than the children of less-educated parents. On average, the children of high-SES parents hear 382 words an hour, while children raised in lower SES homes hear 215 fewer an hour. In a month, that meant a difference of about 20,000 words (assuming 4 hours a day of interaction). That’s a lot of words.

Not only do these children hear more words, they also hear more different words. Since their parents have larger vocabularies and are more likely to use more complete syntax (the structure of sentences), their children will be more likely to know more words and know how to use them to communicate. Studies have also shown that parents in higher SES groups are more likely to use gestures to punctuate speech. Pointing to objects and illustrating meaning with gestures help young children build meaning.

This “vocabulary gap” once established is hard to rectify. This gap may be evident as early as 18 months -- putting lower SES children at a disadvantage from preschool through high school. Vocabulary is a key predictor for school success. Children who begin school with smaller vocabularies may never catch up. 

So what’s to be done? Obviously, parents need to talk with their children -- and to one another. Parents are models for language usage. Start early!  Engage your infants in conversation. Read to them. Get a library card. (Librarians hold story hours for children as young as two.) Make reading together a daily routine. Help other children too --volunteering to read with young children helps the children build their vocabularies and is a lot of fun to boot!

So share your words. Talk to the children you know. Sing with them. Read to them. That king with the bag of gold might as well have had a bag full of words. If he had shared them with that other king, both would have been richer.

The moral holds: it is never good to be greedy.