The Atlantic – Alia Wong
Forty-five million. That’s how many words a typical child in a white-collar family will hear before age 4. The number is striking, not because it’s a lot of words for such a small human—the vast majority of a person’s neural connections, after all, are formed by age 3—but because of how it stacks up against a poor kid’s exposure to vocabulary. By the time she’s 4, a child on welfare might only have heard 13 million words. This disparity is well-documented. It’s the subject of myriad news stories and government programs, as well as the Clinton Foundation’s “Too Small to Fail” initiative, all of which send the message that low-income parents should talk and read to their children more. But these efforts to close the “word gap” often overlook a fundamental problem. In high-poverty neighborhoods, books—the very things that could supply so many of those 30 million-plus words—are hard to come by. In many poor homes, they’re nonexistent.”(more)