Washington Post Opinion Editorial
Rethinking the "Language Gap"
Debates over the relationship between language, poverty, and school failure have been around
since the 1960s, resurfacing most recently in a widely publicized study led by Stanford
psychologist, Anne Fernald. Fernald argues that by the age of two, children from lower income
families demonstrate inferior language processing skills and lesser cognitive aptitude than those
from higher income families, primarily because poorer parents don’t talk to their children
properly. Research of this kind (known as “language gap” studies) is framed as a wellintentioned attempt to assist poor children to overcome linguistic and cognitive deficits.
However, both the premises and promises of these studies must be challenged because the
resulting misunderstandings of such claims spread like wild fire through the media, affecting
educational policy and negatively impacting the lives of millions of children.
The most commonly cited study in language gap research is Betty Hart and Todd Risley’s 1995
book, Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children. This
book reported that by the age of three, children from affluent households are exposed to
approximately 30 million more words than children from families on welfare, and that this “word
gap” is largely responsible for the low academic achievement of economically impoverished
students. This finding is flawed in a number of ways. First, a "linguistically stimulating
environment" cannot be measured simply by counting words. Secondly, linguistic and cognitive
competencies manifest in many forms not measured by this study. Finally, "school success"
does not exclusively depend on the supposedly superior linguistic and cognitive capacities that
result from early exposure to vocabulary-heavy environments; academic achievement is often
affected by host of economic factors (e.g., access to nutrition, health care, and tutoring) unrelated
to a child’s early exposure to particular linguistic environments.
Though agreeing that nothing is gained from exposing babies to mere word lists, Fernald still
insists that their brains will develop better “nets of meaning” if parents immerse their children in
“more and richer language.” According to her study, affluent parents appear to know how to do
this naturally while mothers from lower income households need to be taught how to improve
their language use. These findings rely on ethnocentric methods for testing children’s linguistic
and cognitive abilities, and do not consider other forms of linguistic, cognitive, and social
development that take place in low-income homes.
For decades, linguistic anthropologists and sociolinguists have been developing different
approaches to studying language acquisition and linguistic competence. Rather than comparing
and ranking children from diverse backgrounds using standardized linguistic criteria, we look at
how children develop "communicative competence." This perspective encompasses both the
knowledge of language as well as the knowledge of how to use language in culturally
appropriate ways within specific social settings. Just as communicative features (like turntaking, register, body language, questioning strategies, and vocabulary) vary widely across social
contexts and speech communities, the ways in which children acquire these features vary too.
Researchers like Shirley Brice Heath and Ana Celia Zentella have demonstrated that children in
non-affluent communities are engaged in socializing practices that support many alternative
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forms of constructive thinking and communicating which reflect the appropriate norms of
interaction demonstrated by members of their community.
Students from affluent households tend to succeed at school since the communicative practices
used by more affluent families mirror the ones expected in classrooms (i.e., not because they are
linguistically superior). Conversely, students from less affluent backgrounds tend to have
difficulties mastering classroom-based skills when they start school because they operate from
different, NOT inferior, cultural and linguistic schemas. Blaming academic failure on a lack of
early exposure to "words" glosses over the fact that schools are often insufficiently prepared to
recognize and build upon the strengths of students from diverse backgrounds. If teachers are not
adequately trained to integrate the aptitudes of all their students, less affluent students will
continue to struggle with the new language forms expected of them in a classroom setting.
The popular assumptions resulting from “language gap” research cause parents from less affluent
homes to appear incompetent and irresponsible for not pumping their children full of words and
bookish grammar (perpetuating the view that the linguistic and cognitive forms developed by
non-affluent children are of no value). This further influences the belief that school failure can
be resolved by teaching poor parents to expose their children to “more and richer language." The
root problem here is not a “word gap,” but an economic gap. Given that the United States has
the second highest child poverty rate among all industrialized countries (UNICEF, 2012), it is
imperative that we challenge mainstream approaches to educating children from low income
backgrounds. Unless educators are given the tools to identify, appreciate, and build upon the
language skills of linguistically diverse students, deficit orientations and academic
underachievement will continue to proliferate in public schools across the country.
800 words
Contributing Authors:
Eric J. Johnson, Ph.D., Washington State University Tri-Cities
Ana Celia Zentella, Ph.D., University of California San Diego
Kathleen C. Riley, Ph.D., Queens College, City University of New York
David Cassels Johnson, Ph.D., University of Iowa
Jonathan Rosa, Ph.D., University of Massachusetts Amherst
Sponsoring Organizations:
Society for Linguistic Anthropology/Language and Social Justice Committee
American Anthropological Association Committee for Human Rights
Send comments to Eric Johnson: ejj@tricity.wsu.edu
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