Book forty-three: Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experiences of Young American Children by Betty Hart and Todd Risley

This book is thorough* in its description of the study methods used to collect data on how children between the ages of one and three acquire language. Specifically, the study set out to learn more about the disparities in learning capabilities we see between children of welfare, working class, and professional families. In a nutshell, "the most important difference among families was in the amount of talking that went on." For instance, "simply in words heard, the average welfare child was having half as much experience per hour (616 words per hour) as the avery working-class child (1,251 words per hour) and less than one third that of the average child in a professional family (2,153 words per hour). The numbers are staggering when you multiply that by the waking hours in the day and then multiple that by several years, "exposure to 250,00 thousand utterances versus 4 million utterances." This, to me was the most stunning bit extrapolated from all the data collected: "For an intervention to keep an average welfare child's experience equal in amount to that of an average working-class child would require that the child be in substitute care comparable to the average in a professional home for 40 hours per week from birth onward."

26 down, plus 17.

*I swear I helped Darr fall asleep last night be reading him a passage.