Into the Minds of Babes by Lisa Guernsey

Author:Lisa Guernsey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2012-02-06T00:00:00+00:00

First, though, I needed to answer a few basic questions: Are vocabulary words really so important in the first place? Does a child’s vocabulary growth tell us anything other than the fact that the kid has a lot of big words in his head? Is it honestly helpful for children at age 2 and 3 to learn words that seem so far removed from their real life?

Yes, yes, and yes. Education experts say that a child’s level of vocabulary before entering school is a strong predictor of her academic performance years down the road. Learning to read can be hard enough. Learning to read while coming across words that you’ve never heard before—that’s even tougher. The same can be said about handling experiences even more basic than reading. Without a large reservoir of words to draw upon, it’s difficult to communicate needs, understand what a teacher is saying, and negotiate the politics of the playground.

The sad truth is that children with the most impoverished vocabularies typically come from the most impoverished families. Research has shown that low-income households are more likely to have children with smaller vocabularies, putting those children at a significant disadvantage before they step foot in school.2 Consequently, Head Start and other kindergarten-readiness programs make vocabulary enrichment a big part of their mission. But they can only do so much. First, these programs typically start at age 4. By then, children have already experienced two years of rapid language development. Somewhere around their second birthdays, children experience a dramatic vocabulary spurt. They can go from learning barely a word a week to ten new words a day. Steven Pinker, an evolutionary psychologist, put it this way: “If we divide language into somewhat arbitrary stages, like Syllable Babbling, Gibberish Babbling, One-Word Utterances and Two-Word Strings, the next stage would have to be called All Hell Breaks Loose.”3

That all-hell-breaks-loose moment is thrilling. It screams with potential, with the possibility that a child now has the power to absorb an infinite array of new words and use them to communicate. And it happens long before a child is enrolled in preschool. That is why what happens within a toddler’s home or daycare center—what is taught by parents, siblings, babysitters and, yes, the television—can have a huge impact on the words she learns.

In 1983, two developmental psychologists named Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley took on a monumental project that would shed new light on the home lives of very young children. For years, while working together at the University of Kansas, they had been running intervention programs at daycare centers, trying to make a lasting impact on children’s ability to learn. Time after time they were disappointed. They could raise vocabulary levels in preschool, but the increases were always temporary. The trajectory of growth would stall out, and the children’s school performance would eventually show up as well below average. They realized that they needed to observe what was happening when the kids were very small; they needed to get into their homes to figure out what was holding the children back.

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