072: Is the 30 Million Word Gap Real: Part II

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We want our children to have the best chance to live fulfilling lives, but can you keep up with all the books and scientific research on parenting, and fit the information into your own philosophy on how to raise kids? Welcome to Your Parenting Mojo, the podcast that does the work for you by investigating and examining respectful research-based parenting tools to help kids thrive. Now welcome your host, Jen Lumanlan.

Hello, and welcome to today's episode of the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. regular listeners might recall that we recently did an episode on the 30-million-word gap, which at a high level is the idea that middle-class parents talk so much more to their children on a daily basis than poor parents do that this accumulates to a gap of 30 million words by the time the children are four years old. Our first episode on this topic was an interview with Dr. Doug Sperry, who had just produced a paper calling into question the basic premise of the 30-million-word gap. Now back at the very beginning of the show, I'd interviewed Dr. Roberta Golinkoff on the topic of her book Becoming Brilliant, which I really do recommend to parents all the time to learn more about the types of skills our children will need in the future and how to support the development of those skills. And I should note that you won't need a set of flashcards for any of them. These are not things your child memorized or the you must didactically teach. So Dr. Golinkoff and I have stayed in touch over the last couple of years. And when she heard that I was going to be interviewing Dr. Sperry, she asked to come back on the show to present a different side to the story. So we're going to do that today. And I'm going to be even more forward than I usually am and proving her point of view because I kind of consider us to be professional friends at this point. And I think is the best way to help us understand these issues. Because I really think there are two things that we want to get out in this episode. One is about the best way to support children of low socioeconomic status to succeed. And the other is about how we kind of have a habit of putting science up on a pedestal and thinking that science will tell us the answer. And Dr. Sperry and Dr. Golinkoff we have two researchers who both want what's best for children, but who see that topic in very different ways. And there's kind of a funny story behind this episode. Dr. Golinkoff was actually in town a few weeks ago. And we made arrangements for her to come to my house so that we could record our episode in person. So when she got here, we spent a while chatting about child development and life and other things. And then we did a little test of the microphones just to make sure they were working fine, which they were when I tested on that morning. And then when I listened to the test, I found a whole lot of fuzz on the recording. So thank goodness, I did that test. So I hastily downloaded another recording app, and I did another test and it had the same problem. So I figured it was the microphones that clipped onto our shirts. That was the issue and I didn't have a solution for that. So we actually ended up recording the episode over Skype with me in my living room and Dr. Golinkoff sitting on my daughter's bed with the blinds drawn trying to muffle the noise of the leaf blower from the neighbor's yard across the street. It was sort of funny but kind of stressful in the moment. So I'll give you her intro now. And then you'll kind of hear us just launch into the conversation. So to formally introduce her for those of you who didn't meet her the last time we talked Dr. Golinkoff is the Unidel H. Rodney Sharp Professor of Education, Psychological and Brain Sciences, and Linguistics and Cognitive Science at the University of Delaware, and the director of the Child's Play Learning and Development Laboratory. Her awards are too numerous to mention here. And she's also found time to write over 150 journal publications and book chapters as well as 16 books and monographs. Many of these are Dr. Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, her long-standing collaborator. So I'm going to say now welcome to the show, and then we're just going to get right into it. All right, so let's assume that most of my listeners are of the loyal variety. And they've already heard the interview that I did with Dr. Sperry, so they're pretty familiar with the 30 million word gap idea. But they're really not steeped in this stuff like you are and I am perhaps to a lesser extent, I wonder if you could give us a very brief two-minute overview of the original Hart and Risley study on which the idea of a 30 million word gap is based just to refresh our memories.

Okay. And so before we get too deep into this, I'd like to be really crystal clear that I understand your position on 30 million word gap, can you tell us about what your research and the research of your colleagues, and what that tells you about the 30 million word gap?

So it doesn't matter if it's 30 million, if it's 25 million, or if it's 20 million, what we're talking about is the fact that when parents talk to children, they're not just using words, they're not just passing time, they're answering children's questions. They’re telling them how that door works. They're telling them how this clock works. They're explaining things to them. And the position that I take based on what's out there in the psychological literature, is that addressing children directly, is really important, because it follows up on what they are interested in, and meets them exactly where they are when they want to learn something about the world. So if you don't have a parent who is exceptionally responsive to you, and it's another issue, why your parent might not be that's a totally separate thing. We know from the research that children come to school less prepared than they might be. And I don't only mean with respect to their academic capabilities, I mean, importantly, with respect to their executive function and self-regulation, that is their ability to inhibit impulses, like the kid next to them ticks them off, do they just reach over and give them a bop on their head? Or do they use their language, as parents often say to kids use your words, and when they get practicing doing that at home, they're better qualified to do the kinds of things that schools want them to do that feed into their achievements. So it's not just about the three R's. It's also about the self-regulation, executive control, children need to engage in to be able to profit from what's happening around them in school.

Okay. And so to be specifically clear on this, I think it's there's a particular point of disagreement between you and Dr. Sperry and his colleagues who believe that overhearing language is not potentially the best way for a child to learn. But it is a way that children can learn language. And your contention is that that is not the case. Is that right?

No, no children around the world learn language, we know that there are vastly different ways in which children are treated around the language. For example, Eli Ochs who's out here in California, has studied oh, now the name of the group is going to escape me, perhaps the Samoans I can't remember, I'm sorry. And that group finds that it is low status to engage directly with a child. So they hope to give the child to another sibling to take care of. Those children learn language, just as our pampered White middle-class children do. However, however, they are preparing for two very different worlds. Just as spiders spin webs, humans learn language, and can do so under a wide range of circumstances, whether they grow up in a hovel, in a hut, or in a skyscraper, the best vast majority of children will learn language. So the question of the nature of the input is less important for learning language, per se. However, children in Western societies are going into schools that have recently upped the ante. I met a family the other day here in California. And I asked a little boy what grade he was going into who said first I said, You know what happens in first grade. It's so exciting, you're going to learn to read. And the mother said, no teaching kindergarten just now how to read. So this is the way it is. Around the country, children are not given a chance to pick up on the environment and figure out what matters and what kinds of things they need to talk about. They are launched immediately into reading, and many of them are not even ready. So these kids who are growing up in Samoa or wherever Eli Ochs does her research, are not being trained to respond in Western schools. Now, I know there are a difference between the big differences between schools in Western countries. In the United States however, the emphasis is on early and heavy academic involvement. Now many of us in the field, do not support that, and would wish that schools would have a strong pedagogy, allied with a playful learning approach so that kids have fun while they're doing it. But unfortunately, there are many schools that are engaging in drill and kill. And even for a playful learning pedagogy approach, children need to arrive at school, knowing things. And if we don't talk to them directly, they won't learn as many things as they need to learn.

No, no, no, no. But but you're underestimating how often testing is occurring and when. In kindergarten, according to the Alliance for childhood that looked at 100+ schools in New York and 100+ schools in Los Angeles, children was spending some enormous percentage of their school day preparing for testing. And they were tested multiple times a month, not just you know, once a month in first grade. Yes, I have to change that study, Jen. So there's a tremendous amount of test preparation going on. I couldn't agree more that children need to be in an environment where they can discover what they like, what they're interested in, what they want to learn about and where learning can be exciting and fun. There's nothing that says learning takes place best with drill and kill. In fact, the research I have done with my long-term colleague, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek indicates that learning that takes place by drill and kill does not stick to the same degree that playful learning sticks. So I want to change everything. I want to have an education revolution and make children have fun in school and excite them because we have so many problems in our society that we will need children who learn what we call the six C's in our latest book Becoming Brilliant, and that is collaboration. Everyone works in groups today. Communication, which includes not just speaking, but listening, that lost art, and writing and being able to be persuasive content. Of course, children must have content, the three R's and arts and social studies and science of course, of course, critical thinking, because information is coming at us at the rate of something like 80 newspapers a day. I mean, it's insane how much information is coming at us. Creative innovation, creative innovation only works when you have critical thinking because you know what things need to change and where the gaps are, so that you can innovate. And finally, confidence, the ability to stick with it, persistence, grit, as well as to learn from your mistakes, and keep growing. These are the kinds of qualities that we want our children to have. But again, it's not only about their working life, although we all want our children to succeed to their full potential. It's about their personal life, too. If you haven't learned to communicate about your feelings, and to speak directly and persuasively to your partner, you're going to be in trouble. I don't care what kind of partner you have. It's so important to learn these skills to know how to negotiate, to know how to collaborate to do things together, it isn't all about the job. 50% of life is the job, whatever that is people choose to do. And 50% is the personal side. And what we want to do is develop children who have these capabilities to attain their full potential in both these areas doesn't mean you're not going to hit roadblocks. Everybody hits roadblocks, we know that.

Okay, so this might seem like a little bit of a non sequitur, but I just want to give another quote from your paper and kind of bring it back to what you were just saying. You talk about how the characteristics of speech directed to young children differ from adult-directed speech, content, per cues, grammatical complexity and so on. Many social cues that accompany speech to children helps them to map words to the world. Just because children can exploit these cues under some circumstances does not mean that leveraging the richer set of cues that accompany child-directed speech would not make the process more efficient. And so to tie that back to what you were just saying, I was very curious that you use that word efficient. Because you are used extensively elsewhere for the value of play, even though didactic teaching would potentially be more efficient at getting a child to retain something so they can pass the test. So what is it about language that makes it different from other subjects that we might choose to have our child learn about through play? And is it just so that they're ready for these standardized tests in kindergarten?

Oh, my God, I have so many associations, Jen, I don't know where to begin. The first thing that I know I'll lose the other points. The first thing is with respect to efficiency. Let me just say this in plain language, you’re teacher and you got these little dumb kids in front of you, right? You think what is the most effective way to impart information, I'm just gonna tell them, it turns out, just telling them does not stick. And that's not what makes for kids who love learning, and who can take what they have learned in the context of the classroom and apply it outside when they had similar situations. So efficiency for what happens in the classroom is bogus. You can teach somebody something in a short amount of time, but whether they can use it, and whether they can really understand it is a whole separate question. The other thing that you said, which got me going was infant-directed and child-directed speech. Let's talk about that a little bit versus overheard speech. So Jen, if I spoke to you the way I talked to my little grandchild, you would have me committed. Hi Jen. How are you today? What did you do in school? Notice the huge changes in intonation, the much higher frequency or pitch, and how I dragged out my bowels. Now, when children are 18 months and younger, this is what they find appealing, interesting, attractive, and attention-getting. And there has been work by your very own Anne Fernald, who's at Stanford, going back to the 80s, showing that children pay most attention to the way we talk to babies, as opposed to the way we talk to adults. When we talk to babies that way, we're giving them several messages. One, this is for you, baby, wake up, listen. And the other thing we do is we smile. And we have exaggerated facial expressions. Research by Janet Werker at the University of British Columbia showed babies prefer to look at faces even for languages they don't know and with the sound turned off faces that are giving direct speech to babies, infant-directed speech, baby talk, rather than looking at faces that where the person is speaking to another adult. So we know baby talk is a very seductive stimulus to children. Overheard speech, on the other hand, is another half, it's the way we talk to each other. We have many false starts and stops. We talk about topics like death and taxes. We're not much caring whether the child understands the illusions that were making, or whether they were present at that party we went to Saturday night, you know, we are not setting up the context for the baby when we are speaking to another adult because we wouldn't be in a relationship we'd be committed. You know, like, when you have a baby with you say things like, look at the cup, if you did that to your spouse, your spouse, right? So there are these special adjustments that we seem to use in many Western societies, when we address babies and young children. And these are very important for children, and they are more likely to learn when we speak to them this way. So one thing was telling them when we speak this way, that's why there's nothing wrong with baby talk, let's get that clear. One thing we're telling them is that this is for you. Another thing we're telling them is that boy, we really value interacting with you. And that's why we must turn our cell phones off. Because when we use our cell phone in the middle of an interaction, we break that social contract we have with our child. And a third thing we're telling them is, hey, pay attention because I'm going to tell you something interesting. I might point to that bird on the pole, I might talk about the airplane in the sky, you're going to learn new things about the world. And the research tells us that babies actually seek out information about the world. So when I have a conversation with my spouse, I am not making all the kinds of adjustments that I do when I speak to my young child or my baby. Now I have to add this is not just Roberta Golinkoff’s opinion of whether infant-directed speech or baby talk or child directed speech spoken to young kids is good versus adult-directed speech. When I'm telling you these things I'm speaking from 20 years of research, that tells us that babies are able to learn things about language when they hear child-directed speech that they can't learn when they adult-directed speech. So one quick example is a study we did in my lab with Weiyi Ma, who is now at the University of Arkansas. We came up with new objects that we videoed and either we had the person say I can't remember the names we use. This is a Glor versus this is a Lala whatever. And we show these objects to the babies and either we offer them adult-directed speech or we offer them baby talk. Children at 21 months of age, learn the names of these objects better when they heard baby talk, and when they heard adult-directed speech. So this is a big study for us because it shows that this is not the only one that that babies can learn things about language from baby talk, that they don't learn when it's adult-directed speech. But it's even worse than that because with adult-directed speech, it's two people interacting with each other. And the baby's just hanging around watching. And when you're doing baby talk, remember I talked about how the facial expressions that you use is so much more dynamic and exciting, and you’re really getting the child's focus, and you're really getting the child's attention on your face and your mouth. And we know from the work of David Lewkowicz that babies watch mouths. Bilingual babies watch mouths for longer. And what they're learning is how the sounds are formed. And then they can duplicate that on their own. Babies are brilliant, but we don't give them a cannon fodder they need to learn language when it's speech between adults. In the lab, there have been some studies on speech between adults and what kids can learn. But it's presented in such an isolated way. And everything is control. Everything that might be going on in the house, there's no television, is no sibling banging. So when we tell children, this is for you, we’re really helping the child focus in on us and on our mouths. Now, everybody's gonna say, oh, come on, babies can learn from overheard speech, you know, think about those curse words that kids? Yes. And my children, you know, especially the first one before we realized how sensitive he was and how he was picking everything up, learn things like the name of their parent, some children will prefer to call their parent by the name that they hear the spouse, call the parent, right? You've all heard of kids who use the parent’s first name.

Oh yeah, my daughter’s pretty good at busting out, and Oh, Alvin, at the right moment.

So they'll learn that, and they'll also learn those curse words. Why? Because those words are often ordered, with great emotion. So if something bad happens, and I yell, dammit. That's why when we went for our parent-teacher conference for my son, who's out here in California when he was three or four, it was all I could do not to crack up. Because they said, you know, that when he gets frustrated, he yells, dammit. And it's because those words are hard uttered with great salience and emotion, so they stick out. But when we have children, two and a half and under, and we want to have them learn language and learn about the world, we can count on them pulling out the kinds of information they want to know, from overheard speech between adults because adults don't talk about the stuff that kids care about. They couldn’t give a darn about politics, right? That's what we're talking about.

Okay, well, I want to make a confession. And then I'd like to ask a question about cultural issue. So I have read in the last year or two about the research on the fact that babies do prefer what they call mother ease, that they exaggerated way of speaking to babies, that goes so far against my personality that I just couldn't bring myself to do it. So I never used that with my daughter. And actually, interestingly, I mostly follow an approach to child development called RIE resources for infant educators. And it has a lot of different aspects related to treating your child with respect, one of which is speaking with your child in normal voice is both respectful and encourages their development. And I think it's fairly safe to say at this point that that is only actually the one principle of RIE that I have not been able to find scientific evidence to support and actually it seems based on what you're saying and what I have read that the evidence goes against that particular principle. But I find it interesting that I basically disregarded that research and my daughter seems to be coming out okay, so.

So, I've heard this before. I'm not doubting your veracity, Jen. I did. Try to find an undergraduate In my lab would like to do an honest thesis on mothers and fathers because fathers do infant-directed speech too. That's why mother ease isn't a good name for it, I want to make up a questionnaire Oh, you're reminding me to get back to it, I want to make up a questionnaire where the mother says, among a series of questions that she does not approve of, nor has she ever used infant-directed speech. And then I want to record, but notes to the parent will, this is not a secret, we record the interaction between the mother and the child. And we record the interaction between the mother and one of our students, and compare them systematically on a program called a spectrogram, which allows us to measure different aspects of speech and represent them on paper. You could actually see a corresponds to the frequencies of speech. So my bet is that even parents who claim that they don't use infant-directed speech, will in fact, be adjusting their pitch and going up when they talk to their kids. And we'll also be dragging out their vowels as in do you want the car? So I'm not saying you know, you're making it up. But I firmly believe that it's very difficult not to use infant-directed speech when directing a little bundle of flesh that melts you.

I'm not easily meltable. But I'll take the point.

Well, you know, that's part of, it's part of the same way that we feel when we speak to someone we love. It doesn't just have to be the baby. And as we know, there are many people who use special words and special intonation, especially at the beginning of a relationship when they interact with a lover.

And then 10 years is a whole lot different.

Yeah. Yeah.

Okay, so to my cultural question, I read a lot of work by Dr. Barbara Rogoff, and I was preparing for this episode. And I want to quote from a paper of hers where she actually starts by quoting Dr. Martha Ward, who studied African American children in Louisiana. And so Dr. Ward says the silent absorption and community life the participation in the daily commercial rituals, and the hours spent apparently overhearing adults conversation should not be underestimated in their impact on a child's language growth. And then Dr. Rogoff goes on to say small children in that community were not conversational partners with adults, people with whom to “engage in dialogue”, they were not encouraged to learn skills in initiating and monopolizing conversation with adults on topics of their own choosing schools that are useful in middle-class schooling. They held their parents’ attention longer if they said nothing”, and I know that Dr. Shirley Brice Heath has found very similar circumstances in her study of African Americans and North Carolina Piedmont, where parents just thought it was silly that how White people would ask their children a question to which the parent already knows the answer. And so my question to you is, is it possible that overheard speech makes a relatively larger contribution to the language of one of the major populations that you're trying to reach with the so-called language gap interventions, and that there are two problems with this? Firstly, you're trying to get parents to interact with their children in a way that's culturally very different from what they're accustomed to. And secondly, that the real problem here is that our education system really privileges one kind of learning and communicating over other kinds, when actually it should be helping all children learn how to communicate and value the knowledge and methods of communication that they bring to the table.

This is another very small question.

Yeah, sorry. I'm good at those.

So the first thing I want to tell you is, I had lunch today with a colleague from Berkeley. So why is this relevant? Because we would both love to see universal preschool, let alone places where working parents could bring their infants as many do now. But these places would be constructed along sound principles of child development. I've seen too many daycare centers where children are literally parked on masks in front of the tube and in which there are far fewer manipulable things than they should have. That is not to say one needs to go to the other end. My grandchildren have more toys than you can shake a stick at. And there are two extremes here. And we know the best place is somewhere in the middle. And wouldn't it be wonderful because we know what to do to promote children's development if our government, like other Western countries could get behind, providing the best kind of preschool and care environments for children that exist, that would go as the research suggests, to us a long way, in helping children learn the things they need to learn to go to school. I love Barbara Rogoff. I love the research that she does. I think it's really important. And for several reasons. First, it tells us that there's more than one way absolutely no question. And second, it tells us that in more traditional societies, children don't need to be brought into the conversation at every moment, that they can learn things by overhearing the speech of other peers, let's not forget that their peers speak in shorter and more high pitched sentences, which may serve the function that baby talk serves here. And that those children will become gainful members of their society, in our society, where children are expected to go to school, to pay attention, and to learn. Children need to have more than just observational ability with language, they need to be able to discuss, to talk about, to explain, to know something about the structure of stories narrative. So if we want all children to succeed, and of course, remember, I want an education revolution. I'm not saying we keep the status quo in the schools, and I'm always militating against making children sit. Peck I wrote the book Einstein never use flashcards, right? Just absorb like passive, like black is potato pancakes. I'm not looking for that. I want children to be agents of their own learning, however, even to be agents of their own learning, in schools in the United States, they will need to be engaged in self-control, and to know some of the kinds of things that they're expected to know when they get to school. So there are papers that tell us that children who have better language are better able to engage in that self-control, probably because they have words, they can talk themselves down, and they may have little mantras that are embedded in their little brains, like use your words, which I must have heard six times since I'm here visiting my grandchildren, use your words, don't flip out, use your words, right. So while children around the world learn language, remember just a spider spin webs. It's all a function of the kind of society we're preparing them for. That being said, I am uncomfortable with the gap.

Yeah, okay. So you've preempted my question then.

Yeah. So, you know, it's kind of pejorative. And it suggests that low-income families who make come from a different cultural tradition, are not doing right by their kids and has a finger-pointing quality.

Yeah. If only they would do things more like we would, then their children would be better off.

Right? I strongly value the kind of oral storytelling tradition Shirley Brice Heath and others have talked about. That goes on in African American communities, for example, I think that's wonderful. But children also need to be responded to and talk to in terms of things that are of interest to them. Now, it doesn't mean that we have to take a class on parenting, it doesn't mean we have to get a PhD. It just means when you see your child looking at something, you talk about it. And there are various interventions that are available now, which have attempted to help parents including one conducted in Africa that is designed to help parents help their kids do well by helping build their children's language. Now, again, the gap is a bad word, but from research I've done and others have done, we find that not middle income, but low-income children are substantially behind their middle and upper-income peers in the amount of language they know and how they can leverage this language for their self-control and for their academic achievement. You have a recent paper published by Amy Pace, who's now at the University of Washington, Seattle, that shows that the single best predictor of academic achievement of all types, Math, Science, reading, is language as measured in kindergarten, and how it relates to achievement in the third grade. And even in the fifth grade. These are data you can push under the rug. In America, if you want your children to do well in school, granted, the schools are not to be held up as paragons of evidence-based institution. Granted, we have to help our children develop the kinds of language they will need. There is no parent who does not want their child to exceed them, right? Everybody wants their kid to do better than them. And how do we make that happen? If we can find ways without being teacher preachy, without pointing the finger, just by illuminating parents’ views about what it takes for kids to do well in school, then we win. And we have created, for example, an intervention with a group in Philadelphia called the maternity care coalition that goes into homes. And we worked closely with their advocates. That's the name they use for the people from the community who would the trainer to go into the homes. And what we did was we came up with five little videos of waste to communicate what's in it for the parent, when you speak more with your child, and help your child make choices, like do you want the juice? Or do you want the milk, little things like that reduce the child's ability or the child's tendency, I should say, to have meltdowns, when you give your kid choices. So we work closely with these advocates to develop this program. And in fact, the advocates learn tons and they're members of the community, and the people that they served, learn tons about some of the simple things cost-free that we can do and talking with our children, to help them learn about the world and what's expected of them.

Okay. So there are things that parents can do there, if they want to do them that are not necessarily difficult to do. But I want to talk a little bit about what actually happens in schools. And so I have a couple a couple of ways to get at this. The first is a story that we've actually mentioned before. It's again, it comes from James Paul Gee’s work. And I describe the story actually told the whole story in our episode on why storytelling is so important for our children. And it was originally told by the seven-year-old African American Girl, he just calls her Elle. So if you miss the story, you might want to go back and listen to it. But the long the short of it is that I could not make head nor tail of the story. And then he goes ahead and does this 14 Page literary analysis of all the sophisticated tools she had using she was using when she was telling it. And then he says, and yet Elle’s story was not at all well received by her teacher, she was interrupted at the end by questions. Sure, the teacher didn't understand it, she was told to sit down the teacher having felt her story to be incoherent. It was inconsistent, disconnected, rambling, she was eventually sent on the basis of stories like these to the school psychologists were thus faced with two questions. First, how could a seven-year-old produce such a remarkable narrative? And second, how could she in producing it have nonetheless failed? And I don't want to put myself on a pedestal here. And imagine that if I was that teacher, I would have handled it any differently at all. So, so what this getting to says to me is that the teaching force being predominantly White, middle-class women in this country, is it possible that it's not the student’s skills that we necessarily need to bolster immediately, but that children from different cultures come to school with really rich abilities, and that the school needs to get better at understanding these and integrating them so that all children then become able to use these tools in a way that supports their academic outcomes.

You only asked these questions that have 78 parts, Jen. And I will do my best. The first thing that occurs to me is the work of William Labov, at the University of Pennsylvania, who back in the seven days challenged this view that African American children who spoke dialect, or speaking garbage, because that's what many people thought, and some still do. And what he documented was that Black children, and I cannot say Black children, I must say Black lower-income children, it's not all Black children could tell stories that got to the point and that are clearer than the kind of rambling that middle-class children did. But even more importantly, he showed and subsequent research has confirmed that African American dialect just like Appalachian dialect, just but like the dialect spoken in Texas, is rule-governed. It's not random. It's not bastardizing the language, it's following rules. And kids have learned these rules from the speakers with whom they interact. So one thing I teach in a school of education, and when I teach undergraduates, I literally stand on a table or chair when I get to this because I say to them, you will have children in your class who speak in a dialect, if you do not recognize that the dialect they speak is just as valuable and just as logical and just as rule-governed as the English that you speak, you will make your charges feel bad. And I'm afraid that unless students of teaching are told these things early on, and told them again and again, they may not recognize when they're hearing a child speak in any dialect, that that dialect is to be respected. Now, that doesn't mean that children should be taught in that dialect. If it's a minority dialect, and if the child wants to succeed in a largely majority world, then they should be exposed to English as the newscasters speak on television. I hate to use as sometimes in found in the literature, the term Standard English, because that implies anything that isn’t standard English is non-standard. I don't like that. I don't like that. Okay, so one very important thing for teacher candidates to learn is that when children speak a dialect, they have extracted the rules of that dialect, just as the child who speaks in an English that you don't recognize as a dialect but probably is, has also extracted those rules. But that children can be encouraged to read materials that are not appearing in the dialect and can be spoken to without the dialect and can learn to speak English in the more way that newscasters do as well. So that's one factor. I really wish we could have the education revolution tomorrow. But surely, yeah, short of that, we have to, as we argue, in Becoming Brilliant, we have to think of ways that we can help our children in the 80% of the time that they spend outside of school, they only spend 20%, of their waking hours in school. So parents have a lot of opportunity to inculcate their children with their cultural values and help them become steeped in the stories of their particular culture and group. In addition to what they learn in school, but asked me more, Jen, there may be threads I have omitted.

I guess, I want to sort of move on a little bit and talk about another aspect of how this manifests itself in schools. And when I was preparing for this episode, I was emailing with a listener and I'll just call her Kelsey and she's an African American woman. And she said that she remembered during a test in elementary school on the Beatrix Potter book, Peter Cottontail. And the teacher asked what color Peter’s trousers were and so she grew up in a predominantly White neighborhood and most of our classmates had somehow learned the fact that English people will call pants trousers, probably because they'd had the book read to them at home and they had said what are trousers and the parents said pants. So Kelsey had never heard this word trousers before. So she asked her teacher for help. And the teacher looked at her like she was an idiot. And she told Kelsey to just do her best. And of course, it was a trick question because Peter wasn't wearing pants. And Kelsey knew this because she had memorized the entire outfit. And so when the teacher asked for the answer out loud, later in the day, everyone except Kelsey, and there's one other kid in the class yelled, that Peter wasn't wearing trousers. And the teacher looks at Kelsey and asked everyone what trousers are and the whole class except for Kelsey and the other kid yell, pants. And then the teacher gives a short speech about how some children in the class need to work on their vocabulary. Yeah, and so I was when she told me this, I was just so angry. And so what we asked ourselves is, what did Kelsey learn from this experience? Certainly, she is never going to forget what trousers are. But she also learned some lessons about power and about trickery and how it's perfectly possible to know the answer to a question and not be able to express it because the question is worded in such a way that it's really hard for somebody who hasn't had Peter Cottontail read to them before to answer it. And so probably she stepped back a little bit from engaging with that teacher, and maybe her learning suffered a bit. And she told me now she tries to make up for it by reading voraciously because she never wants to get that caught out feeling again. And so I'm so worried that talking about this word gap, as we've sort of been describing it, we've already said that that's not necessarily the best term to use. But it represents a deficit and abilities and it leads us to, well, then you'd better learn more vocabulary, or you're never going to make it in the world. How do we overcome this?

I am. I'm feeling hurt.

Yeah, me. I was too.

For Kelsey, and you know, teachers are humans. They put their pants on one leg at a time.

Or they’re childish.

So this is why it's important for us in schools of education. And I think that the University of Delaware, where I'm housed, actually does a pretty good job. It's important for us to talk about these issues, and to help teachers of the future to understand the value of other dialects and the links that they make to other subcultures within the United States. And it's also important for teacher candidates to understand how to answer children's questions directly, and not make them feel small. And I would beat that teacher if I could, but it's a little late. Because clearly, this has had a tremendous effect on Kelsey. And the way she talks about feeling caught out I can really identify with when a person in authority does this to you and acts like you're an idiot, it's painful.

Yeah. No matter who you are,

Yes, of course, and it takes a long time to get over. So we have to teach our children to ask questions directly. Like to say, I'm sorry, but could you please repeat that? I'm sorry, but I don't know what the word trousers means. Now, sometimes with young children, it sounds like she's a little because Peter Rabbit is not a story for the seventh grade.

Wait, no, she's pretty young.

Right? And so children are not sufficiently aware of what it is they know. And they don't know, to ask the key question. However, a perceptive adult can recognize that the rest of the words in that sentence a likely words that the child knows. So maybe it's trousers, and one would hope that in student teaching, and in spending time in classrooms, teachers are honing these abilities. There are many super-duper teachers out there. And every now and then even one of them will make a mistake of this nature. But to me, it's very important to encourage children to ask questions. And I worry that Kelsey was discouraged from answering questions when she had questions again, because the teacher’s response, so made her feel small. So that's a big concern for me that teacher candidates understand how to interact with children and not to use sarcasm, but to answer their questions and to try to discern what it is they don't understand. And it's a skill. It's something we can learn. It's malleable. Even as adults with kids, we do that, right? We asked our toddler like my daughter-in-law told me she said she must have asked her toddler 27 times what he meant. And she finally could not understand. She said, oh, okay, but she really tried. And that helps kids.

Yeah. Okay. What nugget of wisdom would you like to leave us with?

Oh, that's a real high-pressure question. Sorry, nugget of wisdom nugget of wisdom. So I also wrote the book How Babies Talk. And I think virtually every chapter of that book, and it was organized chronologically from fetuses, through age three, included some exhortation to parents to talk with their kids. If overheard speech was effective for children. Think about the fact that we could turn on the tube, and kids could be plopped in front of it to learn language.

That’s a bit different, though, isn't it? Overheard speech from the TV versus from real people.

I would like to know why it's different on television, people have conversations. And adults have conversations in the real world where they're not always holding the objects they're talking about.

Yeah. Yeah. So as an example, my neighbor came over and he was saying he had fired his gardener. We're talking about the garden. And he's saying as far he had fired his gardener. And so my daughter was she came to the door with me, she was listening. And then afterwards, she came back into the living room with me. And she said, Mama, why did he say fired? Because she has been learning about wildfires, because a lot of them here in California. And so she couldn't understand why he had fired. Right? And so with that interaction, she was able to have a question and ask me, whereas if you're watching the TV, you don't get that opportunity, right?

Absolutely. Now, remember, your child is four, two, so she could nail what it was that was disturbing to her. I mean, I hate to think what she thought he did to his gardener. When kids are really little, they can do that. And when parents have a conversation, you know, somebody even studied, a woman named Dare Baldwin at the University of Oregon, looked at how much of parents language was about the here and now that is the stuff that's in front of kids, and how much was about stuff that was going to take place in the future, stuff that took place in the past. It's about 70%, she concluded, and that's even around children and speaking to children. So that 30% where we’re speaking directly to our children about what they're interested in, is absolutely crucial. Now, when two adults are talking to each other, they are likely using all 100% of that time to talk about events that are not visible, within the child's per view, and that are quite abstract. So this does not help children learn language. If I could say one more thing about the importance of talking with children and not at them. I would urge parents to think about putting their phone in a drawer at least 10 minutes a day,

Only 10 minutes a day?

Well, I want to be realistic because no one will pay any attention to me if I do with the American Academy of Pediatrics, by the way, based on no evidence that no trial and detention ever go near television. So realistically, if parents could devote a consistent amount of time each day to interacting with their children, without looking at their phone, it would reduce the parent’s stress and would help the child form an important bond with the parent. I had a conversation before I came to you, Jen, with somebody for Men's Health magazine, who wanted to know in particular about why it's so hard to turn off the cell phone when you’re with the kid and it is sometimes difficult because just like cell phones are candy for kids, they’re candy for us. Yeah. But that doesn't mean that we aren't having an impact on our children and what they're going to become. They're going to be rude adults if they see us be rude and We break up our interaction with them. This is from research that we just did in a way that hampers young children's learning. So what we did was, we brought families into the lab, typically a mother and a child, the child was two and a half. And we asked the mother to teach two words, two new words to the trial. And we tell all the mothers that we're going to call them on a cell phone we give them to see how things are going. And then we call half the mothers halfway through the first word. And we call that the mothers at the end of the first word. When we call in the middle, not only does the child not learn that word, but the child doesn't learn the next word. Think about what your face does, when you get a phone call, you may be all animated and talking to your kid. And when the phone call come to face goes flat, you switch out of infant-directed or child-directed language. And you say hello, and you sound very flat, or can be deceptive. But that's what happened. So the kid, it's like, you've broken the social contract with the trial that you were interacting with. When we call that the end of the episode, then the child learned both words. So we really impede our children's ability to take in the information we're offering. And after all, we are their first teachers. If we are interacting with them while interacting with our phone, it's very important for our kids to believe that we are their most important focus. And I wish parents would use their cell for some short period of time less when they're with their kid, so they could have real back and forth in real conversation, and just sit on the floor and describe what the child is doing to play. That's the first step.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay, I think that there's probably going to be an episode on that topic in our future. So we want to get far into that research. Thank you so much for coming out to visit me today and bearing with me through all the technical problems that we had.

This was great fun, and I'm always happy to talk to your audience because I feel like this is a way for me to get the research out and for people to know which things are evidence-based and which things are myths.

Yeah. Okay.

So thank you.

Thank you so listeners can find the first interview in this series with Dr. Sperry at yourparentingmojo.com/word gap, and all the references for today's episode can be found at yourparenting mojo.com/wordgapconsequences.

Thanks for joining us on this episode of Your Parenting Mojo. Please subscribe rate and review the show on iTunes and sign up for our mailing list at yourparentingmojo.com to receive a free gift: Seven relationship-based strategies to support your children's development while making parenting just a little bit easier on you. For more respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive, we'll see you next time on Your Parenting Mojo.