In their study on language development during early childhood, Risley and Hart observed 1 and 2 years old learning to talk for a period of 2 and a half years from 42 families of different socioeconomic status'. They were interested in building on earlier observations of language disparity found in children. Data from this study showed that a parent's SES had a direct influence on how their children's language skills developed, the higher the SES, the more language the child was able to acquire while the opposite was true for parents and children with lower SES.
None of the findings from this study were new or surprising to me. It's not shocking that inequality breeds unfavorable results for vulnerable children and adults and that without intervention this cycle can continue from one generation to the next. However, it did leave me with a lot of unanswered questions about the children and parents studied. Hutchinson (2015) states that children from lower SES are more susceptible to growing up in environments that present risks to healthy early childhood development. These risks include violence, divorce, abuse, and ineffective discipline. None of these risk factors were discussed as additional reasons as to why there could be a drop off in language among the children with lower SES. Hart and Risley also neglected to explore if there were any cultural reasons as to why some children were spoken to less or acquired less vocabulary despite the focus being on children born in the U.S. Hutchinson (2015) names social support as protective factor against disruptions in early childhood. While reading I found myself wondering if the parents with higher SES were also placing their children in environments that provided additional support that enhanced language. Consistent support in the form of going to the library, museum, park, daycare or nanny. This also lead me to wondering how much, if any, extra social support the parents with lower SES were able to provide their children with. I also thought about social support in their being other siblings in the house that the children being studied could be learning from as well and if that played a factor since Hart and Risley did not go into detail about the configurations and dynamics present in these families. Risley and Hart also failed to quantify on average how much one on one time these parents were able to spend with their children. For parents living in poverty activities like play or reading to their child can seem like a luxury and could have happened inconsistently despite Hutchsion (2015) and the video on children and play explaining how important play is to a child's development.
Student 2. Emma Wilde
This study had several limitations, the first of which being the way that it gathered possible participants . There were personal connections involved in terms of who was brought into the study, which could create bias (Hart & Risley, 2003). Those creating the study also pre selected the other participants which, again, might cause them to have preconceived notions about the people they chose to be in the study (Hart & Risley, 2003). At worst, they may have chosen people for the study for the purpose of finding a particular outcome. Additionally, they were in the spaces of the participants of the study whenever they were observing them (Hart & Risley, 2003). This could certainly create a different atmosphere for those involved in the study than there would normally be if they were simply doing what they might be in their own home on a regular day. This data would then skew results. The researchers also seemed to be coming from a deficits based approach rather than a strengths based one. The researchers seemed not to look closely enough into the cultures of the people involved in the study and why that might cause them to differ from each other.
Despite the limitations of the study, there is still information that may be gleaned from it. It seems that children’s exposure to language from an early age, and the knowledge that their parents have, has a direct inpact on the number of words that they learn (Hart & Risley, 2003). It is the environment that they children are exposed to that seemed to have a direct impact on the children in the study. Children modeled their parents both in terms of speech and behavior (Hart & Risley, 2003). The children’s achievements in language extended from when they were learning to speak until well into middle childhood (Hart & Risley, 2003). The ramifications of early childhood education were seen in these children and lasted until much later. Children who were middle or upper class learned both more words over time and higher quality words as well as being exposed to more positive and reinforcing language than their peers of lower socioeconomic status (Hart & Risley, 2003). Learning with positive language could certainly cause children to be more open and likely to want to explore with language and play than they might be otherwise. It would be useful to know what the researchers mean by “positive” and “negative” language.