Poverty is bad for people and it is particularly bad for children. There is a large body of research documenting the negative effect of poverty on children’s physical, socio-emotional, and cognitive development. The focus of this seminar is on how poverty affects children’s linguistic development. In recent years, research on poverty and language has focused on the “word gap,” the oft-cited observation from Hart and Risley (1995) that by age 3, children growing up in poverty have been exposed to 30 million fewer words than their peers growing up in upper-middle class families. This word gap has been shown to be directly related to smaller vocabularies and slower rates of vocabulary growth. The word gap is now considered a public health problem and a variety of interventions have been proposed to combat it. However, vocabulary acquisition is a very small part of language development more generally and there are many other interactions between language development and poverty that have received much less attention. The purpose of this seminar is to explore some of these other relationships between language and poverty. The purpose of this seminar is to explore some of these other relationships between language and poverty, especially as they relate to the complex relation among experience, cognitive development and the acquisition of grammar.

Course Offerings

    Fall 2018Instructor: Jan EdwardsView: Syllabus