The early years are fundamental in ensuring children grow up to be healthy, functioning adults (1-3). By the time children start school there is a clear social gradient in most areas of child health and development (4). The first five years of life, especially for children from disadvantaged backgrounds, are crucial in overcoming the intergenerational transmission of inequality, such that disadvantaged parents have disadvantaged children, who themselves go on to be disadvantaged adults (5).
Language ability is a critical developmental milestone that is directly related to later literacy, educational attainment and labor market experience. In the Australian context, results from the 2018 Australian Early Development Census, a triennial census of children’s development at age 5, showed that 6.6% of children were developmentally vulnerable on the language and cognitive skills domain and 8.2% were vulnerable on the communication skills and general knowledge domain (6). Both domains were socioeconomically patterned, with the highest levels of vulnerability amongst children from the most disadvantaged backgrounds. Poorer language skills have been shown to strongly predict poorer education outcomes in the mid and long term (3, 7).
Given socioeconomic inequalities in language development can be detected early and predict later outcomes, mechanisms for enhancing children’s development require further investigation. Currently, some evidence suggests that the amount of maternal language heard during the early years may mediate the association between social disadvantage and child language ability (8).
Numerous studies indicate that parents from more socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds engage in fewer verbal interactions with their children, compared to those from advantaged backgrounds (9-13). The most influential study of language spoken to the child in the home was that of Hart and Risley (1995) involving 42 families from Kansas, USA. From the age of 12 to 36 months, children of parents on welfare, working-class and professional backgrounds heard 620, 1250 and 2150 words per hour, respectively. Within group trends were linearly extrapolated to estimate that by the age of four, children from professional backgrounds heard over three times more than children from welfare families. Thus, the idea of the ‘30 million word gap’ came into being.
Despite the enormous attention the study has received (google hits = 58,800,000), there are clear limitations. First, the study uses a small convenience sample (n=42) and includes only six families on welfare. Second, the data collection method (researchers videotaping one hour per month in the home) is not likely to be representative of the natural home environment. For instance, while unbeknown to the authors at the time, it was later discovered that early evening, when videotaping usually occurred, is a period of extremely high talk for families (11). Finally, the study began collecting data when children were 12 months of age, neglecting critical language experience under twelve months.
Since the Hart and Risley study, new speech recognition technology called Language ENvironment Analysis (LENA) has become available to allow researchers to objectively measure the amount of parent talk children hear in the home, without the need for videotaping or manual transcription. Gilkerson and colleagues (11) utilized LENA to replicate the work of Hart and Risley with 329 English-speaking families in Denver, USA with children aged 2 to 48 months. Their socioeconomic groups were based on mother’s highest level of completed education, with education groups defined by completed some high school education, completed high school or general education diploma, completed some college and completed bachelor’s degree or higher. Their cross-sectional findings estimated a 4 million word gap by age four between the highest and lowest socioeconomic group, significantly smaller than Hart and Risley’s findings.
Another recent study involved 42 children aged 18 to 48 months from five communities across America with different levels of socioeconomic backgrounds (poor, working-class, middle-class) and like Hart and Risley, captured the number of words heard in the home through videotaping and transcription (14). The authors main finding showed no meaningful differences between the poor, working-class and middle-class communities in the number of words spoken by the primary caregiver to the child, with some poor and working-class communities showing an advantage in words spoken, compared with middle-class communities. They posit that community variation in the amount of speech addressed to the child cannot be predicted by socioeconomic status alone (15). This paper questioned the validity of the original Hart and Risley findings, provoking discussion around the importance of the original 30 million word gap hypothesis (15, 16).
The Language in Little Ones (LiLO) study is a prospective cohort study which aims to advance knowledge in this area by combining the use of the LENA software, recruiting a large socio-economically diverse sample, and beginning when children are six months old. Here we present findings from the first and second waves of data collection in the LiLO study when the children were aged six and twelve months, on the number of adult words spoken to the child, number of child vocalizations, and number of times the adult and child engage in a conversational turn over a day. Analyses examined whether these aspects of the early language home environment differed by maternal education.