critiques of parent word-count studies?

[Susan M. ERVIN-TRIPP]

The earlier work on this by Hart and Risley 1992 and by Walker 1994
followed parent speech and child
speech in a variety of families, and found that higher vocabulary and MLU
were related to speech to children,
especially constructive involvement such as asking questions, repeating or
expanding the child's utterance and encouraging rather than prohibiting
exploration. That was the highest predictor.Also related: amount of verbal
exchange with children, use of many different words, accommodation by
taking turns and accommodating one's own MLU. In an experimental study,
Camaoni and Longobardi had mothers interrupt by overlapping, ignoring the
child's topic initiations, Those who did this delayed the development of
vocabulary and fluency four months later. The opposite, reformulating,
expanding paraphrasing etc. accelerated linguistic development.
These studies also showed correlates with SES. Notice these are not about
content or structure (except prohibitions are content), but they had strong
effects on school performance such as reading scores and IQ measures. And
these studies were in US and Italy.They were not done by linguists hence
not about structure.


On Sun, Apr 28, 2013 at 7:27 PM, galey modan <gmodan at gmail.com> wrote:

> I recently read the NY Times opinion piece, linked below, about studies
> showing that the number of words parents say to their children in a given
> time period is linked to socioeconomic class and is a predictor of future
> academic success. Although I'm not a language acquisition specialist, these
> seem like bizarre and linguistically un-sound studies (at least from the NY
> Times piece, it seems like all they're doing is counting words, rather than
> looking at any content or structure.) Does anyone know of any recent
> linguistic/ ling anth critiques of this kind of work, other than the
> somewhat related Ochs and Heath?
>
> thanks,
>
> Galey Modan
>