Essay --

Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley conducted a clinical language intervention at Turner House Preschool in Kansas City, Kansas. Most interventions use an IQ test as measurement, but they chose to instead look at the growth of the everyday language of the children. The test also included University of Kansas professors' children for comparison. The language intensive activities used resulted in a spur of new vocabulary words, but the effects were only temporary. By the time the children moved to kindergarten, the effects from the vocabulary boost were gone. There was a noticeable difference in vocabulary growth rate between the Turner House children and the professors' children. This concluded that if they were to understand the reasons for the different developmental trajectories, they would have to examine the very start of vocabulary growth. They looked at 42 families for an hour each month and children from 7-9 months old until three years old. Families were selectively recruited through birth announcements. Betty and Todd wanted to make sure they had a diverse and reliable selection. Selected families spanned almost the whole socioeconomic ladder. Thirteen were upper class, ten were in the middle, thirteen were lower class, and six were on welfare. After years analyzing the collected data they saw the first results. The children's vocabularies were greatly influenced by their parents. The welfare family children had the smallest vocabulary and lowest rate of vocabulary growth. These children's skills were diverging from the skills of the professors' children. Curious to see if the children's initial vocabulary would influence school performance at ages 9-10, Betty and Todd hired Dale Walker to examine this. His findings w... ...kheim defines what he calls â€Å"social fact† in his book â€Å"The Rules of the Sociological Method† is â€Å"the beliefs, tendencies, and practices of the group taken collectively†. This could also be read as â€Å"the religious denominations, political and literary schools, and occupational corporations of a particular social system†. Social fact can’t exist without well-defined social organization. Durkheim claims â€Å"most of our ideas and tendencies are not developed by ourselves, but come to us from the outside†. This ties back to what â€Å"The 30 Million Word Gap† was about. The social facts imposed on children by their parents and teachers will precisely shape the child’s image. As the child grows older and becomes part of their society, their ways of thinking and feeling exist outside of their consciousness. Whether they realize it or not, their social fact has been imposed on them. Essay -- Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley conducted a clinical language intervention at Turner House Preschool in Kansas City, Kansas. Most interventions use an IQ test as measurement, but they chose to instead look at the growth of the everyday language of the children. The test also included University of Kansas professors' children for comparison. The language intensive activities used resulted in a spur of new vocabulary words, but the effects were only temporary. By the time the children moved to kindergarten, the effects from the vocabulary boost were gone. There was a noticeable difference in vocabulary growth rate between the Turner House children and the professors' children. This concluded that if they were to understand the reasons for the different developmental trajectories, they would have to examine the very start of vocabulary growth. They looked at 42 families for an hour each month and children from 7-9 months old until three years old. Families were selectively recruited through birth announcements. Betty and Todd wanted to make sure they had a diverse and reliable selection. Selected families spanned almost the whole socioeconomic ladder. Thirteen were upper class, ten were in the middle, thirteen were lower class, and six were on welfare. After years analyzing the collected data they saw the first results. The children's vocabularies were greatly influenced by their parents. The welfare family children had the smallest vocabulary and lowest rate of vocabulary growth. These children's skills were diverging from the skills of the professors' children. Curious to see if the children's initial vocabulary would influence school performance at ages 9-10, Betty and Todd hired Dale Walker to examine this. His findings w... ...kheim defines what he calls â€Å"social fact† in his book â€Å"The Rules of the Sociological Method† is â€Å"the beliefs, tendencies, and practices of the group taken collectively†. This could also be read as â€Å"the religious denominations, political and literary schools, and occupational corporations of a particular social system†. Social fact can’t exist without well-defined social organization. Durkheim claims â€Å"most of our ideas and tendencies are not developed by ourselves, but come to us from the outside†. This ties back to what â€Å"The 30 Million Word Gap† was about. The social facts imposed on children by their parents and teachers will precisely shape the child’s image. As the child grows older and becomes part of their society, their ways of thinking and feeling exist outside of their consciousness. Whether they realize it or not, their social fact has been imposed on them.