(This post is dedicated to my friends Marian and Jan-Willem, who last week welcomed a lovely baby girl into the world. They will most certainly talk to her an awful lot.)
Why is it that children from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds tend to have lower school performance than children from wealthier environments? This may seem like a naïve question at first, but understanding the exact mechanisms in place proves to be much more challenging than one might think. Most likely, the phenomenon is due to a conjunction of factors involving level of education of primary caregiver, parental involvement, a stable environment, adequate nutrition, among others. (Some would like to see ‘genetic predisposition’ on the list. Now, while this cannot be ruled out, I take it that the currently available data are too tangled up with the above-mentioned social factors to allow for an analysis of the genetic component in isolation.)
A recent post at the Fixes blog of the New York Times (Fixes and The Stone are both members of the larger Opinionator family) highlights one specific element: how much people from different socioeconomic backgrounds actually talk to their infants. As reported in the 1995 book Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children (by Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley), it turns out that poorer parents talk considerably less to and around their babies than more affluent parents:
The disparity was staggering. Children whose families were on welfare heard about 600 words per hour. Working-class children heard 1,200 words per hour, and children from professional families heard 2,100 words. By age 3, a poor child would have heard 30 million fewer words in his home environment than a child from a professional family.
[UPDATE: Charles Stewart informs me that the Hart & Risley study has been quite heavily criticized for some methodological shortcomings, in particular pertaining to how it handles African-American Vernacular English.]
This is a disparity that most socioeconomically disadvantaged children never manage to catch up on. As time goes by, the cognitive gap between them and the children of chattier parents grows wider and wider, and this alone seems to be one major factor for the discrepancy in school performance. However, why exactly richer and more educated parents talk more to their children than poorer and less educated parents is not entirely clear. Some hypotheses have been evinced, such as awareness (or lack thereof) of the importance of talking to babies (which would come from e.g. visits to pediatricians and books on early childhood). But naturally, understanding the reasons behind the phenomenon would be crucial if we are to try to redress the imbalance by getting poorer parents to talk more to their children.
The Fixes piece has details on a major project being conducted in the city of Providence, both to study the phenomenon and to develop strategies for intervention, which makes for inspiring reading. Technological progress now allows for automated speech recognition, which greatly facilitates the measurement of how much a parent in fact talks to a baby. (In the 1990s research, the measurement was done manually, through the extremely time-consuming task of transcribing the recorded dialogues.)
My interest in this piece is not restricted to the radical social implications of these findings. It also ties nicely with much of the work that I have been doing on the importance of dialogue for human cognition. My basic story is that cognition is much more a social affair than is usually thought, both in philosophy and elsewhere, and that a lot of what we tend to view as mono-agent thinking processes can only be properly understood as internalizations of ‘language games’ which we first learn in social contexts of dialogues; counting would be a paradigmatic example of internalization. (The general background is the Vygotskian idea of internalization of social practices.) Now, the huge impact of talking to infants for their cognitive development as reported in the Fixes column seems to lend strong support to these hypotheses, and last but not least, also to indicate some possible ways to decrease the educational gap between rich and poor kids. Double bonus!
Naturally, I am not alone in emphasizing the importance of dialogue for cognitive development; in fact, I am in very good company. The developmental psychologist Paul L. Harris published an important book last year, Trusting what we are told: How children learn from others, where he offers a very compelling defense of this general idea. (Full disclosure: Paul is involved in my most recent research project, for which funding application is still ongoing.) From the Introduction (p. 1):
… Progressive educators have conceived of young children as hands-on learners who learn best in the here and now from their own active observation and experimentation. The possibility that children’s early learning might be intimately linked t what they can conjure up in their imagination on the basis of what other people tell them has been downplayed.
Harris goes on to cite Rousseau, Piaget and Montessori as theorists having held the ‘lone little scientist’ view of cognitive development. (See also this interview with him on the book.) Now, if Harris is right (and I for one am entirely convinced that he is), this has implications both for how we think about early education in the school environment and elsewhere (e.g. the ‘hands-on’ approach favored in most museums for children) and for how we conceive of parenting.
It also has important implications within philosophy, in particular epistemology, as it suggests that social epistemology is conceptually prior to ‘standard’ epistemology: we got the order of things all wrong. (But of course, better late than not at all, and the recent focus on e.g. testimony in epistemology is a very good sign.) Similarly, in philosophy of mind, these findings suggest that the extended cognition approach is on the right track, but rather than focusing on our interactions with objects such as note-books and iPhones, we in fact need a thoroughly social story (something that e.g. Menary and others have been bringing up recently).
But ultimately, the short lesson to be drawn is a very simple one: talk to them!
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