The Guardian – Alex Beard
“In 1995, two researchers, Betty Hart and Todd Risley, published the results of a study in which they trailed 42 Kansas City families to compare the experiences of preschoolers from poor families with their richer peers. Starting when the infants were nine months old, they observed them regularly over a two-and-a-half-year period, recording and transcribing all parent-and-child speech during their hour-long visits. The findings were stark. The number of words a child heard by their third birthday strongly predicted academic success aged nine. The difference was barely fathomable. They estimated that, at the age of four, the richest kids had heard 30m more words than the poorest.” (more)