Young children's language experiences and language outcomes are highly variable.
Research in recent decades has focused on understanding the extent to which family …

In this article, I address our understanding of the word gap, or why parents' talk to children
differs by socioeconomic status. The differences in quantity and quality of parents' input …

For the past 25 years, researchers have investigated language input to children from high‐
and low‐socioeconomic status (SES) families. Hart and Risley first reported a “30 Million …

The disparity in the amount and quality of language that low-income children hear relative to
their more-affluent peers is often referred to as the 30-million-word gap. Here, we expand …

Abstract Language input is necessary for language learning, yet little is known about
whether, in natural environments, the speech style and social context of language input to …

Children from low-income backgrounds consistently perform below their more advantaged
peers on standardized measures of language ability, setting long-term trajectories that …

Fifty years of research have documented a sobering reality: There are substantial
differences among parents in how they engage and communicate with their children, and …

Segmental features of child-directed speech (CDS) were studied in a corpus drawn from
thirtynine mothers living in Tyneside, England. Focus was on the phonetic variants used for …

This volume presents the findings of a large-scale study of individual differences in spoken
(and heard) language development during the school years. The goal of the study was to …

Infants differ substantially in their rates of language growth, and slow growth predicts later
academic difficulties. In this study, we explored how the amount of speech directed to infants …