Critical Perspectives of the Language Gap

Eric J. Johnson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138498235
• eBook ISBN: 9781351016650
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This volume is an orchestrated critique of the notion that individuals from lower socioeconomic status communities have inferior language skills as compared to middle- and upper-class groups. The idea of this so-called "language gap" stems in large part from Hart and Risley's (1995) publication Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children. Hart and Risley proposed that by age 3, children from more economically affluent households were exposed to approximately 30 million more words than children from low-income backgrounds. They also claimed that this gap in exposure to words negatively impacts cognitive development and eventual academic achievement. The contributing authors in this book contest the original concept of a "language-gap" as well as the recent swell of academic research and public programs that it has produced. The chapters interrogate the linguistic, academic, cultural, and social implications of the "language-gap" by providing critical accounts grounded in the scholarly disciplines of sociolinguistics, anthropology, and education.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Multilingual Research Journal.

Exposing Gaps in/Between Discourses of Linguistic Deficits

Eric J. Johnson, Netta Avineri, and David Cassels Johnson

ABSTRACT

Hart and Risley’s (1995) concept of a “word gap” (aka “language gap”) is widely used to describe inferior cognitive development and lower academic achievement as by-products of the language patterns of families from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. In recent decades, this line of deficit research has proliferated and caused a surge in public exposure in the media and political realms. In this discussion, we employ critical discourse analysis to illuminate intertextual links across three essential domains of “language gap” discourse: (a) academic research literature, (b) public news media, and (c) institutional narratives. The data are analyzed in terms of interdiscursive connections within and between research articles; news and magazine stories; and institutional documents from academic, political, and philanthropic organizations. Here, we demonstrate how discourses that are generated within a socially insulated “language gap” research paradigm propagate a deficit orientation of linguistic minority communities, problematically validate behavior intervention programs among particular socioeconomic groups, and reify linguistic and cultural misperceptions of traditionally marginalized groups.

Introduction

Since the 1960s, the linguistic characteristics of children from disadvantaged socioeconomic status (SES) groups have been described in terms of verbal deprivation (Bereiter & Engelmann, 1966), restricted codes (Bernstein, 1971), and word gaps (Hart & Risley, 1995). These perspectives have been used to blame community language use for low academic achievement and correlate parent-child conversational patterns with cognitive disadvantages. In recent decades, research that posits a “deficit” in the language development of lower- and working-class children has proliferated, and Hart and Risley’s (1995) popular publication, Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children, has enjoyed rapidly growing interest in both the public and political spheres. Furthermore, current educational initiatives like Providence Talks, the Thirty Million Words Initiative, and Too Small to Fail have engendered a billow in media exposure for the “word gap” (aka “language gap”), which is often portrayed as a crisis.

Increasingly, the notion that children from working-class and lower-SES families suffer from a “language gap”¹ is discussed as if it were common sense, which in turn has an impact on public policy and societal discourses. This swell of public exposure has helped garner support from organizations like the U.S. Department of Education, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the Association for Library Service to Children. The increase in popular attention has also inspired numerous research studies and the creation of the Bridging the Word Gap National Research Network (n.d.a)—comprising over 100 researchers, practitioners, policy makers, and funders who promote research “to reduce the number of children who enter school with delays in language and early literacy” (para. 1). The surging tide of support for programs aimed at leveling academic inequities through linguistic remediation necessitates an in-depth interrogation of how deficit perspectives are proliferated within and across different discursive contexts.

1 We use “language gap” in quotations throughout this discussion for two reasons: (a) the research based on the original “word gap” concept is varied and includes more than just “words,” and (b) to communicate that we do not support the notions underlying this concept.

In this article, we employ critical discourse analysis (CDA) to examine intertextual links across three essential domains of “language gap” discourse: (a) academic research literature, (b) public news media, and (c) institutional narratives. The data are analyzed in terms of interdiscursive connections within and between research articles, news and magazine stories, and institutional documents from academic, political, and philanthropic organizations. The aim of our analysis is to demonstrate how discourses that are generated within a socially insulated “language gap” research paradigm propagate a deficit orientation of linguistic minority communities, problematically validate behavior intervention programs among particular socioeconomic groups, and reify linguistic and cultural misperceptions of traditionally marginalized groups.

Discussion format

We first outline the “language gap” concept in terms of its origins and subsequent trajectories in scholarly literature. Our critique of these research studies provides a platform for the ensuing analysis of the “language gap” in public discourse. Our literature review also considers the foundational sociolinguistic and anthropological research that rejects the deficit orientation inherent in conceptualizations of a “language gap.” In our methods section, we describe the CDA approach used in our analysis and explain how the data are parsed into various categories. The analysis entails a breakdown of the thematic and metaphorical ways the “language gap” discourse manifests in the public domain through media coverage and within institutional narratives. The intention of our overall analysis, though, is to illuminate the interdiscursive connections among all three of the discursive domains mentioned previously.

Interrogating the “language gap” research

For many scholars, Betty Hart and Todd Risley’s (1995) publication is a foundational resource for describing the relationship between children’s home-language use and their subsequent academic achievement. Hart and Risley’s (1995, 2003) research claimed that by 3 years of age, children from more affluent households were exposed to approximately 30 million more words than children from lower SES backgrounds. This “language gap” is attributed to inferior cognitive development and lower academic achievement of communities from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. Even though the inaccuracy of equating quantity of words to linguistic superiority has been pointed out by multiple scholars (Avineri et al., 2015; Benbow, 2006; Dudley-Marling, 2007; Dudley-Marling & Lucas, 2009; Johnson, 2015; Michaels, 2013; Miller & Sperry, 2012; Sperry, 2014), this ostensible language disparity is used by many researchers, educators, and politicians to rationalize low academic achievement patterns of students from economically challenged backgrounds.

Particularly problematic is how Hart and Risley (1995) conceptualize “language” and linguistic “richness” (pp. 120–134). Simply put, studies that posit cognitive deprivation and verbal deprivation in terms of counting words (and other language items) are based on the researchers’ ethnocentric definitions of linguistic complexity. Moreover, the findings in such studies are founded upon claims that are in direct opposition to decades of linguistic and anthropological research on language socialization and acquisition (as described in the following section). Here, we scrutinize how the “language gap” concept has manifested within scholarly literature in terms of language quality, language processing, and health.

Language quality

Although Hart and Risley (1995) are widely recognized for implicating quantity of word exposure in cognitive development, they also evaluate the “quality” of language interactions based on parenting strategies (pp. 75–92). Their definition of linguistic “richness” (p. 120) in parental language included features like number of nouns and modifiers, the usage of verb tenses, and strategies for asking and answering questions (pp. 96–134). These findings were used in the study to associate differing discourse styles with varying levels of intellectual “accomplishment” (p. 142). Stemming from these types of claims, the educational community has been misled to believe that socioeconomic status unidirectionally determines a child’s capacity for cognitive functioning and her/his level of intellectual accomplishment (Dudley-Marling, 2007; Dudley-Marling & Lucas, 2009; Gorski, 2011, 2012).

This perspective has resulted in multiple studies on the quality of language use across different SES levels. For example, “quality” has been judged in terms of the importance of “affirmatives (encouraging words) and prohibitions” (Hart & Risley, 2003, p. 8), amount of “interruptions to fluent and connected conversations” (Hirsh-Pasek et al., 2015, p. 1081), and similarity to classroom discourse patterns (Wasik & Hindman, 2015, pp. 52–53). In other studies, language “quality” is described by relating linguistic complexity to cognitive growth (Hoff, 2013) where language and social environments are credited for either enhancing or impeding a child’s development (Hoff, 2003, 2006; Leffel & Suskind, 2013; Suskind, 2015; Suskind et al., 2013). Even when “unique skills” and “language strengths” are mentioned, it is emphasized that because those linguistic features do not map onto school-based language patterns, specifically in literacy activities, “the different skills of lower SES children constitute a deficit” (Hoff, 2013, p. 7). Although describing linguistic differences can be helpful for better understanding intergroup communication patterns, qualifying one group’s language characteristics as superior and more cognitively beneficial is flawed and culturally biased.

Language processing

Another area of research that has received significant attention involves the effect of SES on language processing and cognitive development. Language processing studies generally evaluate children’s ability to discern the meaning of spoken words by identifying objects presented on pictures (in English: Fernald, Perfors, & Marchman, 2006; Fernald, Marchman, & Weisleder, 2013; Fernald & Marchman, 2012; Marchman & Fernald, 2008; in Spanish: Weisleder & Fernald, 2013). For example, Fernald et al. (2013) frame their discussion of language processing by pointing to previous “language gap”-related studies on verbal and cognitive abilities determined by standardized assessments (e.g., Ramey & Ramey, 2004), language quality and experiential factors (e.g., Hart & Risley, 1995; Hoff, 2003, 2006), and differences in eventual academic success or failure (based on comparisons of Black and White families: e.g., Burchinal et al., 2011; Farkas & Beron, 2004). Hart and Risley’s work has also influenced studies on SES and neural processing (Hutton, Horowitz-Kraus, Mendelsohn, DeWitt, & Holland, 2015; Noble et al., 2015; Noble, Houston, Kan, & Sowell, 2012). In many of these studies, linguistic experiences are conflated with other potential social and psychological factors (e.g., stress)—which are not caused by language, per se.

Language and health

The connection between language development and health is the explicit focus of Crow and O’Leary’s (2015) report: Word Health: Addressing the Word Gap as a Public Health Crisis. In this discussion, language interventions for lower-SES groups are claimed to be associated with reductions in cardiovascular and metabolic diseases, lower rates of obesity, and advantages in material success later in life (Crow & O’Leary, 2015, p. 3). The authors are also strategic about conflating language environment with “adverse childhood experiences” (p. 4). Although there is a growing body of research on “adverse childhood experiences” (ACEs), the focus of that line of research is on contexts of physical and psychological abuse and not everyday language patterns based on linguistic features like word count, reading, or singing (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2016).

Other health-oriented claims include a “lack of words in a child’s life amounts to both a public education and a public health concern” (Crow &a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Introducing the Language Gap
• 1 Exposing Gaps in/Between Discourses of Linguistic Deficits
• 2 Unseen WEIRD Assumptions: The So-Called Language Gap Discourse and Ideologies of Language, Childhood, and Learning
• 3 Meaning-Less Differences: Exposing Fallacies and Flaws in “The Word Gap” Hypothesis That Conceal a Dangerous “Language Trap” for Low-Income American Families and Their Children
• 4 Interrogating the Language Gap of Young Bilingual and Bidialectal Students
• 5 (Re)Categorizing Language-Minority Literacies in Restrictive Educational Contexts
• Index