Specifying the nature of the vocabulary gap

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The United States is facing an education crisis as far too many of our children enter school ill prepared to learn. Challenges to achievement begin early and are strongly connected to social disparities, with measures of vocabulary providing a particularly striking illustration. According to previous research, children from socioeconomically disadvantaged homes enter preschool knowing as many as 3000 fewer words than their peers. This gap persists into adolescence, with implications for later literacy and general academic success. This work moves beyond documenting these disparities to address how and why socioeconomic disparities lead to vocabulary differences. Specifically, the research investigates the hypothesis that differences in vocabulary may be the result of differences in children's basic ability to learn new words when the opportunity presents itself. To this end, children from widely varying socioeconomic strata will be tested on several word learning tasks designed to index different component word learning skills. Their performance will be considered in relation to both measures of socioeconomic status and accumulated vocabulary. This project lays the foundation for an innovative approach to early intervention that focuses on teaching children how to learn words rather than solely on teaching words per se. This approach could powerfully facilitate the generalization of vocabulary gains well beyond the scope of words targeted in any particular intervention. In order for this approach to gain effective momentum, however, it is critical that this project first establish the role of word-learning skills in the 'vocabulary gap', and in so doing, identify which of a number of specific word-learning skills are in greatest need of educational intervention.