Specifying the nature of the vocabulary gap

美国正面临着一场教育危机，因为我们有太多的孩子上学时没有准备好学习。取得成就的挑战很早就开始了，并与社会差距密切相关，词汇量的测量提供了一个特别引人注目的例子。根据之前的研究，来自社会经济困难家庭的儿童进入学前班时，比他们的同龄人少知道多达3000个单词。这种差距一直持续到青春期，对以后的识字和一般的学业成就都有影响。这项工作不仅仅是记录这些差异，而是要解决社会经济差异如何以及为什么会导致词汇差异。具体地说，这项研究调查了一种假设，即当机会出现时，词汇差异可能是儿童学习新单词的基本能力差异的结果。为此，来自不同社会经济阶层的儿童将接受几项词汇学习任务的测试，这些任务旨在索引不同组成部分的词汇学习技能。他们的表现将与社会经济地位和累积词汇量的衡量标准相关联。该项目为早期干预的创新方法奠定了基础，该方法侧重于教孩子如何学习单词，而不仅仅是教单词本身。这种方法可以有力地促进词汇习得的泛化，远远超出任何特定干预的目标词的范围。然而，为了使这种方法获得有效的势头，这个项目首先要确定单词学习技能在词汇差距中的作用，并在这样做的过程中，确定一些具体的单词学习技能中最需要教育干预的是什么。

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.