Writer: Strong Early Vocabulary Skills Needed For Future Academic Success

Ginia Bellafante wrote in the New York Times (10/5, Subscription Publication) about the positive impact that having a strong vocabulary can have on young students when they enter into school, noting that "in the '80s, the psychologists Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley spent years cataloging the number of words spoken to young children in dozens of families from different socioeconomic groups, and what they found was not only a disparity in the complexity of words used, but also astonishing differences in sheer number. Children of professionals were, on average, exposed to approximately 1,500 more words hourly than children growing up in poverty. This resulted in a gap of more than 32 million words by the time the children reached the age of 4." She writes about how this issue relates to New York City's Specialized High Schools Admissions Test, which has been criticized because of the low number of minority students who are able to pass it.