As mentioned earlier, a chilling finding in a study of one California community by Todd Risley and Betty Hart exposes a bleak reality with serious implications: by five years of age, some children from impoverished-language environments have heard 32 million fewer words spoken to them than the average middle-class child. What Louisa Cook Moats calls “word poverty” extends well beyond what the child hears. In another study, which looked at how many words children produce at age three, children from impoverished environments used less than half of the number of words already spoken by their more
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