Social Differences and Language Development

A few statistics from the book How Babies Talk.

Words spoken to a child in an average hour at home:

• professional class child – 2153 words
• working-class child – 1251
• welfare child - 616

The quality of the conversation differed: were the parents interacting positively with the child, or were they just telling him/her not to do something?

• professional class child – 32 affirmatives and 5 prohibitions
• working-class child – 12 affirmatives, 7 prohibitions
• welfare child – 5 affirmatives, 11 prohibitions

Reading before first grade:
The typical middle-class child entering first grade has had 1000-1700 hours of one-on-one picture book reading time. For low-income family, that number is 25.

Books in the house:
47% of public-aid preschoolers had no alphabet books in the home, compared to 3% of children in professional families.

I would love to know the reasons behind the differences. Are welfare children talked to less because their parents have less time with them, or have less energy because they work more jobs? Does the number of children in a household matter? It would be interesting to follow up and find out what’s going on here. They cite a number of sources; the main book citation is for Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children
by Hart and Risley.