The vocabulary word gap in this study is different from the conversational word gap and may have different implications for children, she said. Other studies since then suggest this 30 million word gap may be much smaller or even non-existent, Logan said. The word gap examined in this research isn't the only type kids may face.Ī controversial 1992 study suggested that children growing up in poverty hear about 30 million fewer words in conversation by age 3 than those from more privileged backgrounds.

'The word gap of more than 1 million words between children raised in a literacy-rich environment and those who were never read to is striking,' Logan said. They also assumed that parents who reported never reading to their kids actually read one book to their children every other month.īased on these calculations, here's how many words kids would have heard by the time they were 5 years old: Never read to, 4,662 words 1-2 times per week, 63,570 words 3-5 times per week, 169,520 words daily, 296,660 words and five books a day, 1,483,300 words. They assumed that kids would be read board books through their 3rd birthday and picture books the next two years, and that every reading session (except for one category) would include one book. With that information, the researchers calculated how many words a child would hear from birth through his or her 5th birthday at different levels of reading. They found that board books contained an average of 140 words, while picture books contained an average of 228 words. Logan and her colleagues randomly selected 30 books from both lists and counted how many words were in each book. The researchers collaborated with the Columbus Metropolitan Library, which identified the 100 most circulated books for both board books (targeting infants and toddlers) and picture books (targeting preschoolers). We wanted to figure out what that might mean for their kids,' Logan said. 'The fact that we had so many parents who said they never or seldom read to their kids was pretty shocking to us.

Logan said the idea for this research came from one of her earlier studies, which found that about one-fourth of children in a national sample were never read to and another fourth were seldom read to (once or twice weekly).

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