Professional Documents
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Catherine E. Snow
To cite this article: Catherine E. Snow (2017) The role of vocabulary versus knowledge
in children’s language learning: a fifty-year perspective / El papel del vocabulario frente al
conocimiento en el aprendizaje lingüístico de los niños: una perspectiva de cincuenta años,
Infancia y Aprendizaje, 40:1, 1-18, DOI: 10.1080/02103702.2016.1263449
Abstract: Much public attention has been drawn to the ‘30 million-word gap’
between children growing up in more vs. less privileged families. I argue in
this paper that conceptualizing the gap in quantity of words, which is useful in
emphasizing the size of the challenge, misconceptualizes the real differences,
which are in knowledge of the world rather than just vocabulary size, and
risks luring early childhood educators and parents into overly simple solu-
tions. If we recognize the challenge as one of knowledge rather than just
vocabulary size, we also are in a better position to support second language
learners whose knowledge base across both languages is a better predictor of
academic success than vocabulary in the second language.
Keywords: social class differences; vocabulary; knowledge; early childhood
education; interventions
Early childhood educators and policy advocates have recently exploited the
meme ‘30 million-word gap’ to direct attention to social class differences in
children’s vocabularies (e.g., Suskind, 2015). The 30 million words separating
more privileged children from those growing up in poverty and in low-literacy
homes do not, of course, refer to their own vocabularies, but rather to the
number of words they have had a chance to hear by the age of three. A study
conducted in the 1980s by Betty Hart and Todd Risley, published in the book
Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children
(1995), displayed the multiple levels on which children growing up in less-
privileged circumstances miss out on opportunities to hear language: their
parents on average spend less time playing with and talking to them; when
they are with their children, the low-income parents typically talk less, produ-
cing fewer and shorter utterances; and they are less responsive to their children’s
communicative attempts. In addition, middle-class parents are much less likely
to tell their children to shut up or to deny their requests without explanation than
are low-income parents, and more likely to provide praise and words of encour-
agement. Calculating the differences observed in regular hour-long recordings
over two-plus years, and extrapolating to age five, it is possible to estimate that
children in the least linguistically enriched households do, indeed, hear
30 million fewer words than the children of more highly educated, professional
parents.
The Hart and Risley findings were published in 1995, but it took almost
20 years for them to have a strong and visible influence on public perceptions,
early childhood practices or policy. By 2016, the findings have been cited over
5,000 times, and have provided a headline for an array of social policy initiatives.
In this paper, I put the Hart and Risley findings in historical context, by briefly
reviewing the history of thinking about vocabulary development in my own
research and that of others in the field, before scrutinizing the degree to which
the current focus on vocabulary in education for young children is well founded.
Given the influence that focus is having on the utilization of funds, design of
programmes and shaping of policy, it is desirable to consider the range of benefits
it can generate and the limits on those benefits.
Vocabulary neglect
The renewal of interest in language acquisition sparked by Chomsky’s theorizing
and taken up enthusiastically by Roger Brown (1973), Martin Braine (1971) and
others in the 1960s and 1970s largely ignored the specific words children pro-
duced, in favour of focusing on the grammatical structures (e.g., pivot-open) and
semantic relationships (e.g., possession, location, actor-action) expressed in their
early utterances. Some level of interest in vocabulary emerged with the observa-
tion that a threshold number of words known (50–150) typically preceded the first
multi-word utterance (Brown, 1973), and then with the observation that children
show a sudden rapid increase in speed of word learning — the vocabulary
spurt — around that threshold (e.g., Bloom, 1973; Nelson, 1973). The vocabulary
Vocabulary and knowledge / Vocabulario y conocimiento 3
Which words?
The question of which words children learned was perhaps first raised by
Katherine Nelson (1973), in her study of individual differences in early language
acquisition. She identified the more familiar, noun-learning child as typical for the
referential group, which she contrasted with the less frequently described expres-
sive group — children who learned a higher proportion of social expressions and
socially useful phrases (e.g., thank you, don’t do that). Serious attention to which
words were frequently acquired in the earliest stages of language acquisition was
required, though, for another effort at using vocabulary size as a developmental
indicator: the design of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory
(CDI; Fenson, Dale, Reznick, Bates, & Thal, 1994), a parent-report instrument.
Eliciting information from caregivers about the size of their children’s vocabul-
aries requires having a list of candidate words — thus was launched the first
serious attempt to figure out which words children learn, though still in service of
the question how many words they know. The CDI has been extremely widely
used, but users of CDI data rarely exploited the information about semantic
categories or specific lexical items made available by the instrument.
In addition to the CDI, transcript analysis continued to be the standard
approach to studying children’s language development. Automated transcript
analysis systems such as the Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts
(SALT; Miller & Chapman, 1985) and the Child Language Data Exchange
System (CHILDES; MacWhinney, 2000a, 2000b; MacWhinney & Snow, 1985,
1990) produced data that could be automatically mined to answer questions about
the words children used, but a quick scan of the research published in child
language-focused journals suggests rather limited use of the data for such pur-
poses. Targeted searches for specific words or categories of word (e.g., for
politeness-related words like please and thank you, Snow, Perlmann, Gleason,
& Hooshyar, 1990; or for mental-state terms, Bartsch & Wellman, 1995) have
generated important insights, but these have occurred most often in response to
questions about children’s social or cognitive development. Language researchers
remain more focused on how children say things than on what they say.
4 C. E. Snow
Vocabulary in interaction
Though the Hart and Risley study was instrumental in focusing attention on the
input to children, in fact research had made abundantly clear long before they
published their book that input to children was in many ways supportive of
language learning. The supportive features in language used with young children
included phonological clarity (Ratner, 1984, 1987), high redundancy and syntactic
simplicity (Snow, 1972), limitation to topics and propositions appropriate to
children’s developmental level (Snow, 1977), presence of expansions on child
utterances (Brown & Bellugi, 1964) and a very gradual introduction of topics that
went beyond the here and now (Snow, 1984).
Subsequent work has made even clearer the features of adult-child interaction
that support children’s language learning. The use of gestures (Rowe, 2000),
asking questions (Hoff-Ginsberg, 1986; Rowe, 2008), adopting dialogic styles
of book-reading (Mol, Bus, & de Jong, 2009), using lower frequency words in
contexts that help clarify their meaning (Weizman & Snow, 2001) and talking
responsively (Pan, Rowe, Singer, & Snow, 2005) all have been shown to be
associated with better language outcomes or faster language learning for children.
Our knowledge base has expanded impressively — but still with remarkably little
attention to what parents and children actually talk about! For instance, despite the
extensive focus on book-reading as a context for language learning, and the
suggestion that it works in part by introducing vocabulary and topics that expand
the default list typical of natural interaction (Weizman & Snow, 2001), rather little
attention has been paid in studies of language development to the specific words
learned or the domains of content knowledge referred to in the books read.
The exception to this generalization comes from a growing body of research
on vocabulary interventions with young children (e.g., August, Artzi, & Barr,
2016; Loftus-Rattan, Mitchell, & Coyne, 2016). In such studies, researchers have
no choice but to look at specific words — in general, the evidence suggests that
children learn only the words taught in the intervention. Efforts to use targeted
interventions to expand general vocabulary (e.g., scores on the Peabody Picture
Vocabulary Test, PPVT, or the Woodcock vocabulary assessment) have been
largely unsuccessful, at least in the short run. This is not surprising — standar-
dized vocabulary assessments sample sparsely from a very large target domain, so
the likelihood that children will learn precisely those words that get them higher
scores on the test is very low. Successful interventions can generate lots of word
learning without showing impacts on tests that fail to include the curricular target
words. But their limited success reorients us to the question, what words should
children be learning? Are some words more important than others? Is there a
principled basis for organizing input to children beyond simply word frequency,
which is the primary basis for selecting vocabulary test items?
The impetus did not come, I would argue, from the child language community,
but rather from those studying literacy development. The finding that children’s
vocabulary scores predict their reading success, both concurrently and predic-
tively, is robust and widely replicated (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998). Social class
differences in reading success are large and troubling, prompting an exploration of
possible sources. The evidence presented by Hart and Risley offered an explana-
tion for the achievement gap in reading, and thus became an impetus to greater
emphasis in early childhood programmes on vocabulary development.
Of course, the Hart and Risley findings make very clear that sizable vocabu-
lary discrepancies are present by age three — well before most children enter any
educationally focused early childhood setting. Thus the second wave of response
in grappling with those findings was a series of efforts to intervene with families
to ensure that all children’s language environments approach the verbal density
and variety of those available to the highest SES group in the Hart and Risley
study. Examples of such efforts include Providence Talks, Denver Talks Back,
The 30 million Words Initiative, Vroom [http://www.joinvroom.org/] and the
efforts of organizations such as Zero to Three [http://main.zerotothree.org], the
Parent-child Home Program [http://www.parent-child.org/] and Reach Out and
Read [http://www.reachoutandread.org/]. Some of these initiatives have shown
measurable effects in large- or small-scale evaluation efforts, and none of them
should be dismissed out of hand. Of particular promise are the attempts to turn
small screens (phones and tablets), which too often are used to deflect children’s
conversational approaches to adults, into sources of support for adult-child con-
versation. Nonetheless, I argue that interventions focused primarily on amount of
talk are likely to fail, unless they both build on child curiosity and provide adults
resources for enriching the content of talk.
a few times’, children’s language environments are denser but not richer. Explicit
vocabulary instruction in preschool is much less efficient than the natural voca-
bulary acquisition that results from use of low frequency words during rich
discussions about interesting topics. Furthermore, focusing on vocabulary rather
than knowledge can lead to counterproductive practices with second-language
learners — suggesting more input in the school language, for example, rather than
strengthening the learner’s knowledge base in any language whatsoever.
A more robust and promising approach would be to explore the differences
between conversations in well-resourced vs. less-privileged households, to see
how they differ in quality and content. To be fair, Hart and Risley did this. They
presented in their book transcripts of parent-child talk that make clear the many
dimensions of difference in talk that go along with differences in quantity of
words (and subsequent research by many has confirmed those dimensions). Hart
and Risley’s more highly educated, professional parents gave children more praise
and fewer reprimands, produced more complex syntax and engaged in conversa-
tions that focused over more turns on a single topic. In other words, their talk
differed from that of low-income parents on emotional, grammatical and discourse
dimensions. Nonetheless, the public presentation of their work has focused almost
exclusively on numbers of words, not on which words or how those words are
used.
Next steps
What is wrong with ‘just talk more’ advice? It fails to take into account both what
we know about vocabulary development and the natural forces shaping adult-
child interaction. We know that vocabulary develops in the course of conversa-
tion, that those conversations are relevant to ongoing activities and that children’s
contributions have social-communicative goals. At the earliest stages, for exam-
ple, children (at least those in families with responsive adults) can initiate con-
versations by pointing at objects, to which parents typically respond by naming
the indicated item. One might legitimately ask whether children aged 10–-
18 months engage in pointing because they have the communicative intent to
elicit names; very likely the more broadly social intent to share a joint focus of
attention and/or to engage adults’ attention and direct their behaviour motivates
their pointing. Such interactions are described in Ninio and Bruner (1978) and in
Ninio and Snow (1996) as games rather than conversations; though information is
exchanged, that is not their primary purpose.
As children’s language skills develop, these language games continue, but two
additional types of communicative activity come to play a central role in shaping
the conversations of which they are a part: discussing a joint focus of attention
(naming, identifying attributes of named items, talking about the pictures in a
shared book, etc.); and negotiating immediate activity (talking about how to build
a tower or complete a jigsaw puzzle, making cookies, getting dressed, putting toys
away) (Ninio & Snow, 1996). In these two categories of communicative
exchange, the shared focus of attention or activity creates a visible, manageable,
Vocabulary and knowledge / Vocabulario y conocimiento 7
comprehensible structure into which words fit and through which they become
learnable.
Slightly older children no longer need the scaffold of the external activity as a
context for understanding words; they are capable of engaging in extended dis-
courses — narratives, explanations, discussions — through which new words can
be learned, but even more importantly both previously familiar and new, unfamiliar
words can be put into larger conceptual and semantic contexts (Nelson, 2013).
Thus, a four-year-old might well learn the word ‘oxygen’ from a discussion of the
firefighters’ visit to his daycare class, but probably not from the periodic table or a
listing of atmospheric gases. And the discussion of the firefighter visit will link
oxygen semantically and conceptually to an array of words related to the firefighting
scenario: fire, fire engine, face mask, oxygen tank, protection, rescue, respiration,
asphyxiation and perhaps, if the adults are sufficiently attentive and sesquipedalian,
conflagration, catastrophe, oxidation and inferno. This is one natural context for
vocabulary learning — an interesting conversation about a personally experienced
event. It is, furthermore, an opportunity for young children to start to acquire the
information structures that will support their reading comprehension and ongoing
learning in school contexts many years later. Thus a discussion of firefighters’
oxygen masks opens up a possibility to learn about the utilization of oxygen in fires,
a short step to understanding the chemistry of rapid oxidation.
Another natural context for vocabulary learning is created by children’s ques-
tions. Michelle Chouinard (2007) conducted an analysis of transcripts of parent-
child conversations from five children between the ages of 18 and 60 months. She
reported that the children asked between 50 and 120 questions per hour, the vast
majority of which were information-seeking questions. While not all those ques-
tions initiated rich conversations, the majority were answered by the adults, and
indeed if they were not answered the children persisted, repeating their questions
much more often than they repeated their own statements. In other words, at about
18 months children start to show their interest in acquiring information, and thus
craft for themselves rich opportunities to learn vocabulary in the context of
connected discourse. Of course, acquiring vocabulary is not the children’s intent;
they are interested in certain topics — the words come along for free! But again,
children from lower SES families are less likely to get informative responses to
their information questions, and ultimately become less likely to persist in
demanding such responses, having learned from earlier interactions that parents
do not reward curiosity (Kurkul & Corriveau, in press).
Implications
Everything we know about vocabulary acquisition suggests strongly that children
acquire large vocabularies in the context of responsive interactions about topics of
interest to them. ‘More language input’ all by itself will not close the 30 million-
word gap; it will take better language input, input more adapted to child interests
and input in the context of which rich conceptual structures can be built. Children
build knowledge about topics of interest to them (Engel, 2015), but most reliably
8 C. E. Snow
when those topics are shared with adults, in discussions and negotiations about
content. Dinner table conversations about what happened during the day as well
as about where food comes from, why we need vegetables in our diet and what is
happening tomorrow generate opportunities for children to ask questions about
what words mean, about how things work and about why people act the way they
do. Reading aloud and discussing books of interest to children create rich contexts
for informative conversations, in part because the books often supplement and
broaden the knowledge and language available to the adult. Shared special
events — things like excursions to the beach, visits to the zoo, going to museums
or celebrating holidays with family members — create opportunities for new
learning and for developing reminiscence narratives with adults, during which
vocabulary gets built. At the same time, though, more quotidian activities such as
getting dressed, fixing meals, buying groceries or taking a bus to an appointment
can also create contexts in which talk about what is going on builds knowledge
about how the world works. Such conversations constitute situations in which
language is linked to content, in which knowledge structures are built and
elaborated and in which, because they get answers to the questions they pose,
children become increasingly curious. Those are the real mechanisms for building
better brains.
Vocabulary and knowledge / Vocabulario y conocimiento 9
conveniente tener en cuenta qué beneficios puede aportar y qué límites pueden
tener dichos beneficios.
¿Qué palabras?
Quizá fuera Katherine Nelson (1973) quien, en su estudio sobre las diferencias
individuales en la adquisición temprana del lenguaje, preguntó por primera vez
qué palabras aprendían los niños. Identificó al niño común (que aprende sustanti-
vos) como típico del grupo de referencia, que comparó con el grupo expresivo,
menos frecuentemente estudiado: niños que aprenden una proporción mayor de
expresiones sociales y frases socialmente útiles (e.g. hola, no hagas eso). Para
utilizar el tamaño del vocabulario como indicador del desarrollo se tornó nece-
sario prestar atención sistemáticamente a las palabras que se adquirían con mayor
frecuencia en las etapas más tempranas de la adquisición del lenguaje: en ese
contexto se diseñó el Inventario de Desarrollo Comunicativo MacArthur
(Communicative Development Inventory, CDI; Fenson, Dale, Reznick, Bates, &
Thal, 1994), un instrumento basado en el informe parental. Para obtener
información sobre el tamaño del vocabulario de los niños por parte de sus padres
Vocabulary and knowledge / Vocabulario y conocimiento 11
El vocabulario en interacción
Aunque el estudio de Hart y Risley fue crucial para centrar la atención sobre el input
lingüístico disponible para los niños, en realidad las investigaciones previas habían
dejado muy claro antes de la publicación de su libro que ese input fomenta el
aprendizaje lingüístico de muy diversas formas. El lenguaje que se emplea con los
niños tiene diversas características que fomentan la adquisición, como la claridad
fonológica (Ratner, 1984, 1987), un alto nivel de redundancia y simplicidad sintáctica
(Snow, 1972), la limitación de los temas y proposiciones en base a lo que es apropiado
para el nivel evolutivo del niño (Snow, 1977), la presencia de expansiones sobre los
enunciados del niño (Brown & Bellugi, 1964), y una introducción muy gradual de
temas que van más allá del aquí y el ahora (Snow, 1984).
Las investigaciones posteriores han clarificado aún más aquellas características de
la interacción adulto-niño que fomentan el aprendizaje lingüístico de los niños. El uso
de gestos (Rowe, 2000), hacer preguntas (Hoff-Ginsberg, 1986; Rowe, 2008), adop-
tar estilos dialógicos en la lectura de libros (Mol, Bus, & de Jong, 2009), emplear
palabras de relativamente baja frecuencia en contextos que ayuden a clarificar su
significado (Weizman & Snow, 2001), y hablar con receptividad1 (Pan, Rowe, Singer,
& Snow, 2005) son características que se asocian con mejores resultados lingüísticos
o un aprendizaje lingüístico más rápido en los niños. Nuestra base de conocimientos
12 C. E. Snow
lo que digas unas cuantas veces’, los entornos lingüísticos de los niños serán más
densos pero no más ricos. Una instrucción explícita en preescolar centrada en el
vocabulario es mucho menos eficaz que la adquisición natural de vocabulario que
resulta del uso de palabras de baja frecuencia en conversaciones ricas sobre temas
interesantes. Además, centrarse en el vocabulario más que en el conocimiento
puede llevar a prácticas contraproducentes con los aprendices de una segunda
lengua, como por ejemplo sugerir más input en el lenguaje escolar en lugar de
reforzar la base de conocimientos del niño en cualquiera de las dos lenguas.
Un enfoque más robusto y prometedor consistiría en analizar las diferencias
entre las conversaciones que se mantienen en hogares con muchos recursos y en
los hogares menos privilegiados, y observar en qué difieren tanto en calidad como
en contenido. Siendo justos, Hart y Risley sí hicieron esto. Presentaron en su libro
transcripciones de habla padres-niño que dejaban claras las diferencias que había
respecto a muchas dimensiones del habla, aparte de la cantidad de palabras
empleada (y las muchas investigaciones posteriores realizadas han confirmado
dichas dimensiones). Los padres profesionales y con una educación superior del
estudio de Hart y Risley alababan con mayor frecuencia a sus hijos y les
reprendían menos, producían una sintaxis más complicada y mantenían más
turnos durante las conversaciones que tenían con sus hijos sobre un mismo
tema. En otras palabras, su habla difería de la de los padres de bajos ingresos
en las dimensiones emocional, gramatical y discursiva. Sin embargo, la
presentación al público de su trabajo se ha enfocado casi exclusivamente en el
número de palabras, no en qué palabras se usaban o cómo.
Siguientes pasos
¿Qué problema esconde aconsejar ‘simplemente hable más’? Que no tiene en
cuenta lo que sabemos tanto sobre el desarrollo del vocabulario como sobre las
fuerzas naturales que dan forma a la interacción adulto-niño. Sabemos que el
vocabulario se va desarrollando en el transcurso de la conversación, que estas
conversaciones son significativas respecto a actividades en curso, y que las
aportaciones de los niños tienen metas sociocomunicativas. En las etapas más
tempranas, por ejemplo, los niños (al menos aquellos que viven en familias con
adultos receptivos) pueden iniciar conversaciones señalando objetos, a lo que los
padres responden típicamente nombrando el objeto indicado. Uno se podría
preguntar legítimamente si los niños de entre 10 y 18 meses apuntan a cosas
porque tienen la intención comunicativa de suscitar nombres; lo más probable es
que su motivación proceda de la intención social de compartir un foco atencional
y/o de atraer la atención de los adultos y dirigir su comportamiento. Estas
interacciones se describieron en Ninio y Bruner (1978) y en Ninio y Snow
(1996) como juegos más que como conversaciones; aunque hay intercambio de
información, éste no es su propósito principal.
Al ir desarrollándose las habilidades lingüísticas de los niños estos juegos de
lenguaje continúan, pero entran también en juego dos tipos adicionales de activi-
dad comunicativa cruciales en cuanto que dan forma a las conversaciones en las
Vocabulary and knowledge / Vocabulario y conocimiento 15
en obtener tales respuestas, ya que han aprendido de interacciones previas que sus
padres no recompensan la curiosidad (Kurkul & Corriveau, en prensa).
Implicaciones
Todo lo que sabemos sobre la adquisición de vocabulario sugiere que los niños
adquieren vocabularios amplios en contextos de interacciones receptivas sobre
temas que les interesan. Si se emplea un ‘aumento del input lingüístico’ como
única medida no se logrará el objetivo de cerrar la brecha de los 30 millones de
palabras; para ello es necesario mejorar el input lingüístico, adaptarlo más a los
intereses del niño, y emplear un input que permita construir estructuras de mayor
riqueza conceptual. Los niños construyen su conocimiento sobre temas que les
interesan (Engel, 2015), pero lo hacen con mayor fiabilidad si esos temas se
comparten con adultos, en conversaciones y negociaciones sobre el contenido.
Las conversaciones a la hora de la cena sobre lo que pasó durante el día, sobre de
dónde viene la comida, por qué necesitamos verduras y hortalizas en nuestras
dietas y lo que va a ocurrir mañana, generan oportunidades para que los niños se
hagan preguntas acerca del significado de las palabras, de cómo funcionan las
cosas, y por qué la gente actúa de la manera que lo hace. Leer en alto y hablar
sobre los libros que les interesan a los niños crea contextos adecuados en los que
se pueden producir conversaciones informativas, en parte porque los libros a
menudo suplementan y amplían el conocimiento y el lenguaje disponible para
los adultos. Compartir eventos especiales (como excursiones a la playa, visitas al
zoo, ir a museos o pasar las vacaciones con sus familias) crea oportunidades para
nuevos aprendizajes y para desarrollar narrativas de recuerdo con los adultos,
fomentando así el desarrollo del vocabulario. Al mismo tiempo, sin embargo, las
actividades más cotidianas como vestirse, preparar la comida, hacer la compra, o
ir a una cita en autobús pueden crear también contextos en los que, a través de las
conversaciones sobre lo que está sucediendo, se fomenta la construcción del
conocimiento sobre cómo funciona el mundo. Tales conversaciones generan
situaciones en las que el lenguaje se asocia al contenido, en las que las estructuras
de conocimiento se construyen y desarrollan, y en las que, en la medida en que
reciban respuestas a las preguntas que hacen, los niños van mostrándose cada
vez más curiosos. Esos son los mecanismos reales para construir mejores
cerebros.
Nota
1. Talking responsively, se refiere a los ajustes que el adulto hace en su habla sobre la
marcha y en relación a las necesidades que percibe en el niño (N. del T.).
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author./ Los autores no han referido
ningún potencial conflicto de interés en relación con este artículo.
Vocabulary and knowledge / Vocabulario y conocimiento 17
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