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“WORDS ARE AS wild as rocky peaks. They’re as smooth as a millpond and as sunny as a day in a meadow. Words are beautiful things,” said the writer Brian Jacques. Words are beautiful things. They hold meaning, they reveal meaning, and they give us the power to express meaning. Words are also keys that unlock the world. Every time we read a book to a child, we are holding out a new box of interesting and useful keys for them to collect: a tumble of shapes and colors in which they may discover vintage keys, copper-colored pin-tumblers, tubular keys, double-sided keys, grand brass lever-lock keys. The variety of the keys they find, by its very existence, hints at the wideness of possibility in the world.
In medieval times, the lady of a castle, the chatelaine, could be identified by the fact that she carried keys. With the keys and other useful tools attached to a device strung with chains (also called a chatelaine) at her waist, she could enter any chamber, any storeroom, any locked closet. Having the keys made her mistress of her estate. The same is true for children and the words they learn: the more they have, the more vaults they can open. Not only that, but the more words they know, the more easily they’ll pick up new ones from context, syntax, and repetition.
There is music and antiquity in our words. Ordinary language that you and I use with our children has come to us from the deep past, handed across generations through speech and print. Words are the raw materials of the “language arts,” that stale phrase from elementary school that no more than hints at the emotional dynamism and potential for beauty we can unlock through near-infinite combinations of words. Language is an art form, if not always expressed in ways that exhilarate. It is also democratic and universal: anyone can dabble, and there are no expensive paints or canvases to buy.
“If your attitude to language has been generated by a parent who enjoys it with you,” Philip Pullman has said, “who sits with you on their lap and reads with you and asks you questions and answers your questions, then you will grow up with a basic sense that language is fun. I can’t begin to express how important that is; the most important thing of all.”
Language allows children to occupy the world, their castle, as owners. It means they can understand and describe things with texture and precision. It means that if a girl sees a dog or a squirrel, say, moving with great speed, she can describe what’s happening: is the creature darting or sprinting, racing or feinting, ambling or scampering? When something frightening happens, she can fine-tune her explanation: it was chilling, alarming, macabre, ghastly, daunting, or perhaps just unpleasant. Gradations of meaning matter, because they bring us closer to truth.
Even if nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, and the rest had no practical application, it still would be good for children to cultivate an ample and varied supply of them. That they do have functional value makes the spreading of their goodness that much more important.
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FACILITY WITH LANGUAGE improves a person’s ability to succeed in the world, and it starts early. Young children whose heads are well stocked with words tend to enter school ahead of their peers. They start with an advantage that in most cases increases as they rise through the grade levels, because, in a ruthless natural calculus, vocabulary growth comes with its own built-in accelerant. As neurobiologist Maryanne Wolf explains in her book Proust and the Squid, “For word-rich children, old words become automatic, and new words come flying in, both from the child’s sheer exposure to them and from his or her figuring out how to derive the meanings and functions of new words from new contexts.”
Word-rich schoolchildren gather more words with each passing year, pulling ahead all the time as their word-poor comrades fall behind in comparison. Academics call this phenomenon of accumulated advantage the Matthew effect, after a line from the Gospel of Matthew: “For to everyone who has, more will be given and he will grow rich; but from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away.” In common parlance we might say, “The rich get richer, the poor get poorer,” but in this case, the wealth we’re talking about is language, which is free to all.
The University of Kansas researchers who uncovered the thirty-million-word gap two decades ago (the original report was entitled Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children) decided to revisit the original subject families for a 2003 report. What they found alarmed them, as was evident from their title, “The Early Catastrophe: The 30 Million Word Gap by Age 3.” In describing their findings, Betty Hart and Todd Risley took pains to point out that all forty-two of the families they observed, whether tending toward word-richness or word-poverty, “nurtured their children and played with them. They all disciplined their children and taught them good manners and how to dress and toilet themselves. They provided their children with much the same toys, and talked to them about much the same things. Though different in personality and skill levels, the children all learned to talk and be socially appropriate members of the family with all the basic skills needed for preschool entry.”
There was, however, no avoiding certain glaring differences in the amount and type of language to which the children of these families were exposed. In word-rich households, parents talked more and encouraged conversation through affirmations (“That’s an interesting toy”), whereas in word-poor homes, the parents talked less and were more inclined to use prohibitions (“Don’t touch that”). The children who heard more words learned more words. The children who heard fewer words learned fewer words.
Boys and girls who had entered the original study as seven-month-old babies had left it at the age of three with divergent abilities. The children from word-rich homes could muster about 1,100 words. The children growing up in word-poor households had access to around 500 words. These differences correlated with even wider differences a few years later. Having returned to the families in their first study, Hart and Risley were “awestruck,” they wrote, to find that language competency at three accurately predicted measures of language skill six and seven years later, when children were nine and ten.
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SO HOW DO we do it? How can we surround children with language in such a way that they will encounter a rich variety of words? How can we help them remember the words they hear? And how best can we encourage them to experiment with the words they learn, so that they not only acquire a wide vocabulary but can also use it?
We can start by reading out loud to them. Well, of course, you may be thinking. Yet the several ways that reading aloud helps a person develop a sophisticated vocabulary are not necessarily self-evident. It is worth looking at them in turn, and in detail.
To begin with, books contain words, and therefore when we read books out loud, we are delivering those words to the listener. So far, so good. But when the listener in question is a child and the books contain more pictures than words, how helpful is reading them, really? How many distinct vocabulary words can a child possibly hear?
The answer may surprise you. We know from the example of The Story of Babar that even a single picture book can contain multitudes of surprising and interesting words. It’s true that Babar’s story comes to us from the 1930s, a time when picture-book texts tended to be more discursive than they are today. Assuming that parents and children will draw from an array of books, old and new, what kind of language fuel are we talking about?
That’s what researchers at Indiana University, Bloomington, wanted to find out for a study completed in 2015. The researchers began by selecting a hundred well-known picture books. These included beloved oldies—Babar and Munro Leaf’s The Story of Ferdinand and Virginia Lee Burton’s Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel—as well as popular newcomers such as The Day the Crayons Quit, by Drew Daywalt, and Jon Klassen’s This Is Not My Hat. The research team measured the lexical diversity of each book—that is, the total number of unique words. Then they did the same with recordings of parents chatting with their children. The children in the recorded dialogues ranged in age from newborn to five years old, matching th
e intended age range of the picture books. This created clear points of comparison between the words that children would hear in everyday speech and those they would hear from books.
The result? The Bloomington team concluded that “shared book reading creates a learning environment in which infants and children are exposed to words that they would never have encountered via speech alone.” (Italics mine.) “Unlike conversations, books are not limited by here-and-now constraints,” the report authors wrote, “each book may be different from others in topic or content, opening new domains for discovery and bringing new words into play.” At the rate of one book a day, the Bloomington team found that “a child would hear more than 219,000 words of text in a year. At the rate of two books a day, the child would hear more than 438,000 words of text in a year.”
For the average child, a diet of two picture books a day would supply about 6 percent of his “linguistic input,” as it’s called. That may not sound like much. But imagine expanding the daily reading from two books to, say, six or seven. Then imagine what this might represent in the life of a child who, like the word-deprived children in the Hart-Risley study, might otherwise be millions of words behind his peers by the time he turns three.
Every dollop of language can help. A word-poor household is, ipso facto, a place where not a lot of speech is directed toward children. It is often (but by no means always) low in socioeconomic status. According to a 2013 Stanford University study of low-income Latino families, most of the preschoolers under observation heard between 6,000 and 7,000 words of child-directed speech over the course of ten hours. That’s not a lot. Yet there were striking variations between the twenty-nine families in the study. One lucky child had heard more than 12,000 words. A less fortunate toddler had heard a mere 670 words. Think of the boost a picture book or two would add to that child’s repertoire.
What matters with vocabulary acquisition is not just the number of words but also their variety, and the ideas, objects, and concepts they represent. As New York University’s Catherine Tamis-LeMonda pointed out, “When you look at the content of language that children hear in different settings, book sharing is really the only setting in which you could talk about things that are different from your everyday routines.”
Picture books, she told me, provide “the opportunity to talk about many different words: the moon, the sun, the planets. You can do this in book sharing, whereas it would be kind of weird in everyday life. In everyday life, you may talk about books and balls and blocks and so forth, but books open the world and its infinite possibilities for words.”
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INFINITE POSSIBILITIES FOR words: it is a delicious idea! If only infinity were what small children wanted. Unfortunately, as many a fatigued grown-up will testify, often what’s wanted is not a new story, with new words, but the same story over and over and over. It can drive you to distraction.
“She will ask me to read Pip and Posy again and again,” said Magda Jenson, whose daughter was two when she made her complaint. “Eventually I say, enough! I’ve read Pip and Posy six times today! It’s time to read something else!”
Her frustration is forgivable. It can be tedious to read the same book night after night. It may even seem unhealthy for a child to fixate on one story when so many others remain unexplored. If nothing else, our irritation marks us out as grown-ups. We love novelty; children love reassurance. We like smoky nuance; they like clear endings. In any case, Axel Scheffler’s rabbit and mouse characters aren’t supposed to interest people over the age of five. In bright pictures, the friends play and argue and experience toddler drama, and though adults may appreciate the books as pleasant bedtime reads, we cannot expect to be drawn into their thrall the way a two-year-old will be. So when the child holds up a Pip and Posy book yet again, we groan: “Enough!”
The trouble is, it may not be enough. When a child asks for the same story “again, again,” he is telling us something important, though we may never find out what that important thing is. The book may be helping him perform quiet interior work having to do with fear or sadness that he can’t articulate. The book may be an old friend whose familiarity feels comforting at bedtime. When Flora was at the Pip and Posy stage, she wanted us to read Clement Hurd’s The Merry Chase every night, for weeks. She loved the color-saturated illustrations of a dog dashing after a cat through a neighborhood—right through houses and shops—causing mayhem. She also had an inexhaustible appetite for Stephen Mitchell’s adaptation of The Tinderbox, the Hans Christian Andersen story. Flora would pore over Bagram Ibatoulline’s intricate pictures of the gnarled and terrible witch, and she wasn’t troubled in the least when the three huge dogs (“the one with eyes like clocks, the one with eyes like dinner plates, and the one with eyes like wagon wheels”) put a violent end to the king and queen.
Why did she love these books so? I don’t know. I don’t have any explanation, either, for Molly’s devotion, years earlier, to Around the World with Ant and Bee, by Angela Banner, or to David McKee’s cautionary tale Not Now, Bernard. All I know is that we went through these books again and again and again. I noticed, as many parents do, that my children had little habits with their favorite books, moments when the page had to be touched in a way that could appear oddly formal. If we had once paused to examine a tiny drawing of Lowly Worm in his little Tyrolean hat in a busy Richard Scarry illustration, for instance, we had to pause every time. If a page had a rip or a smudge, a small finger might have to touch that spot, too, every time. One little girl, Ella, who’s all grown up now, was so enamored of the dogs splashing in a swimming pool in a P. D. Eastman illustration that she would try to join them. Her mother laughed at the memory: “When we got to that part, she had to take her sock off and put her foot physically into the gutter of the book, as if she were going into the pool. I remember being on the subway with the stroller and she’d be strapped in, and we’d get to that page and I could see her, in the stroller, physically trying to get her foot up so that she could get it into the book!”
When my daughters Violet and Phoebe were four and three, respectively, we had to read The Story of Babar most nights. Violet at the time had a curious cosmology: in picture-book illustrations, all older men were kings, all younger men were princes, and females of all ages, unless obviously witches, were princesses. In those days my children also competed to claim characters and objects in the picture books we read (“I’m the monkey,” someone would say, tapping the page, or “That’s my cake”). One night the girls and I arrived at the scene in which Babar meets his wealthy benefactress. Violet thrust out a finger and pointed to the Old Lady.
“I’m her,” she said. “She’s a princess.”
A few pages later, we got to the scene of Babar motoring through the countryside, about to pass the girl with the braid down her back standing beside the goat with the bell around its neck.
It was Phoebe’s turn to poke the page.
“That’s me,” she said, “with my goat.”
“No, that’s me,” Violet said.
“No, that’s you,” her little sister agreed.
“I know,” Violet said. “She’s a princess.”
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WE MAY NOT ever know why some books come to exert such spellbinding power that children want to hear them again and again. Perhaps it will forever be a mystery, like love. There does however seem to be one solid, prosaic explanation: children enjoy repeating books because the experience imbues them with feelings of competence and mastery; because, with each reading, they understand a bit more of what they’re seeing and hearing.
Researchers at the University of Sussex in Great Britain tested this idea by exploring the effect of rereading the same storybooks on a cohort of three-year-olds. I should point out that the books they chose did not reflect the passions of any particular child but were created for the study. The clinicians wanted to observe the children’s fast and slow mapping of new words, that two-speed process of language acquisition we discussed earlier. So
they smuggled a couple of made-up vocabulary words into the narratives of otherwise unremarkable picture books, so that they would be able to separate the ersatz words from words the children already knew. For three specially created picture books, The Very Naughty Puppy, Nosy Rosie at the Restaurant, and Rosie’s Bad Baking Day, the researchers invented an unorthodox hand mixer, the sprock, and a peculiar rolling pin, the tannin.
To the young subjects, these words would be no more bizarre than the aardvark or the andiron. The English language is full of eccentricity. Why not a sprock or a tannin? The children in the study took the words in stride as they would any others that were unfamiliar to them. Context gave them clues to the meaning of the words and their grammatical function, and repetition made the words memorable.
As Vanderbilt’s David Dickinson and his colleagues pointed out, “Children learn vocabulary through grammar and grammar through vocabulary.” Once they know a word, if they hear it in different syntactic settings, their understanding will expand. To take an example from Babar, the adjective becoming, to describe a shade of green, turns into a verb when used to describe the changing of one circumstance into another (“it’s becoming chilly”). The more words and the greater the diversity of texts children hear, the more easily they can untangle these intricacies.
The Sussex University study found that reading picture books “again, again” is remarkably helpful in this regard. “We found a dramatic increase in children’s ability to both recall and retain novel name-object associations encountered during shared storybook reading when they heard the same stories multiple times in succession,” Jessica Horst, Kelly Parsons, and Natasha Bryan wrote, publishing their conclusions in 2011.
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