Reexamining the Verbal Environments of Children From Different Socioeconomic Backgrounds Douglas E. Sperry Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College Linda L. Sperry Indiana State University Peggy J. Miller University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign Amid growing controversy about the oft-cited “30-million-word gap,” this investigation uses language data from five American communities across the socioeconomic spectrum to test, for the first time, Hart and Ris- ley’s (1995) claim that poor children hear 30 million fewer words than their middle-class counterparts during the early years of life. The five studies combined ethnographic fieldwork with longitudinal home observations of 42 children (18–48 months) interacting with family members in everyday life contexts. Results do not sup- port Hart and Risley’s claim, reveal substantial variation in vocabulary environments within each socioeco- nomic stratum, and suggest that definitions of verbal environments that exclude multiple caregivers and bystander talk disproportionately underestimate the number of words to which low-income children are exposed. Recently, considerable attention has been paid to the disparity in the number of words spoken to very young children from socioeconomically disad- vantaged families compared with their privileged peers. Although this relationship has been oft noted, the current reiterations of the argument her- ald the 30-million “Word Gap,” citing Hart and Ris- ley’s (HR) study of 42 Kansas families conducted in the 1980s (Hart & Risley, 1995, 2003). HR calculated the mean number of words spoken to each child across 1-hr monthly observations from the child’s first to third birthday. HR then extrapolated from this average to predict the number of words the child would hear in the first 4 years of life. In this manner, HR estimated that the children in their most impoverished group (six African Americans) heard 30 million fewer words than did the children in the most privileged group (13 offspring of professional families, one of whom was African American). These findings have never been repli- cated. The Word Gap has garnered widespread atten- tion beyond the academy. Media interest acceler- ated in 2013 when the Bloomberg Philanthropies Mayor’s Challenge awarded Providence, RI its grand prize to “Providence Talks.” This project pro- posed to teach poor parents how to speak to their children with the aid of an electronic device that measured their words. Another prominent example is the Clinton Foundation’s Too Small to Fail Initia- tive, which hosted the White House Word Gap Event in October 2014. Initiatives announced at this policy forum included potential funding by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for remedial efforts to address the Word Gap. Recent attention includes an Associated Press report on the Providence initiative that was picked up by major news outlets including the New York Times (Neer- gaard, 2017). Not all attention to the Word Gap has been favorable. Some scholars suggest that the Word Gap is only the most recent vestige of a tendency to consider non-mainstream ways of speaking as This research was supported by a Spencer/National Academy of Education Dissertation Fellowship for Research Related to Education to Douglas E. Sperry and by a grant from the Univer- sity of Illinois Research Board (Arnold O. Beckman Award) to Peggy J. Miller. We thank the families who generously partici- pated in this research; the members of D.S.’s dissertation com- mittee (Anne Haas Dyson, Cynthia L. Fisher, Wendy L. Haight, and Mich ele Koven); and R. Bryant, M. Olivarez, C. Rundel, E. Siegel, E. E. Sperry, and A. Vowell for their assistance in tran- scription and coding. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Douglas E. Sperry, Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College, Saint Mary of the Woods, IN 47876. Electronic mail may be sent to dsperry@smwc.edu. © 2018 Society for Research in Child Development All rights reserved. 0009-3920/2018/xxxx-xxxx DOI: 10.1111/cdev.13072 Child Development, xxxx 2018, Volume 00, Number 0, Pages 1–16