“The Early Catastrophe” by Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley is a research article following the language gap in children from various socioeconomic backgrounds. The researchers predicted language development skills observed in young children would affect how they performed in school at an older age. They observed 42 children in their homes from infancy to age three to gather data on their vocabulary and make future predictions about development trajectories and gaps between the socioeconomic class. Then, they revisited 29 of the children 6 years later to compare the children’s actual development to the predicted trajectories. (Hart & Risley, 2003) This paper will explore the main result of their research and its implications for the classroom.…show more content… During infancy, early experiences are centered around family as babies depend on their caretakers to provide them with experience and social interactions. Therefore, the children observed turned out to be much like their parents in terms of vocabulary, amount of talk, and style of interaction. The children in families on welfare had the smallest vocabulary size and the slowest rate of vocabulary growth. The children in professional families had the largest vocabulary size and the fastest rate of vocabulary growth. The children in middle-class families were in the middle of the two. (Hart & Risley, 2003). As the children aged, the gaps continued to widen because their rate of growth remained either slow or fast, proving that early experiences with language development skills shape how children will continue to develop and what their development will look like at various
