1.5

is how much more time parents who are highly skilled professionals spend communicating with their children than those who are living on welfare.

These data are presented by Kirill Maslinsky, Research Fellow at HSE St. Petersburg’s Laboratory of Sociology in Education and Science, in the chapter ‘Language and Poverty’ in a recent book ‘Poverty and Child Development’.

Maslinsky elaborates that in the families of highly skilled professionals the volume of speech directed at children up to three years age is more than 30 million words, while in the families of workers the figure is only 20 million; in poor families living on welfare, it is 10 million.