Commentary: Déjà Vu All Over Again: What’s Wrong With Hart & Risley and a "Linguistic Deficit" Framework in Early Childhood Education?

In this invited article, the author critiques some of the most often-cited scholarship on children’s early language development and its relationship to children’s learning. She suggests that Hart and Risley’s work, Meaningful Differences, adopts an implicit deficit perspective, and makes unwarranted claims about the impact of children’s early language on their later thinking and learning abilities. In contrast, she proposes an alternative...