In 1995, Hart and Risley, in a groundbreaking study, reported a projected 30-million-word gap in words heard by age 4 between children growing up in low-resourced homes and their peers growing up in high-resourced homes, with corresponding differences in children's language skills. The simple and parsimonious message that children who hear more words know more words infiltrated the public sphere, influencing researchers, policymakers, and caregivers. However, the benefits associated with exposure to language are nuanced and complex, and language input is about more than the number of words that pass a child's senses. The features of the language, often referenced as quality, addressed to children may be more important for language development than the amount of talk per se. What words caregivers use and how they use them vary greatly. Several researchers have recognized the value of measuring features of language input (Cartmill, 2016;Kuchirko, 2019;Rowe & Snow, 2020). In this article, we argue that this focus further promotes a more inclusive approach to understanding how children learn, which is crucial as the field moves away from a focus on Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) populations and toward a more global science. QUA N T I F Y I NG SPEEC H I N PU TDecades after Hart and Risley's report (1995), the quantity of speech in children's environments continues to be a major area of focus (see Kuchirko, 2019, for a review). Indeed, even research that has focused on debunking
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