“The most important aspect of children’s language experience is its amount,” Hart and Risley write in the newly updated preface to their book. Their research, which began by recording 30,000 pages of transcripts collected from monthly visits to ordinary American families, showed that children from low-income families heard dramatically fewer words than children of professional parents and that this large disparity in language experience was tightly linked to differences in child outcomes. “With few exceptions, the more parents talked to their children, the faster the children’s vocabularies were growing and the higher the children’s IQ test scores at age 3 and later,” Hart and Risley note. “Amount of parent talk accounted for all the correlation between socioeconomic status (and/or race) and the verbal intellectual accomplishments.”

For officials responsible for improving the school performance of all children, and in particular meeting the Early Reading First program’s goals of “prepar[ing] young children to enter kindergarten with the necessary language, cognitive, and early reading skills to prevent reading difficulties and ensure school success,” the study has important implications. As Hart and Risley explain, “First, there is less need for programs to try to teach parents to talk differently to their children or to change parent styles of interacting and more need for programs to help parents learn to talk more to their children. Second, the most important aspect to evaluate in child care settings for very young children is the amount of talk actually going on, moment by moment, between children and their caregivers.”

Hart and Risley’s seminal work was the first to document why, despite the best efforts of preschool programs to equalize opportunity, children from low-income homes remain behind their economically advantaged peers years later in school. Widely recognized by experts as one of the most influential and authoritative studies to look at child language development and educational outcomes, the research showed that by age 3, the spoken vocabularies recorded for the children from the professional families were larger than those recorded for the parents in the welfare families — a fact that has been cited recently by politicians and reading experts and generated commentary on National Public Radio’s “Fresh Air” program.

The data, painstakingly recorded over 2 1/2 years in the homes of 1- and 2-year old children, also showed that between professional and welfare parents, there was a difference of almost 1,500 words spoken per hour. Extrapolating this verbal interaction to a year, a child in a professional family would hear 11 million words while a child in a welfare family would hear just 3 million. Or put another way, a child from a welfare family could start kindergarten having heard 32 million fewer words than their wealthier classmates.

“We knew that the ways parents interact with their children affect how their children turn out,” write Hart and Risley in Meaningful Differences, “we did not know how strongly the language performance of children is tied to how much their parents have talked to them, and why just more talking makes so much of a difference.”


About the Authors

Betty Hart, Ph.D., is Professor Emeritus of Human Development at the University of Kansas. Todd Risley, Ph.D., is Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Alaska. Both are Senior Scientists at the Schiefelbusch Institute for Life Span Studies at the University of Kansas.

Drs. Hart and Risley have been collaborating in their research and writing for more than 35 years. Their early work, begun at the University of Kansas where they established preschool intervention programs in low-socioeconomic neighborhoods in Kansas City, continues to form the empirical base for contemporary child-centered teaching practices in preschool and special education.

Four years after the publication of Meaningful Differences, Hart and Risley again blended their significant talents to write The Social World of Children Learning to Talk (Brookes Publishing Co., 1999). Charting the month-to-month growth in children’s vocabulary, utterances, and changing patterns of parent-child interaction, this book reveals the “social dance” of children learning to talk with their families.



About Brookes Publishing

On the verge of a quarter century in business, Brookes Publishing has been a leading provider of resources on education, disabilities, child development, early intervention, communication and language, behavior, and mental health since 1978. An independent company, Brookes Publishing is headquartered in Baltimore, Maryland. For more information on Brookes Publishing’s resource offerings, visit the Brookes Publishing website.

For more information about Meaningful Differences and to read an excerpt
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