Excerpted from The Social World of Children Learning to Talk, by Betty Hart, Ph.D., & Todd R. Risley, Ph.D.

Copyright © 1999 by Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

With this book we celebrate 36 years of collaboration. We first met at the University of Washington in 1962, where we were both mentored by the great Montrose Wolf. He guided Betty in demonstrating to the world the power of adult attention for young children. On the basis of that discovery, he and Todd invented "time-out" and discovered how to teach mute children to talk. In 1965 we joined a group that set up early intervention programs in a low-income neighborhood in Kansas City, Kansas. The longitudinal study we describe in this book had its beginning in the questions we asked as we worked together on language intervention, on the organization of preschool and child care programs, and on children's vocabulary growth. In 1982 we decided to search for the realities of children's early lives. We devoted the next 3 years to monthly observations of casual family interactions and then 10 more years to creating an immense, reliable, completely quantified database.

After 13 years of the routine, exhausting work of natural science, we suddenly were so rich in data and discoveries that we had to write two books. The first, Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children (Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co., 1995), reported our journey to the most important of our discoveries, one that amazes us still because it was so invisible during our observations of family interactions. The longitudinal data revealed that there are enormous, durable differences among families in the amount that parents talk with young children and that these differences are profoundly and lastingly related to how children turn out. We had to devote a book to establishing the integrity of this finding and discussing the implications for national policy of such huge differences in the amounts of early language experience that children bring to an increasingly technological society.

We discussed in Meaningful Differences the role of language experience in the intergenerational transmission of competence. In this book we describe our discovery of the pattern of that transmission. We put all of the tables and figures together in the appendixes rather than intersperse them within the chapters so that the quantification of our findings would complement and review rather than interrupt our description of the changing parent-child interactions we observed.

Equally as unexpected as our first discovery of differences among the parents was our second discovery of similar differences among the children. Before the children began talking, all of their data looked alike. All were vocalizing approximately 150 times per hour. But at 36 months old, each child's data looked like the data of that child's parent. The data revealed that as children are learning to talk, they talk more and more, and then their rates of talking level off. This leveling off occurs when they begin to talk as much as their parents had been talking to them.

When we looked at what was happening between the parents and children during the months the children were learning to talk, we saw the intergenerational transmission of the particular social dance practiced in the family. After the demands of daily living were taken care of, extra talk occurred in conversations concerning ideas, feelings, and impressions. Parents who talked a lot about such things or only a little ended up with 3-year-olds who also talked a lot, or only a little. We saw added to the huge differences in the amount of language experience we reported in our first book, huge differences in the amount that the children were practicing using language to influence and understand their everyday experience.

The data lead us to a simple message for parents. When you talk with your children a lot about things that are not important, you automatically give them experiences that are important to their cognitive and emotional learning. While your children are little, your conversation matters. Children get better at what they practice, and having more language tools, more nuances, more fluency, more steps in the social dances of life is likely to contribute at least as much to your children's future success as their heredity and their choice of friends.