Review of Hart and Risley’s Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children

Abstract

Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children presents a long-term study of the early, parentally supplied verbal environment of children and its association with a child's daily vocabulary and with later test scores. As such it provides a detailed and direct assessment of the effects of specific family interactions, especially those concerned with language development. In an introduction to the book, Lois Bloom termed Hart and Risley's effort "heroic," and indeed it seems so. Approximately 1,300 hour-long observations were painstakingly recorded, codified, and analyzed over the course of the study.1 Authors Betty Hart and Todd Risley are well known to the field of behavior analysis and single-subject design. Their book reports on a study of a different sort and of a type atypical of behavior analysis. Employing both descriptive and inferential statistical analyses of longitudinal data, the study could aptly be termed actuarial. In this sense it is more typical of traditional developmental psychological research that entails longitudinal study of children's natural environments. Finally, the study is exemplary as a model of this type of research because of its Hart, B., & Risley, T. R. (1995). Meaningful differences in the everyday experience of young American children. Baltimore: Brookes.

Associations of paternal factors and child’s sex with early vocabulary development – The STEPS study

“…The finding that vocabulary size in boys at 13 months of age predicted vocabulary growth between 13 and 24 months of age is significant. It suggests that already at 13 months of age we can find, at least in boys, trajectories for later language development as has also been suggested by Fenson et al (2007), Hart and Risley (1995), and Lee (2011).…”

“…What factors are associated with the kind of paternal behaviour that promotes their children's language development? Parental socioeconomic (SES) background has been argued to influence the quantity and quality of parental speech (Hart & Risley, 1995;Rowe, 2008). Most of this work has focused on mothers.…”

“…Most of this work has focused on mothers. Studies have shown that children of well-educated mothers hear more words than do children of mothers with less education (Gilkerson et al, 2017;Hart & Risley, 1995). Compared to mothers with mid-SES background, mothers with advanced education and a higher occupational status use longer sentences and a more varied and richer vocabulary (Hoff, 2003).…”

“…Boys with mothers working as professionals had larger vocabulary growth compared to boys with mothers of lower occupational status. The impact of parental occupational status on language use was established most famously by Hart and Risley (1995). Mothers from a high SES background have been demonstrated to use richer language with their children, with more words and child-directed speech (Hoff, 2003;Hoff-Ginsberg, 1998;Rowe, 2008;Weisleder & Fernald, 2013).…”

Children's likelihood to perform adult-like in word association test: Effects of bilingualism and distributional properties of word relationships

“…Improved effectiveness in concept elaborations may help children grasp how and why two concepts semantically relate, reinforcing the semantic network and the activation of related concepts given a cue. Increased frequency of communicative interactions between parents and children associated with higher social-economic status (Hart & Risley, 1995) may result in more exposures to distributional properties of word relationships, which may highlight the co-occurrence and semantic relatedness of word pairs in sentence contexts. Finally, the relationship between maternal education and semantic convergence may reflect the demographic properties of the adult respondents sampled in De Deyne et al (2019).…”