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Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children
Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children is the story of the landmark research study that uncovered the widely cited "word gap" between children from low-income homes and their more economically advantaged peers. This groundbreaking research has spurred hundreds of studies and programs, including the White House’s Bridging the Word Gap campaign and Too Small to Fail , a joint initiative of the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton foundation. Betty Hart and Todd Risley wanted to know why, despite best efforts in preschool programs to equalize opportunity, children from low-income homes remain well behind their more economically advantaged peers years later in school. Each month, they recorded one full hour of every word spoken at home between parent and child in 42 families, categorized as professional, working class, or welfare families. Two and a half years of coding and analyzing every utterance in 1,318 transcripts followed. By age 3, the recorded spoken vocabularies of the children from the professional families were larger than those of the parents in the welfare families. Between professional and welfare parents, there was a difference of almost 300 words spoken per hour. Extrapolating this verbal interaction to four years, a child in a professional family would accumulate experience with almost 45 million words, while an average child in a welfare family would hear just 13 million—coining the phrase the 30 million word gap . The implications of this painstaking study are Hart and Risley's follow-up studies at age 9 show that the large differences in children's language experience were tightly linked to large differences in child outcomes. As the authors note in their preface to the 2002 printing of Meaningful Differences , "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." By giving children positive interactions and experiences with adults who take the time to teach vocabulary, oral language concepts, and emergent literacy concepts, children should have a better chance to succeed at school and in the workplace. Learn more about how parent and children's language interactions affect learning to talk in Hart & Risley's companion book
268 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1995
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464 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
February 16, 2025
This is one of these books that has been very influential, but when you read it critically it doesn't seem to mean what people think it means.
Based on a very small sample size (29 children followed to 3rd grade) of welfare and working-class and professional households, the authors extrapolate that poor children suffer from a huge vocabulary gap vs. the other classes. Okay, that's plausible. But that's just an observation about a problem, not a test of a solution.
Nevertheless, it seems that based on that observation, people have jumped to assuming that the remedy is to do things like running ads to tell everyone to read to their children every day. And now they want parents to buy electronic word counters. Fair enough, except that decades of this type of advice has not closed the gap. In fact, one could easily imagine how these interventions further widen the gap between poor kids and others, as richer families do even more of the daily reading aloud now than they used to.
The biggest problem though is that pre-school vocabulary does not appear to be a valid predictor of the relevant outcome of school performance. As the authors note on page 161:
"We had speculated, however, that rates of vocabulary growth might be related rather specifically to language skills. We saw no association between rate of vocabulary growth and the children's third-grade scores in the academic skill areas of reading, writing, spelling, and arithmetic ... ."
In other words, based on Hart & Risley, one can conclude that there is possibly a huge vocabulary gap, but that it doesn't matter much for school performance. To me, the implication is that rather than launching more vocabulary-focused programs, one should look first for other modifiable early factors that do predict school performance, and then test interventions to address those.
I seem to be alone in this assessment so if I am misinterpreting the paragraph above or missing something else, I hope someone will comment with clarification.
In addition, the famous "30 million word gap" meme that originated from this research does not appear to stand up to replication studies.
Based on a very small sample size (29 children followed to 3rd grade) of welfare and working-class and professional households, the authors extrapolate that poor children suffer from a huge vocabulary gap vs. the other classes. Okay, that's plausible. But that's just an observation about a problem, not a test of a solution.
Nevertheless, it seems that based on that observation, people have jumped to assuming that the remedy is to do things like running ads to tell everyone to read to their children every day. And now they want parents to buy electronic word counters. Fair enough, except that decades of this type of advice has not closed the gap. In fact, one could easily imagine how these interventions further widen the gap between poor kids and others, as richer families do even more of the daily reading aloud now than they used to.
The biggest problem though is that pre-school vocabulary does not appear to be a valid predictor of the relevant outcome of school performance. As the authors note on page 161:
"We had speculated, however, that rates of vocabulary growth might be related rather specifically to language skills. We saw no association between rate of vocabulary growth and the children's third-grade scores in the academic skill areas of reading, writing, spelling, and arithmetic ... ."
In other words, based on Hart & Risley, one can conclude that there is possibly a huge vocabulary gap, but that it doesn't matter much for school performance. To me, the implication is that rather than launching more vocabulary-focused programs, one should look first for other modifiable early factors that do predict school performance, and then test interventions to address those.
I seem to be alone in this assessment so if I am misinterpreting the paragraph above or missing something else, I hope someone will comment with clarification.
In addition, the famous "30 million word gap" meme that originated from this research does not appear to stand up to replication studies.
October 17, 2023
Had to read this entire book for class so I’m counting it in my reading goal
February 14, 2012
This is a very interesting read on early childhood development. I think this research has managed to make its way into the occasional media story. I heard a reference to it on NPR once.
The authors constructed a longitudinal study where graduate students spent one hour with families every other week for four years. They observed the quantity and type of words spoken by parents to children from birth to four years of age.
They picked three groups of parents. The first set were professional families. These included professors from the University of Kansas as well as some lawyers and doctors. Then they picked another group of working class families. Finally they picked a group of families that were receiving government benefits ("welfare"). They decided to count the use of the spoken word by parents. Television words did not count. There were 42 families in each group. They cross-tested observers for observer neutrality.
Here are a few of the findings:
A child in a professional family hears 48 million words by the age of four. A child in a welfare family hears 13 million.
A child in a professional family hears 6 positive encouragements for every negative prohibition. A child in a welfare family receives two prohibitions for every positive encouragement.
The impacts show that while socio-economic status was predictive, quantity of words and particularly the ratio of positive to negative were far more significant. The welfare children had an average iq of 75 and the professional children scored around 119. The working class families scored 99. The iqs were roughly the same when they revisited the children at age 19.
Their belief is that the professional parents were trying to help their kids develop analytical skills based on frequent questions and discussion of abstract ideas. They were trying to teach their children the skills that they thought were important to success in life. On the other hand, the welfare parents were teaching their kids the necessity of following orders, fitting in with group expectations, and exhibit respect for superiors. Given the characteristics of workplace expectations for workers at the top and the bottom of the job scale, both parent groups were trying to help their children cope with the worlds that they knew in their own lives.
The authors believe that this creates an ongoing cycle of economic inequality. Moreover, they think the distinctions are going to become more problematic as our society continues to discount manual labor while putting increasing weight on to the symbolic analysts.
The authors suggest that we need to spend a lot more money on early childhood intervention and on parent-coaching. To get a welfare child to hear as many words as a professional child, a caseworker would need to spend 61 hours per week in the home of a child.
The authors constructed a longitudinal study where graduate students spent one hour with families every other week for four years. They observed the quantity and type of words spoken by parents to children from birth to four years of age.
They picked three groups of parents. The first set were professional families. These included professors from the University of Kansas as well as some lawyers and doctors. Then they picked another group of working class families. Finally they picked a group of families that were receiving government benefits ("welfare"). They decided to count the use of the spoken word by parents. Television words did not count. There were 42 families in each group. They cross-tested observers for observer neutrality.
Here are a few of the findings:
A child in a professional family hears 48 million words by the age of four. A child in a welfare family hears 13 million.
A child in a professional family hears 6 positive encouragements for every negative prohibition. A child in a welfare family receives two prohibitions for every positive encouragement.
The impacts show that while socio-economic status was predictive, quantity of words and particularly the ratio of positive to negative were far more significant. The welfare children had an average iq of 75 and the professional children scored around 119. The working class families scored 99. The iqs were roughly the same when they revisited the children at age 19.
Their belief is that the professional parents were trying to help their kids develop analytical skills based on frequent questions and discussion of abstract ideas. They were trying to teach their children the skills that they thought were important to success in life. On the other hand, the welfare parents were teaching their kids the necessity of following orders, fitting in with group expectations, and exhibit respect for superiors. Given the characteristics of workplace expectations for workers at the top and the bottom of the job scale, both parent groups were trying to help their children cope with the worlds that they knew in their own lives.
The authors believe that this creates an ongoing cycle of economic inequality. Moreover, they think the distinctions are going to become more problematic as our society continues to discount manual labor while putting increasing weight on to the symbolic analysts.
The authors suggest that we need to spend a lot more money on early childhood intervention and on parent-coaching. To get a welfare child to hear as many words as a professional child, a caseworker would need to spend 61 hours per week in the home of a child.
July 18, 2009
For me the most intriguing part of this was the methodology and the researchers' perseverance for this long term project. It's important to remember this project and the authors' views are very much shaped by America's "War on Poverty" in past decades. But the conclusion, that we should talk to and with children as much as possible from birth on, has been influential in numerous areas. The book remains a thought provoking read.
March 18, 2013
Really impresses upon the reader the importance of constant parent-child talk and interaction the first three years of a child's life. If not interested, you can easily skip the methodology sections of the book and finish Meaningful Differences in a weekend.
January 2, 2021
Full disclosure: Betty Hart was my aunt - my father's sister. I didn't know her well, but whenever I talked to her I would learn something.
One of my favorite stories she told me was from when she was an undergrad at UC Berkely around 1950.
She needed a car, and one of her professors offered her a cheap one. The engine had quit running, and nobody knew why, but the car was in good shape otherwise. Betty signed up for an auto shop class so she could repair the car. She was a small woman. Intellectual and well read, and surrounded by large men in that class. She described them as being very helpful as she set about repairing her car. But at the beginning, when diagnosing the car's problems, she decided that the crankshaft must have been broken. The shop teacher didn't believe that - it was not the sort of thing that was likely to happen.
In the end it turned out that Betty was correct. The car's crankshaft was broken. And she got a car for almost nothing, along with an excellent education.
But back to the book.
Betty Hart devoted the majority of her adult life to the study that collected the data that was analyzed to produce this book. There is a vast quantity of data from that study. So much that just before Betty died a few years ago, she had collated perhaps only half of it.
At her memorial at Kansas University, her colleagues told me that this study would never be replicated because there was such a great amount of labor involved that nobody would be able to afford to do those things again. But the records are still at KU for any researcher to access.
One of my favorite stories she told me was from when she was an undergrad at UC Berkely around 1950.
She needed a car, and one of her professors offered her a cheap one. The engine had quit running, and nobody knew why, but the car was in good shape otherwise. Betty signed up for an auto shop class so she could repair the car. She was a small woman. Intellectual and well read, and surrounded by large men in that class. She described them as being very helpful as she set about repairing her car. But at the beginning, when diagnosing the car's problems, she decided that the crankshaft must have been broken. The shop teacher didn't believe that - it was not the sort of thing that was likely to happen.
In the end it turned out that Betty was correct. The car's crankshaft was broken. And she got a car for almost nothing, along with an excellent education.
But back to the book.
Betty Hart devoted the majority of her adult life to the study that collected the data that was analyzed to produce this book. There is a vast quantity of data from that study. So much that just before Betty died a few years ago, she had collated perhaps only half of it.
At her memorial at Kansas University, her colleagues told me that this study would never be replicated because there was such a great amount of labor involved that nobody would be able to afford to do those things again. But the records are still at KU for any researcher to access.
March 6, 2023
I don't typically keep track of textbooks I read for class, but I was impressed with myself that I read this in one day for an assignment. Reading is reading.
So as an SLP, this was reassuring because it's about longitudinal research that reaffirms what I already tell parents in practice: the quantity and quality of language a child hears in the early years is important for language development. The theory is: the more a child hears something, the more likely they are to say it. This goes for negative language too - if a child hears "no" or "shut up" more often than they hear "good job," they're going to repeat the negative stuff more. I wish more parents understood this - you can't verbally abuse your child throughout the day and expect them not to absorb that and say it back.
I also like that this book highlighted the disparity between the vocabularies of children from professional families, children from working middle class, and children from welfare families. Does a low income naturally mean that the child will have a smaller vocabulary than their higher SES peer? No, of course not. But lack of support for parents in low SES households can lead to fewer interactions between parents and children, which can result in these children hearing much fewer words than their peers.
So as an SLP, this was reassuring because it's about longitudinal research that reaffirms what I already tell parents in practice: the quantity and quality of language a child hears in the early years is important for language development. The theory is: the more a child hears something, the more likely they are to say it. This goes for negative language too - if a child hears "no" or "shut up" more often than they hear "good job," they're going to repeat the negative stuff more. I wish more parents understood this - you can't verbally abuse your child throughout the day and expect them not to absorb that and say it back.
I also like that this book highlighted the disparity between the vocabularies of children from professional families, children from working middle class, and children from welfare families. Does a low income naturally mean that the child will have a smaller vocabulary than their higher SES peer? No, of course not. But lack of support for parents in low SES households can lead to fewer interactions between parents and children, which can result in these children hearing much fewer words than their peers.
June 25, 2017
This book aside from "Verbal Behavior" and "THE HOLY BIBLE" is the third most important book in the existence of the world.
This book is worth reading more than once, and if you are a parent aside from "THE HOLY BIBLE" this book would help you help your child more than any other book.
"Verbal Behavior" by Dr. B. F. Skinner is a book showing the full understanding of language, but the impact of language is very significant to humans, and especially children as this book shows.
This book is worth reading more than once, and if you are a parent aside from "THE HOLY BIBLE" this book would help you help your child more than any other book.
"Verbal Behavior" by Dr. B. F. Skinner is a book showing the full understanding of language, but the impact of language is very significant to humans, and especially children as this book shows.
December 29, 2024
Terrible science (-5 stars) but critical to read (and read with a critical eye) due to its widespread impact on policy and for them saying the quiet part out loud (like “we decided to do [a statistical test] despite our data violating its assumptions, because it would allow us to make the comparisons we wanted to”) so that you really know how terrible the science is.
Read
October 4, 2022this book made me both more interested and more terrified abt raising kids
pretty narrow demographic for the sample tho
pretty narrow demographic for the sample tho
April 3, 2024
read this for a class. this book had a lot of really interesting insights
June 16, 2013
In this book, published in 1995, Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley make a strong case that much of the achievement gap between children from poor families and those from better off families relate to differences in those children's early childhood experiences. By observing interactions between parents and young children in 42 families, Hart and Risley found that there was a strong correlation between how and how much parents talked to young children and the verbal development, including vocabulary, of the children, and the differences that were found predicted academic achievement in certain domains at age 8. The differences in the amount of talking parents do to children varied remarkably by socioeconomic status: "By age 3 the children in professional families would have heard more than 30 million words, the children in working-class families 20 million, and the children in welfare families 10 million." These are differences for which Head Start and pre-K programs just cannot compensate.
May 1, 2015
Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children is the presentation of a study to determine how to help children from low-income homes with substantially less vocabulary words entering kindergarten than their peers from more affluent homes. The study records weekly interaction with children in forty-two homes for numbers of interactions, length of interaction and if the parent anticipates the needs of the child without requiring the child to verbalize the need.
They also looked at closing the gap between these two groups with high quality preschool experiences rich in language and found that the gap can be lessened but not entirely closed with preschool to help children with fewer vocabulary words. Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children is a valuable resource for educators working as advocates for giving young children preschool experience and as a reference for educators taking college courses in English Second Language or diversity studies.
They also looked at closing the gap between these two groups with high quality preschool experiences rich in language and found that the gap can be lessened but not entirely closed with preschool to help children with fewer vocabulary words. Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children is a valuable resource for educators working as advocates for giving young children preschool experience and as a reference for educators taking college courses in English Second Language or diversity studies.
June 15, 2013
Not everyone wants to read this book. Most of it is a tedious description of Hart & Risley's specific methods for their research. However, it is very reassuring to read exactly what & how they came to their conclusions, which are mind-blowing:
[[I started to write a lengthy book description - but the Summer Reading Program starts today, & I don't have time to finish, so I will have to post it later!]]
[[I started to write a lengthy book description - but the Summer Reading Program starts today, & I don't have time to finish, so I will have to post it later!]]
March 27, 2017
This is a book read for class. It's a longitudinal study looking at language development. The authors found that the more you talk/interact with your child from ages 0-3, the larger vocabulary your child has at 3 years do age. This is important because we can reliably predict a child's academic outcome based on their vocabulary at 3. Unless you're a grad student, you probably don't need to read this book, but the bottom line is: read and talk to you children!
September 24, 2007
This is one of the books that I reference most, both aloud and internally, in my professional life. It's a longitudinal study of language development that exposes the differences in frequency and "quality" of language across classes. It is a constant reminder of the inequities, language-wise, that children and human beings, bring to the table.
May 1, 2013
This book could not be more dry but its insights about the importance of 0-3 age children being immersed in language-rich environments could not be more powerful. This is a "must read" for all expectant parents and parents of infants.
October 1, 2007
the importance of early language exposure to child development. awesome.
June 17, 2013
A benchmark study about the effects of environment on the development of children. The initial differences were shown to have a long-term effects of the formative years.
July 22, 2013
Everyone involved in education in the U.S., but especially those making education policy, must read this book.
June 21, 2016
reading up before starting my coursework this fall. so much of this still rings true after 20+ years...
if you'd like a less 'academic' take on the study check out 30 million words.
if you'd like a less 'academic' take on the study check out 30 million words.
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August 26, 20091 copy available
Want to read
October 27, 2012for the Rudy Crew book
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