Meaningful Differences - A review

Here is an excellent review of the book and the story of how the authors went down ths road.

Snip

Hart and Risley delved deeper into the richness of the parent-child interactions. They developed a set of five quality indicators, including vocabulary, sentence structure, number of choices given to the children, responsiveness to the children's speech, and the emotional quality of the interactions. These features accounted for a significant amount of variance in the children's vocabulary growth, vocabulary use and IQ scores at age 3, and were better predictors than race, gender or birth order. These differences held up at age nine, when the children were again tested for vocabulary and language skills.

Why would parental speech have such an impact on children's development? The authors discuss some of the developmental functions of language. Vocabulary defines and labels a child's experience in terms of the family culture. Language reflects the parent's view of what the child should notice and think about the world, family and self. In addition, the affect associated with language makes human sounds distinctive and, hopefully, pleasant.

This latter point was another striking research finding. Of the three socioeconomic levels studied, only the children in welfare families heard feedback that was overwhelmingly (80 to 90%) negative. This negative tone surely affects the children's self-concept, motivation level and expectations.

Here is a link to a pdf Power Point file that summarizes much of their work