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Hart and Risley's insight into the role of early language exposure in a child's ultimate academic achievement was an incredible step forward in social thought. The famous “war of words” between Noam Chomsky and B.F. Skinner, debating the question of language acquisition during the same period, didn't even hint at language exposure as a factor.
An intellectualized debate, the “war of words” juxtaposed Chomsky's theory of genetic prewiring of the human brain, or “nature,” with B.F. Skinner's “operant conditioning,” that is, negative versus positive reinforcement, or “nurture,” as the predominant factors for acquiring language. Most incredibly, while Skinner was the “nurture” part of the argument, exposure to language via parental input was not even mentioned in his theory. Instead, Skinner's “operant conditioning” rested on the theory that a child's language acquisition resulted from reinforcements similar to Pavlov's “rat with a lever” reward-versus-punishment routine.
Chomsky theorized, on the other hand, that humans had a “language acquisition device” genetically prewired within their brains. He believed that brain “encoding” explained the early, rapid acquisition of language in young children. Dismissing B.F. Skinner's hypothesis as “absurd,” he questioned how the complexity of grammar that children acquire in such a short period of time could be explained by a simplistic theory of reward and punishment.
The general acceptance of Chomsky's theory mirrored the broader acceptance of the importance of heredity in what happens to humans. As a result, interest in and support for exploring disparities in language outcomes were rare. Research in language acquisition was done primarily with infants and children from middle-class families, with findings then generalized to all children. There was little attempt to examine variations in development. While the debate continues today, as evidenced by the heated discussions I witnessed while auditing Professor Susan Goldin-Meadow's undergraduate course on child language development, it is Hart and Risley who deserve credit for initiating awareness of the importance of early language exposure in the development of the intellect.
While both Hart and Risley believed that science's role was “for the social good that [it] could produce” and to help “ develop answers to serious human problems,” in many ways Betty Hart and Todd Risley were polar opposites. It may have been their dissimilarities, in fact, that led to their successfully taking a very innovative, not totally accepted idea, and turning it into a world-famous landmark study.
“Applied behavioral analysis” refers to applying what science tells us about human behavior toward solving social problems. Todd Risley, a developmental psychologist, was one of its founding fathers, dedicating his professional life to understanding how human behavior could be shaped through interventions.
“Todd's genius,” said his lifelong colleague James Sherman, “was in seeing through the . . . tangle of vines . . . to the essence of the problem” in order to solve it. In other words, Risley paved clear paths through the behavioral labyrinth.
Betty Hart, said Steve Warren, was “ a unique genius.” Reserved, shy, wearing large glasses that overpowered her thin face, she had been Todd Risley's graduate student in the 1960s. Her escalation to colleague did not change their relationship; even after becoming his research partner, Betty Hart called Todd Risley “Dr. Risley.” But her mild academic appearance belied a dogged perseverance for detail and accurate data, traits that propelled their study from a vision into a reality. In 1982, Todd Risley left Kansas City, returning to “Risley Mountain,” his family's homestead in Alaska for four generations, to become professor of psychology at the University of Alaska in Anchorage. When he left, the day-to-day burden of the study fell on Betty Hart.