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I don't think I'd ever heard of Hart and Risley before Susan Goldin-Meadow's class and when I first heard their names in her class, I'm sure I had no idea of their ultimate importance to me. Child psychologists at the University of Kansas in the 1960s, Betty Hart and Todd Risley wanted to find a way to improve the poor academic achievement in low-income children. The program they designed, which included intense vocabulary enrichment, initially seemed to work. But when the children were tested before entering kindergarten, the positive effects had faded. Hart and Risley's determination to find out why resulted in a landmark study that was pivotal in our understanding the importance of the early language environment in a child's long-term learning trajectory.
But what makes Betty Hart and Todd Risley extraordinary is not simply the results of their study, but the fact that they did the study at all. The conventional wisdom of the time was that if you do well it's because you're smart; if you don't do well, it's because you're not. End of discussion. The differing trajectories of children born into poverty versus those born into more affluent families had long been accepted as immutable fact. Rarely were causes sought, because everyone knew why: genetics.
Hart and Risley changed that. In their groundbreaking study, they found another answer to the pivotal question “why?” The language environments of young children born into poverty, their study showed, were very different from the language environments of children born to more affluent families, and those differences could be correlated to later academic performance. In addition, while their study showed that children in lower socioeconomic homes heard far less language than their higher socioeconomic counterparts, quantity was not the only difference. Hart and Risley also found significant differences in quality, that is, what types of words were spoken and how they were spoken to a child. Finally, confirming that language exposure, not socioeconomic status, was the salient difference, Hart and Risley found that no matter how well or how poorly the children did academically, the early language environment was the significant factor. It all came down to words.
Because of Hart and Risley, the importance of the early language environment began to be understood: that the words a child heard, both the quantity and the quality, from birth through three years of age could be linked to the predictable stark disparities in ultimate educational achievement.
The children in the Hart and Risley study were born hearing, yet they were no different from children born deaf who acquire cochlear implants. Children who receive cochlear implants and are in homes where the language is rich do well; those who receive cochlear implants but are in homes without adequate language do not do as well. I began to understand, thanks to the work of many dedicated scientists, that it takes more than the ability to hear sounds for language to develop; it is learning that the sounds have meaning that is critical. And for that, a young child must live in a world rich with words and words and words.
I had given all of my patients the same ability to hear, but for those children born into homes where there was less talk, less eliciting of response, less variation in vocabulary, the meaningful sounds needed to make those critical brain connections were not sufficient. The cochlear implant, as incredible as it is, is not the missing puzzle piece. Rather, it is simply a conduit, a pathway for the essential puzzle piece, the miraculous power of parent talk , a power that is the same, whether a child is born hearing or has acquired hearing via a cochlear implant. Without that language environment, the ability to hear is a wasted gift. Without that language environment, a child will be unlikely to achieve optimally.
I believe that every baby, every child, from every home, from every socioeconomic status, deserves the chance to fulfill his or her highest potentials. We just have to make it happen.
And we can.
And that is what this book is about.