Guest Blog by Drs. Lauren Schnell-Peskin and Jessica Day
Lauren Schnell-Peskin (she/her) earned her Ph.D. in ABA from Caldwell University and is
currently an Associate Professor in the ABA programs at Hunter College. In addition to her
academic appointment, Dr. Schnell-Peskin maintains a private consultation practice, where she
collaborates with and supports families of individuals with ASD.
Dr. Schnell-Peskin’s scholarship centers on stakeholder training, instructional design, and the
broader application of behavior-analytic principles in community settings. Her work has been
published in several peer-reviewed journals, and she regularly presents at local, national, and
international conferences. She is also a very tired mom to a teenager and a toddler.
Dr. Jessica Day is an Assistant Professor at Rider University. Dr. Day is an advocate for the broader application of behavior analysis to mainstream populations. Her work addresses a broad range of infant safety topics. Dr. Day collaborates with a team of researchers and clinicians in the Mid-Atlantic region to provide community-based safe infant sleep trainings to caregivers to reduce the risk of a Sudden Unexpected Infant Death. Dr. Day has presented her research at regional and international conferences in the field of behavior analysis and is a member of the American Association of SIDS Prevention Physicians.
Last Tuesday morning, I was loading the dishwasher when my two-year-old, Maeve, marched into the kitchen and announced, “Mama, Eloise (the dog) is chewing the couch, and she is being naughty.” I stood, fork in hand. Naughty. I had no recollection of teaching her that word. She had to have stolen it from somewhere, a book, a grandparent, an off-hand comment I didn’t even register saying and deployed it with perfect contextual accuracy. It was a small moment, the kind any parent of a toddler experiences daily. But as a behavior analyst, I couldn’t stop turning it over. Where had that word come from? What conditions had to be in place for her to use it appropriately? And, more humbling, how many other words was she absorbing from the verbal environment I was creating around her, without any of us noticing?
That question sent me back to a book I had read in graduate school, assigned by my professor, Dr. April Kisamore, but had not picked up since becoming a parent: Betty Hart and Todd Risley’s Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children (1995). It hit very differently this time with my own young child.
Hart and Risley spent two and a half years following 42 families, recording, transcribing, and coding nearly every word spoken to and by their young children during monthly hour-long observations. The families spanned what the authors referred to as “professional,” “working class,” and “welfare” households. The children were observed from roughly nine months through age three, and a subset was followed up at ages nine and ten.
What Hart and Risley (1995) found has since become one of the most cited and most debated findings in developmental science: by age three, the children in “professional” families had heard, on average, approximately 30 million more words than the children in “welfare” families. The much-discussed “30-million-word gap” is the headline, but the headline buries the more important findings (Hart & Risley, 2003). Meaningful Differences is not, fundamentally, a book about poverty. It is a book about the cumulative power of small, ordinary, repeated verbal interactions.
Three findings, in particular, have stayed with me as a mom:
1. The cumulative arithmetic of small differences. Hart and Risley (1995) calculated that a child hearing, say, 2,150 words per hour (the average in their “professional” families group) accumulates roughly 11 million words a year. A child hearing 620 words per hour accumulates about 3 million. Extend that over the first 36 months of life, and the gap is enormous, not because any single hour is dramatic, but because every hour is doing quiet work. Whatever I say, or don’t say, to Maeve this afternoon will not move the needle. What I do across thousands of afternoons will.
2. Quality matters as much as quantity. Hart and Risley (1995) distinguished between mere word count and what they called the quality of language input: the diversity of vocabulary, the use of past and future tense, questions, expansions of the child’s own utterances, and, perhaps most striking, the ratio of encouragements (“good job,” “yes, that’s right,” “I like how you did that”) to discouragements (“stop that,” “no,” “don’t”). Behavior analysts will hear this and immediately think, differential reinforcement, schedule density, motivating operations! Hart and Risley made it so that the book reads like one long applied case for what we already know about establishing and maintaining verbal behavior.
3. The effects persist. When the researchers followed up with the same children at age nine, the amount and quality of language they had been exposed to before age three predicted vocabulary, language use, and reading comprehension better than any other variable they measured. Early verbal community is not just a head start. It is, in many ways, the foundation.
What This Looks Like at My Kitchen Counter
Reading this as a graduate student, I treated it as an abstract finding about populations. Reading it as Maeve’s mom, I treat it as a question about Tuesday morning.
Here is what I notice in our house, now that I am paying attention:
When Maeve points at the refrigerator and says, “milk,” the easiest response, and often the one I default to when I am tired from a long week, is to hand her the milk. In this case, the exchange is complete. From a behavior-analytic perspective, I have just reinforced a one-word mand. But I have done nothing to build the next response in her repertoire. Hart and Risley would call this a missed opportunity for expansion. A more language-rich response is, “You want milk! Should we pour the cold milk into the blue cup?” That sentence does several things at once: it reinforces her mand, models a fuller frame, introduces an adjective and a color, and invites a choice (which is itself an opportunity for another mand). The transaction takes ten seconds longer. Multiply that by every request she makes in a day, and the cumulative input is dramatically different.
I have also noticed how often I narrate, or fail to narrate, what is happening. When I am folding laundry, and Maeve is playing nearby, I can fold in silence, or I can say, “I’m folding my favorite shirt. This one is soft. This one is scratchy. Where do you think this sock goes?” The folding is identical. The verbal environment is not.
Then there is the encouragement-to-discouragement ratio. This is the one that genuinely changed my behavior. Two-year-olds spend a not-insignificant portion of their waking hours doing things you wish they would stop doing, for example, pouring juice into the dog’s water bowl, removing every single book from the shelf, pumping their expensive bath shampoo onto their baby’s head, etc. The natural flow of a day with a toddler can tilt heavily toward “no,” “stop,” “don’t.” I had to be mindful that I was upholding the other side of that ratio. So, I started, informally, paying attention to whether I was catching and naming the things Maeve was doing right — sitting nicely at the table, putting her shoes by the door, etc. The behaviors were already happening, and I just had to make sure we were reinforcing them verbally.
The Behavior-Analytic Translation
For readers of this blog, Hart and Risley’s (1995) findings map cleanly onto Skinner’s analysis of verbal behavior (Skinner, 1958). The “language environment” they describe is, in our terms, a verbal community, the set of contingencies under which a child’s verbal operants are shaped, maintained, and elaborated. A child whose mands are reinforced quickly and whose tacts are expanded and reinforced contingently learns to mand and tact more, with greater variety. A child whose verbal behavior is largely met with discouragement, or, just as importantly, with nothing at all, has fewer opportunities for the response–reinforcement pairings that build a fluent repertoire.
What Hart and Risley (1995) add to the conceptual picture is the cumulative dimension. Verbal behavior is shaped trial by trial, but the trials accumulate at a rate of thousands per day. The differences between verbal communities are not produced by any single dramatic intervention. They are produced by the schedule density of ordinary moments, such as the number of words heard per hour, the proportion of utterances that are responsive to the child, the proportion that affirm rather than correct, the proportion that introduce a new word or grammatical frame versus repeating a familiar one.
As behavior analysts, we sometimes describe parent training as teaching specific techniques. Hart and Risley’s (1995) data suggest that these techniques are most powerful when they are not techniques at all, but rather the default texture of how the adults in a child’s life talk to the child throughout the ordinary day.
What I Am Trying to Do Differently With Maeve
I will not pretend I have built a perfectly responsive verbal community in my house. Some afternoons, I am exhausted, and the iPad® makes an appearance, and the only word Maeve hears for thirty minutes is “Bluey.” But Hart and Risley (1995) have changed a few things about how I approach the day.
I narrate more. Cooking, driving, walking the dog, putting on shoes, etc. Most of the time that I am with Maeve, I am also doing something. Talking through what I am doing costs me nothing and gives her access to vocabulary she would otherwise not hear. I expand her utterances rather than just confirming them. “Dog!” gets “Yes, the dog is running through the wet grass!” instead of just “Yes, doggie.” I try to ask questions I do not know the answer to. “What do you think we should make for dinner?” “Where do you think Eloise is hiding?” These invite responses rather than test them, which I have found shifts the entire tone of our conversations. I count (very loosely) my encouragements. Not in a rigorous data-collection way (I am a behavior analyst, but I am also a tired working mom), but I try to notice when I have gone a while without affirming something she has done. That noticing is usually enough to shift my behavior.
And I try to remember the cumulative math. Today’s individual interactions feel small. But Maeve will be three soon, and Hart and Risley’s families had already written most of the story by then.
A Word of Caution, and a Closing Thought
It would be misleading to wrap this up without acknowledging that Meaningful Differences (1995) has been the subject of substantial critique in the thirty years since it was published. Researchers have raised legitimate concerns about sample size, the cultural assumptions embedded in what counts as “rich” language input, and the way the “word gap” framing has, at times, been used to pathologize the language practices of historically marginalized families. These critiques are worth engaging with seriously.
But the core insight that drew me back to the book as a parent has held up well: young children’s verbal repertoires are shaped by the verbal communities they inhabit, and those communities are built one interaction at a time. For me, while sitting on the kitchen floor with Maeve at 7 a.m., that is both an enormous responsibility and a strangely comforting thought. I do not have to do anything heroic (phew). I just have to keep talking with her, fully, responsively, with as many “yeses” as I can find, for as many of the next twenty-seven thousand waking hours of her early childhood as I can manage.
References
Hart, B., & Risley, T. R. (1995). Meaningful differences in the everyday experience of young
American children. Brookes Publishing.
Hart, B., & Risley, T. R. (2003). The early catastrophe: The 30 million word gap by age 3.
American Educator, 27(1), 4–9. https://www.aft.org/ae/spring2003/hart_risley
Skinner, B. F. (1957). Verbal behavior. Appleton-Century-Crofts.