Excerpted from Chapter 5 of Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children, by Betty Hart, Ph.D., & Todd R. Risley, Ph.D.

Copyright © 1995 Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

When parents just talk to create or maintain social closeness with their children, letting immediate circumstances determine the words they use, they expose their children to a steady stream of diverse words and expressions associated with all the varied objects the parents and children handle in the varied places they interact. Children hear vocabulary used in connection with many slightly different uses of objects and in relation to many other different words in a variety of sentence structures.

Such parent talk in association with ongoing experience serves to define and label that experience into the referents of the parent's culture. The more often a child hears different words, the more varied are the associated experiences and the more the meanings of the words for the child come to match the range and nuances of the meanings of the words for the speaker and the culture. Even within the consistent routines that establish associations between words and events for infants there is continual variation. For example, as parents dress their children they casually inform them of the range of meaning of the word "clothes." Clothes will be pants and sweater one day and shorts and shirt another, all of which themselves vary in association with words describing color, size, and weight.

When parents talk spontaneously to their children about what they are doing at the moment, the words they use vary with the subtle demands of the circumstances of speaking. The different words they use reflect the variety of experiences they provide their children and the aspects of those experiences they consider important for the children to notice, name, and remember. The invisible curriculum of child rearing focuses parent talk on what children need to know: first the basics, the names of all the things and actions required in order to give and follow directions; then social routines for polite giving and getting; and, finally, preparation for school by naming colors, counting, and reciting name and age.

The vocabulary of basic names and categories parents use when talking to young children lays the foundations for the complex concepts and relationships the children will be asked to understand later on. The diversity of the vocabulary parents use reflects the scope of the knowledge base the parents are putting in place. A propensity to name and describe embraces the visible, external world as well as the inner world of ideas and motivations. In the intimacy of caring for their infants, parents establish much of what their children will know and feel about private and personal things. As they interpret their infants' behaviors, they label and categorize states and actions and legitimatize with words nuances of feeling and attitudes toward one's own body and self.

We had coded the quality features of vocabulary in the data variables assigned to all words and to the different words the parent said to the child. We assigned each word in the data a code for part of speech and speaker. Words were coded as nouns, verbs, modifiers, or functors; parent words were separately coded for whether they were addressed to the child or to other people. The computer program looked up each word in the individual dictionary of the speaker, added the word if it was not listed there, and counted by part of speech each word and each different word (type) used by the speaker in that observation. This process revealed how different the parents were in the number of total words and of different words, especially different nouns and modifiers (adjectives and adverbs), then typically addressed to the children per hour. Some children learning words had much more experience than others hearing objects, actions, and attributes named in the varying contexts of daily life.