MEANINGFUL DIFFERENCES  &  LEARNING TO TALK

Betty Hart and Todd Risley

Book Description
Two award winning books Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children  and Learning to Talk reveal how daily child-parent social interactions govern children's language and social development.

The books are based on unparaled data from 2-1/2 years of observing the everyday interactions of 1- and 2-year-old children learning to talk in their own homes, Hart and Risley have charted the month-by-month growth of the children's vocabulary, utterances, and use of grammatical structures. The compelling narrative highlights reliability-tested research findings and is supplemented with numerous transcripts from observations and a list of 2,000 words of children's expressive vocabulary from 19-36 months of age.

These books are must-reading for professionals who need to understand how children learn to talk.

About the Author
Betty Hart, Ph.D., and Todd R. Risley, Ph.D., began their careers in the early 1960s at the Institute for Child Development at the University of Washington, where they participated in the original demonstrations of the power of learning principles in influencing young children. With Montrose Wolf they introduced the basic procedures of adult attention and time-out now routinely taught and used in teaching and parenting. They also introduced the procedures for shaping speech and language widely used in special education.

In 1965, Hart and Risley began 30 years of collaborative work at The University of Kansas, when they established preschool intervention programs in poverty neighborhoods in Kansas City. Their study of what children actually do and say in day care and preschool and their publications on incidental teaching form the empirical base for contemporary child-centered teaching practices in preschool and special education.

Dr. Hart is now Professor Emeritus of Human Development at The University of Kansas, and Dr. Risley is Professor of Psychology at the Universityof Alaska. Both are Senior Scientists at the Schiefelbusch Institute for Life Span Studies at The University of Kansas.

 

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CHILDREN’S LANGUAGE SKILLS

Reference: Learning to Talk: Betty Hart and Todd Risley

 

10 Months of Age: (children demonstrate the following skills)

            Following directions     

                                          Show me dancing. Can you put this in the trash?

                                          Can you bring me the keys?

            Playing with Toys   

                                          Rocking babies, pushing cars, Stacking blocks

            Responding to questions to notice and point     

                                          Where’s your nose? Who is that?, Where is sis?

 

11 Months of Age: (children demonstrate the following skills)

 

Most Common Vocabulary of children 11-24 months:

 

19 Months of Age: (children demonstrate the following skills)

 

            Name items they desire                         “milk”

            Ask for the name of items                     “what that?”

            Ask and answer questions,                    “where mine”, “In there”

            Claim possession                                  “my ball”

            Defend                                                 “Stop”, “don’t”

            Negate                                                 “not-up”

            Command attention                               “look”, “see”

            Demand compliance                             “more”, “Give me”

 

20-28 Months of Age: This period of development is called the period of staying and playing.  During this period children demonstrate increases in attention span, and hand eye coordination, which leads them spending increasingly more time engaged with increasingly challenging materials.  Parents interact with children during age appropriate activities and use these interactions to gradually build more complex language skills.  Some examples of child development during activities in this phase:

 

Parents and children play                Children learn and build fluency in

Swinging and riding bikes                                  Opposites: high/low, up/down, pull/push

                                                                        Requests:  “more push” “help”

                                                                        Descriptions: “hot” (slide), “fast” (bike)

Puzzles/Coloring                                               Expressive labels:  eyes, feet, ball, dog

                                                                        Descriptions: size, color,

                                                                        Receptive Directions: point to, touch, give

                                                                        Talk about how things go together

Help dress and feed self                                    “You can do it”, “I can do it”

Help clean-up                                                   increased cooperation & independence

                                                                        Increasing skills in resistance

                                                                                    “No”>“wait a minute”> don’t wanna

                                                                                    “Why”

Trips to zoo, fair, friends                                   All above skills

 

21 months of Age: (children demonstrate the following skills)

            Add article before a noun                      “book”> “a book”, “dog”> “the dog”

            Add s after noun                                   “book”> “books”> “what books”

                                                                        “Dog”> “the dogs”

            Add adverbs                                        “I do” >  “I do again”, “I do now”        

            Add 2 words after verb                        “See book”> “I see a book”

                                                                        “Need baby” > “I need my baby”

                                                                        “Get diapers” > “Get more diapers”

                                                                        “Go up”  > “Go up that street”

                                                                        “Ride floor” > “ride on the floor”

            Add verb after want                              “I wanna do that”

                                                                        “I wanna go”

 

22 months of Age: (children demonstrate the following skills)

 

23 months of Age: (children demonstrate the following skills)

            Adding –ing                                          “Dad doing that”,  “What they playing?”

                                                                        “Going up that street”

            Replace wanna with don’t                     “I don’t do that”

 

25 months of Age: (children demonstrate the following skills)

            Put can before verb                              “I can do that”

            Commenting on past                             “I did it”, “I made it”, “Hit my leg”

 

26 months of Age: (children demonstrate the following skills)

            Replace wanna with can, gonna, can’t “I gonna do that”, “I can’t do that”

            Auxiliary verb before verb                     “I’m gonna do that”, “what do you got”

            Negative verb before verb                    “You not getting no more”

            Adding s to mark third person               “there he goes”

            Person singular on verbs                       “He stinks”

            Produce first combinations                    “watch me. I jump”>”watch me jump”

                                                                        “Let me. I do that”> “Let me do that”

27 months of Age: (children demonstrate the following skills)

            Adding words to sentences                  

                        2-3 word phrases before verb or 3-4 word phase after verb

                                                                        “The guys gonna fix it”

                                                                        “A little bug go in there”

                                                                        “I get some more eggs”

                                                                        “Look at this longer chip”

 

            Putting the verb first in questions            “Is my room neat?”,” Does he tie his shoes?”

            Adding –ed to verbs                             “I dropped mine”, “I washed my hands”

            Replace present tense with past             “I was playing with it”, “Did you find it?”

 

28 months of Age: (children demonstrate the following skills)

           

Most Common Vocabulary of children 25-30 months:

 

29-36 months of Age: This period of development is called practicing. During this period the children engaged independently in exercising and elaborating their skills. They began going swimming, playing play dough, basketball, cards, and board games.  They demonstrated extended bouts of pretend play: looking at a book became "reading to dolls”, a tea party became a restaurant, using trucks became towing at a construction site.  Now children who have developed basic skills making them competent speakers continue to practice those skills during play activities to improve their precision, brevity and relevance. 

 

30 months of Age: (children demonstrate the following skills)

            Use of clauses                                      “I find another and I’m getting it”

                                                                        “I know we can clean this”

            Infinitives and Wh- clauses`                   “Look what I got”

                                                                        “I show you how to do it”

                                                                        “Want me to wash my face”

 

32-33 months of Age: (children demonstrate the following skills)

            wh & relative clauses                            “Why don’t you let me go with you?”

                                                                        “There was a toy he wanted”

            Negated auxiliaries                                “I didn’t even fall”

            Medial adverbs                                     “It still won’t go”

                                                                        “We’re just gonna play in her room”

            Replace wanna with better, hafta, gotta, might, need

                                                            “I wanna drink it”> “I think I better drink it”

                                                            “I want a ball”> “You need to buy me a basket ball”

            Replace can with could, may, or would

                                                                        “Help me”> “can’t you help me do it”

                                                                        “come in”> “you could come in all the way”

 

34-36 months of Age: (children demonstrate the following skills)

 

Most Common Vocabulary of children 31-36 months: At this age there is greater variation of vocabulary and a low frequency of each word.  Below are words that occur at a high frequency.