measuring environment: meaningful differences in language experience

Measuring Environment: Meaningful Differences in Language ExperienceMeaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children by BettyHart; Todd R. RisleyReview by: John R. KirbyCanadian Journal of Education / Revue canadienne de l'éducation, Vol. 22, No. 3 (Summer,1997), pp. 323-329Published by: Canadian Society for the Study of EducationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1585834 .

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Review Essays / Essais critiques

Measuring Environment: Meaningful Differences in Language Experience

Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children

By Betty Hart & Todd R. Risley

Baltimore, MD: Paul H. Brookes, 1995. xxvi+268 pages. ISBN 1-55766-197-9 (hc.)

REVIEWED BY JOHN R. KIRBY, QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY

Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children is Hart and Risley's first report in book form on their extensive and comprehen- sive longitudinal study of children's language development. Their data, and the patterns found in them, are extraordinary, and have profound implications for the rearing and educating of children, and for how educators understand the contribu- tions of environment to cognitive development. Their detailed recording of children's language experience over the first three years of life provides a rare example of assessing environmental quality.

NATURE-NURTURE AND THE LANGUAGE ENVIRONMENT

When educators address the nature-nurture issue, they are usually attracted to the nurture side of the argument (or, perhaps better, to that side of the balance). After all, education is essentially environmental. Perhaps because of their belief in the efficacy of education and environment, educators have avoided the dif- ficult task of measuring environmental or educational influences. As a conse- quence, the nature-nurture debate has been dominated in recent years by those supporting the nature (genetic) view with relatively hard data, and those supporting the nurture side with appeals to social justice. A perfect illustration of this state of affairs is the debate engendered by Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell Curve (1994; see also Cameron, 1995; Fraser, 1995; Jacoby & Glauberman, 1995). The style of much of the debate may leave the impression -in my view, unwarranted - that morality is on the side of environment but reality on the side of genetics. I do believe, however, that it is possible to assemble strong empirical evidence to support a healthy environmental position (healthy in the

323 CANADIAN JOURNAL OF EDUCATION 22, 3 (1997): 323-329



324 REVIEW ESSAYS / ESSAIS CRITIQUES

sense that it is viable, without denying the effects, often powerful, of genetics). All educators have to work with is environment, whether it contributes 1% or 50% to the equation. But if they believe in the efficacy of environment, it behooves them to devote themselves to its measurement.

One standard approach to the issue is to conflate environment with socio- economic status (SES). As convenient as this conflation may be, primarily because SES is easy to measure, it is important to recognize two problems. First, SES is not a true causal entity--it never has and never could influence something else; at best it is a proxy variable, representing the collective influence of a host of other variables. In this it is not unlike many other variables in the social and behavioural sciences, but educators should use it with caution. They should remember that it does not describe the mechanism of any causal influence; it is merely associated with the variables that effect causation. Second, SES does a poor job of capturing what most educators mean by a quality environment (Kirby, 1995). With respect to home life, SES is usually measured by parental education or income or both, but what is the benefit of both parents being highly educated and wealthy if they do not play with, read to, and care for their children? Conversely, why can a poor and less educated family not provide as cogni- tively and emotionally stimulating an environment? Surely the issue concerns what is done rather than the sterile demographic facts of education and income. There may well be a correlation between SES and quality of interaction, but this association is neither necessary nor perfect. Perhaps it should not be surprising that Herrnstein and Murray (1994) did not find strong effects of SES. More importantly, if educators want to improve outcomes, they need to determine which aspects of the environment contribute causally to the SES-outcomes

correlation--a task that Hart and Risley set themselves.

MEASURING LANGUAGE EXPERIENCE AND LANGUAGE GROWTH

Based upon their experiences in Head Start programs, and their observations that children from low-SES backgrounds had much lower vocabulary growth rates than those from higher SES backgrounds, Hart and Risley set out to study what was happening in the home to produce such great differences. Working with a sample of 42 children (later grouped as from "welfare," "working," and "professional" families), Hart and Risley tape-recorded one hour of spontaneous home verbal interaction per child per month from the age of 7-9 months to 36 months. They noted what was said to and by the child, and later analyzed the observations to determine how many words, how many new words, and what types of syntactic constructions, among many other variables, the child produced or heard per hour. Hart and Risley provide a daunting account of the amount of labour involved in the collection, transcription, and analysis of these data (they also provide the most important raw data in two large tables). The children were



REVIEW ESSAYS / ESSAIS CRITIQUES 325

administered the Stanford-Binet intelligence test at age 3 years, and later assessed for intelligence, language ability, and academic skills at age 9-10 years.

Hart and Risley's findings may be summarized as follows: (a) The three SES groups differed greatly in the number of words per hour

addressed to the child ("welfare": 616, "working": 1251, "professional": 2152), and these differences were strongly linked to the more detailed and complex measures of linguistic quality. Extrapolated to every waking hour to age 4, these rates produce staggering differences in the amount of cumulative language experience.

(b) The three SES groups differed in vocabulary growth rates. At 3 years, the "welfare," "working," and "professional" children have estimated vocabularies of 550, 750, and 1100 words, respectively, and it seems unlikely that these curves will later converge.

(c) The three SES groups differed in language and parenting "styles." One characteristic feature was the relative preponderance of affirmative and prohibi- tory statements addressed to the child. The ratio of affirmatives to prohibitions was about 7 to 1 in "professional" families, about 2 to 1 in "working" families, and about 1 to 1 in the "welfare" families.

(d) The various language experience measures (up to 36 months), collapsed into five variables, were strongly associated with later intelligence and verbal

ability (correlations in the .74 to .82 range), whereas SES was less strongly related (correlations in the .15 to .65 range). Language experience consistently accounted for substantially more variance in achievement than did SES; for instance, whereas SES accounted for 29% of age 3 IQ and 30% of age 9 verbal

IQ, the language variables accounted for 59% of the age 3 score and 61% of the

age 9 score. The five overall categories of language experience referred to in point (d)

comprise a useful summary of quality of language experience: language diversity (number of different words heard), feedback tone (ratio of positives to positives and negatives), symbolic emphasis (relative amount of language referring to relations between things and events), guidance style (how often the child is asked rather than told what to do), and responsiveness (the degree to which verbal interaction was controlled by the child).

THE ROLE OF LANGUAGE EXPERIENCE IN COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

Hart and Risley portray in great detail the quality of home language experience that plausibly comprises the mechanism of any SES effect, and further show it to be more successful than SES in predicting later behaviour. Although these results are impressive, it is important to remember that they are correlational, not

experimental, in nature. There is no guarantee that increasing the language experience of the welfare children would increase their ability or achievement scores; Hart and Risley's language-experience measures may themselves be mere




correlates or consequences of the true causal variable, which may be responsible for SES, quality of home language experience, and later achievement and ability. The most plausible candidate for such a fundamental cause is parental intellectual ability, operating both genetically and environmentally upon the child.

Pretend for a moment not only that Hart and Risley had collected parental IQ data, but also that the parental IQ scores explained virtually all of the variance in SES, language experience, and achievement/ability. What then? Clearly, parental IQ would be a prior observation, but it in turn could be attributed to the parents' early home language environment (and this regress could be followed back through grandparents, etc.). These (imagined) correlations, even though longitudinal, are no guarantee that the relationships are necessary - they merely reflect what is. Heritability, it should be remembered, describes the ways things are, not the way they must be. Improved environment in the form of language experience may well break this correlational pattern. The genetic view may be the worst-case scenario, describing what happens if people do nothing. The only resolution to these problems, and something worth doing in its own light, is a program of experimental studies designed to determine if improving the quality of home language experience can improve cognitive and educational outcomes.

ISSUES, CONCERNS, AND OTHER EXPLANATIONS

Meaningful Differences is thought provoking and a rich source of information, but no book, especially such a short one (253 pages including appendices), can answer every question successfully. In several areas, difficulties persist.

(a) Ambiguity of the "working" group. Hart and Risley's "working" group was quite broad in nature, including both "middle SES" and "lower SES" (p. 31). This classification seems rather broad, especially because no justification is provided for the conflation. In fact, some analyses include only subjects from this broad "working" group, and significant relationships between variables are still found. Such findings indicate important variability within this group, and there may be value, in future studies, in investigating it more closely. In these days of economic upheaval, many families may be on welfare for the first time (thus "welfare" may not describe their history); on the other hand, especially in the United States, many working families may be on such low incomes as to be worse off than if they were on welfare (thus they may be more similar to the welfare families). I also would have liked to see a more explicit indication of the dividing line between the "working" and "professional" groups.

(b) What is happening in the poorest families? Although I am uncomfortable identifying families as "welfare families," and even less happy to see this group represented by only 6 families, it is also important to recognize that these families may not represent the poorest or least functional families in our society. Of the 42 families in the study, only 8 were not "intact," and in all but 1 family the father or another adult male was "regularly involved in daily life" (p. 31).




Furthermore, all of the families consented to being studied, and had a stable enough home situation to be located throughout the study. Hart and Risley com- mented on the generally positive impressions they obtained of all the families' parenting. I fear that there are many less positive home situations, perhaps aggravated by recent economic situations. If the 6 welfare families in the study do not seem to be providing a strong language environment, what can readers imagine of those who are not represented? The situation may be much more grim than even Hart and Risley portray.

(c) Other analyses. I would have preferred to see more regression analyses, and more details of the ones performed. In particular I would have liked to see hierarchical regressions (in which, for instance, SES could be entered first, to determine what effect the other variables have above and beyond it). Fortunately, the data are there, so I and others can pursue such questions.

(d) Predicting literacy. One disappointing feature of the results was that early language experience did not predict Grade 3 performance in reading, writing, spelling, arithmetic, or reasoning. (It should be noted that because the Grade 3 follow-up study only included 29 of the original 42 children, primarily from the "working" group, the strength of the relationships may have been attenuated.) Hart and Risley's language-experience measures were overwhelmingly vocabulary-oriented (they did include some syntactic measures, of verb tenses and question types). Although vocabulary is important, vocabulary alone does not offer a complete picture of language development. Measures of phonological and (other) syntactic factors may have been more successful in predicting literacy achievement (Scarborough, 1990). Measures of home literacy experience may also have been powerful (Griffin & Morrison, in press; Hogan & Kirby, 1997). Educators should not conclude from Hart and Risley's work that early language experience does not affect literacy.

(e) What is the validity of these findings elsewhere? Hart and Risley's results are firmly situated in a particular culture at a particular time in history. How different would the results be in Canada, or in a culture with very different child- rearing practices? I suspect that the connection between language experience and language development would appear in any culture, as would the connection between language experience and intelligence, as long as intelligence were measured with primarily verbal tests. A different question is whether these relationships would have the same meaning in groups that either (a) valued verbal ability less, or (b) had a school system truly tailored to individual needs and growth patterns. I will leave those questions for others to ponder.

WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT: HIGH-QUALITY DAY CARE AND PARENT EDUCATION

Until the final chapter, Meaningful Differences offers little optimism for our society: the differences between SES groups are immense, and unlikely to be




overcome in one or two generations. Low-verbal homes seem destined to raise low-verbal children who will establish more low-verbal homes and raise more low-verbal children. This likelihood is particularly crucial today, as people invent a postindustrial society in which knowledge, knowledge management, and other forms of symbolic literacy become the keys to success. Although citizens with low verbal skills may have been disadvantaged in the agricultural and industrial societies of the past, they are likely to fare much worse in the future (Rifkin, 1995).

The final chapter does provide a sense of hope that improvement is possible, even if the deeper problems cannot be solved completely or easily. Hart and Risley estimate that the average "welfare" child would require 41 hours per week of language experience as rich as that received by "professional" children, in order to reach the overall level of language experience obtained by "working" children. This level of intervention would have to start at birth, operate every day of the year, and continue at least until formal schooling begins. This equation is daunting, because of the effort required and because working children in their turn are not doing well, and also worrying, because it suggests that many low- SES families are not competent to raise their children. Paradoxically, this conclu- sion resembles an argument by Herrnstein and Murray (1994, pp. 410-413), that the only established way (in their view) to improve IQ is through adoption into higher-IQ families (this parallel is paradoxical because Hart and Risley clearly believe in the value of interventions and the ultimate effectiveness of environmental changes to improve the human situation, beliefs I have not heard Herrn- stein and Murray accused of holding).

Do citizens have to enter into a painful social debate on the competence of certain families to raise their children? Perhaps the solution is to make the intervention available and attractive, and let nature take its (new) course. Poor families (including those on welfare and the "working poor") would benefit from the availability of high-quality day care, which would take pressure off their home life, free them to seek employment, and provide a level of stimulation that might otherwise be lacking in their children's lives. The 41 hours per week calculated by Hart and Risley are roughly what a child would spend in full-time day care. The challenges are to fund the day care, to convince parents to use it, and to design it to attain the high levels of verbal quality required. The research challenge is to evaluate it, to test whether Hart and Risley's hypothesis is true.

The type of day care required must be of high quality: large groups, children propped up in front of television sets, low levels of verbal interaction, or low levels of affirmative feedback will not improve the situation. Parent education also has a role to play, if only to increase the likelihood that the day care environment will have a generative effect. Prenatal classes are now common, and sometimes free; why can there not be postnatal classes too? These classes could deal with many other factors beyond verbal interaction and reading, from nutri- tion to discipline. Perhaps sponsors could be located to fund the courses and




provide free reading materials (for parents and children). Undoubtedly the cost of this investment would be high, and unattractive to many. But if it worked, the social and economic benefits would be great. In the absence of any other plausible solution, it is worth a try.

REFERENCES

Cameron, J. (Ed.). (1995). Canadian perspectives on The bell curve [Special issue]. Alberta Journal of Educational Research, 41(3).

Fraser, S. (Ed.). (1995). The bell curve wars: Race, intelligence, and the future of America. New York: Basic Books.

Griffin, E. A., & Morrison, F J. (in press). The unique contribution of home literacy environment to differences in early literacy skills. Early Child Development and Care.

Herrnstein, R. J., & Murray, C. (1994). The bell curve: Intelligence and class structure in American life. New York: Free Press.

Hogan, B., & Kirby, J. R. (1997). Home literacy practices and the development of reading ability. Unpublished manuscript.

Jacoby, R., & Glauberman, N. (Eds.). (1995). The bell curve debate: History, documents, opinions. New York: Times Books.

Kirby, J. R. (1995). Intelligence and social policy. Alberta Journal of Educational Research, 41, 322-334.

Rifkin, J. (1995). The end of work: The decline of the global labor force and the dawn of the post-market era. New York: G. P Putnam's Sons.

Scarborough, H. S. (1990). Very early language deficits in dyslexic children. Child Development, 61, 1728-1743.



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