Betty M. Hart

American parenting of language-learning children: Persisting differences in family-child interactions observed in natural home environments.

Forty families were selected to represent the range of typical American families in size, race, and socioeconomic status. In data from 2 1/2 years of once-monthly, hour-long observations of unstructured parent-child interactions in the home, parenting was examined over 27 months, including the time before, during, and after all the children learned to talk

Parental Language and Verbal Responsiveness to Children in Crowded Homes

This article is a secondary data analysis of the University of Kansas Language Acquisition Project, which intensively studied, on a regular basis, parent and child language from age 6 months to 30 months. The association between residential density and parent-child speech was examined. Parents in crowded homes speak in less complex, sophisticated ways with their children compared with parents in uncrowded homes, and this association is mediated by parental responsiveness. Parents in more crowded homes are less verbally responsive to their children. This in turn accounts for their simpler, less sophisticated speech to their children. This mediational pathway is evident with statistical controls for socioeconomic status. This model may help explain prior findings showing a link between residential crowding and delayed cognitive development.

Input frequency and children's first words

In once-monthly, hour-long recordings of uncontructured interactions at home between parents and 45 children averaging 11-17 months old, the first productive words recorded for each child were examined for the frequency each word had been recorded in parent use. The first words the children produced tended to be ones their parents frequently addressed to the children, but evidence for a relationship with word frequency in input decreased as the children produced increasing numbers of words. The children seemed to progress rapidly from rote learning to learning words on a more principled basis.

A Natural History of Early Language Experience

Talking is important for children, because the complexity of what children say influences the complexity of other peoples responses. This article describes how years of focusing on the talk of 4-year-olds in early intervention led to years of observing 1- through 3-year-olds learning to talk during their everyday interactions with their parents at home. Analysis of the observational data revealed how crucial to development is the amount of childrens language experience as partners in the social dances of conversation. The parent behaviors observed to support learning to talk have many implications for research and practice.

What Toddlers Talk About

The size of the noun vocabulary children learn is influenced by what the children talk about with their caregivers when they are toddlers. For quartiles based on root noun vocabulary size, longitudinal data for 40 children (13ñ36 months old) were analysed using the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) to standardize the vocabulary of topics examined and a 100-utterance sample each month to equate the children for rate of talking. Analysis showed similar trends across the quartiles in the topic categories the children talked about, major increases in use of nouns different from those on the CDI, and diversity (different nouns per noun used) increasing as vocabulary increased. Richness differed across the quartiles, and the richness in nouns of the children’s utterances was associated not with diversity but with the richness in nouns of their parents’ utterances. An important aspect of the size of the noun vocabulary children learn may be the extent to which the children are matching not only the nouns but the richness in nouns of the utterances their caregivers address to them.

Out of the laboratory and into the community. 26 years of applied behavior analysis at the Juniper Gardens Children's Project.

Application of Skinners principles to socially significant human behavior had been well articulated by 1968 (Baer, Wolf, & Risley, 1968). Applications of these principles by Baer, Wolf, Risley, Hall, Hart, Christophersen, and their colleagues were in evidence as early as 1964 in the homes, schools, and clinics of inner-city Kansas City, Kansas, at the Juniper Gardens Housing Project. The work continues relatively uninterrupted, having contributed extensively to the literature of applied behavior analysis and the lives of community residents. This article describes the project and illustrates how applied behavioral research was initiated and extended, how the work addressed general concerns in psychology, and how it continues to address contemporary concerns within the community.

The Initial Growth of Expressive Vocabulary among Children with Down Syndrome.

Longitudinal data on the unstructured interactions at home of 9 children with Down syndrome were used to compare individual differences in initial expressive vocabulary growth to group data identically collected longitudinally on children without disabilities. The overall pattern of vocabulary growth was similar in all the children. Among the children with Down syndrome, differences in initial learning strategies, an asynchrony between growth of vocabulary and MLU, and differences between individual children of as long as 2 years in producing the first 50 words of expressive vocabulary were seen. Implications for intervention are discussed.

Pragmatics and Language Development

In the study of language, as in the study of any other phenomenon, it is necessary to define the nature and limits of the subject of study. But defining an area of study involves taking a point of view, and associating it with historical and contemporary views that support or contradict it. The theoretical stand implied by definition, then, tends to determine the kinds of research undertaken, and the interpretation given to the results. The audience to which the research interpretation is directed tends to reinforce the approach, and to further determine what will be the issues of concern. The seemingly widely divergent views of the be-haviorist and the psycholinguist, and their very different approaches to research, are the result of important differences in their definitions of what language is and what development means.