Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experiences of Young American Children (1995), by Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley is a qualitative look at the at how parents and children interact during early childhood, as children acquire language and then develop their language skills. This longitudinal study examined 42 families, 23 of which were middle class and the remainder which were classified as professional (high SES ) or welfare families (lowest SES ), and their verbal interactions beginning when the child was 10 months of age and ending when the child was 3 years old. The researchers noted that the biggest cause of difference in amount of utterances in an hour was SES status, rather than gender, race, birth order, and so forth. They observed that in any given hour, the children in professional families heard approximately 2, 153 words per hour in contrast to the children of welfare families, who heard an average of 616 words an hour. Once this data was ext...
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