Dr. Todd Risley: If you looked at things like reading, but also all cognitively symbolic complex things that are kind of unique things to our species, if you will, it starts, at the very fundamental level in terms of dancing, in terms of social interaction on which language is laid.

David Boulton: Yes.

Dr. Todd Risley: Language is laid on that by everybody. In other words, even the most taciturn parents had moments when they were talkative. Their talkativeness had all the features, in terms of positivity and complexity, and so on, that the more talkative people had.

In other words, the notion of social ability, of interaction -- remember what I said was that it wasn't people who didn't interact with their babies a lot, just not talking. It never happened that way. Talking was laid onto social dancing.

And see, that's where it starts. That's where it kind of ends, because if you grow up in taciturn families who don't dance very much, then you don't dance with your kids very much. You see what I mean?

Now, when you get into more complex content, then you worry about the parents' vocabulary size itself, you know, the complexity of the things they talk about, and so on.  But with babies, you don't have to worry about that. Every parent has got language that’s more complex than his or her babies.

People with very low education that were talkative were still doing all sorts of good things in terms of quantities and probabilities and what ifs, and relationships and time relationships, and all that stuff with their kids. So when you start this human game of symbolism, this human thing, people will start out, in terms of the micro culture of the family and their families, dancing a lot with their kids, or not -- with their babies, or not. By the time you're three, the experience differences are so large, as well as the neurobiological differences and so on, you can't make up for them.

You can't catch up. Remember, the average child is hearing 1,500 words an hour.

David Boulton: Yes, we're talking about a 35 million-plus word gap difference in exposure and exercise.

Dr. Todd Risley: They can't make that up.

Convergence:

David Boulton: That part is clear, as is the neuroscience side of this. Before we move on to the next part, I want to say that a number of the people we have talked with point to you. I mean, it runs across the gamut from George Farkus last night, to Siegfried Engelmann, to Marilyn Jager Adams, to other people that are in the reading research field. So you've caught on really well, and you've become a base reference for one whole part of the emerging argument.

At the neuroscience level, independent of awareness of this part of the conversation, without concern for or without awareness of this level of research, they're really clear that what builds brain is the kind of distinctions being made in the soundscape in order to participate in language.

Dr. Todd Risley: Yes.

David Boulton: So you could strip away all this conversation about sociological effects and research and the kind of research you're doing, and just come at this from what we know from the inside out of growing brains, from brain research and end up in the same place.

Dr. Todd Risley: That's right.

Disappointing Lack of Studies:

Dr. Todd Risley: Exactly. But we have the numbers on this side, a little. Betty's and my greatest disappointment is that nobody else has done this work. I mean, isn't that amazing that this is the only glimpse that we have of what happens in the everyday lives of children?

David Boulton: Yes, it is amazing.

Dr. Todd Risley: So our numbers are as good as you're going to get, in terms of they're pretty good, because you can talk about not just more or less, but how many per hour.

David Boulton: Right. And this important distinction between the instrumental or business talk, as you call it, and this other more extensional talk that's not tied to business, and the difference in emotions experienced in the two.

Dr. Todd Risley: Right, exactly. If you begin to think about the numbers, you begin to think of things like, well, what about infant daycare? Well, let's see, the average baby in a home environment is hearing 1,500 words an hour every hour they're awake addressed to them. What's happening in our infant daycare programs and centers? Do you see what I'm saying?

David Boulton: Right. So you're disappointed that you haven't caused a seeding of similar studies being done in other dimensions on…

Dr. Todd Risley: Also just replications.  What about older kids? What about the notion about life after kids start reading, how much reading do they do?

David Boulton: Right. And we don't know anything about whether or not we could compensate for this yet, because we haven't factored it in sufficiently to begin that thought process.

Dr. Todd Risley: That's right, exactly. I think that the next window of opportunity is literacy. I mean, that's where a lot of us got out of the middle class, which was reading with our flashlights under the covers at night. You know, because our mother would say, "Turn off the lights." And it's that kind of millions and millions and millions of words, in words with words experience.

David Boulton: Those kind of semantic differentiations, that are building and snowballing in the development of intelligence.

Dr. Todd Risley: Yes.

Reading: The Differences Add Up

David Boulton: Well, there's an enormous connection here. I think you've done very important work that, among other things, connects the dots between work being done at Head Start, Even Start, National Center for Family Literacy, and other locations.

It seems that it boils down to this: if we look at all the different things that we measure about children and the risk factors they have for having great lives or having lives that are diminished and impoverished and so forth, the greatest single risk factor that we can get a handle on is how well they come through reading.

Dr. Todd Risley: Yes.

David Boulton: I mean, it all but fates their lives.

Dr. Todd Risley: That's right.

David Boulton: And it's costing us. We're getting arguments that indicate at least a half a trillion dollars, and perhaps closer to a trillion dollars a year.

Dr. Todd Risley: Right.

David Boulton: It's harming a significant part of our population's psychological and intellectual well-being because the maladaptive learning scripts that are forming in relation to this confusion effect all these other things.

Now we get to reading, we double-click on reading; what's involved in it? Well, there's really three different fields that are co-implicating one another. One, and the ground of the others, is general language proficiency.

Dr. Todd Risley: Right.

David Boulton: The second thing is the overlay of the code, which acts like a piano scroll to the piano playing that language, at least until that system coheres and it can start to transcend the spoken language part in the reading.

Dr. Todd Risley: Right.

David Boulton: Then enveloping the first two is: How they feel about themselves when engaged in learning to read? Because that changes the threshold with which they shame out.

Dr. Todd Risley: Yes.

Myopia:

David Boulton: So you're right at the ground of where reading breaks down. The primary focus in educational policy circles is to invest in instructional strategies, methodologies and materials for K-4, which is where they consider to be the fulcrum, and rightfully so, in terms of where they can get traction right now.

Dr. Todd Risley: Right.

David Boulton: That the real problem is happening underneath where we're locating our lenses, where we're positioning our levers.

Dr. Todd Risley: Right. Well, my notion is this: I have been telling people there are lots and lots of parenting programs and home visiting programs and Even Start, and so on. I've been talking with Even Start right along. But what is needed is an add-on because, in a sense, cognitive psychology, people who are interested in cognition have kind of missed this point, and that is: It's not about just the things you talk about, it's how much talking is going on.

David Boulton: Right. Well, I think that the neuroscientists get that (1, 2). There are questions about how the amplitude of meaning-relevance changes the depth of learning.

Dr. Todd Risley: Right.

David Boulton: But in terms of just the general dexterity with differentiation, that's volume.

Babies:

Dr. Todd Risley: Yes, exactly. But especially very early. See, it becomes simpler when we talk about babies.

David Boulton: Right. Have you encountered Patricia Kuhl's work?

Dr. Todd Risley: Oh, yes. As a matter of fact, I was going to mention that to you because it’s very specific about early exposure and learning speech codes (Kuhl-pdf), it doesn't take very much of it, but it was about the fact that video didn't do it. It had to be interactive.

David Boulton: Yeah, with a real live person to which there's an emotional relationship that's the basis of the engagement.

Dr. Todd Risley: That's right, exactly. It's the emotional relationships and interactions. But what I keep doing is telling people that what we need to do is to add the component of talkativeness, of chattiness to every message we get to every parenting interaction educational program. Because we've been misdirecting parents by talking about things like motherese, or topical richness, or whatever it is, as if we have to change what people do as if they're doing it wrong. They're not. Those things automatically come with chatty people.

What we need to do is focus on chattiness, on talking, on talking aloud, commenting what the child is doing, commenting on what you're thinking. That's what that Bureau of Indian affairs tape I did was good at demonstrating.

Kind of commenting, not just, ‘I'm going to sit down here and read a book with you or I'm going to ask you questions.’ It is where the vocabulary has to come from. It can't come from anyplace else except what you hear.

Stewarding The Health of Learning: Bathing in Language

David Boulton: Yes. I'm interested in us getting a similar message into parents, that they can take as a center to act from, which has to do with stewarding the health of learning.

Dr. Todd Risley: Yes.

David Boulton: We want to help people see stewarding the health of learning as the organizing rubric. That with respect to children's learning very early, the number one thing that you can do to steward the health of their learning is to immerse and engage them in this language bath.

Dr. Todd Risley: Right, and kind of a silly bath. It isn't important things. It's silly things, it's joking and commenting and talking.

David Boulton: Well, it may not be important to the adult, but that's exactly what's important to the kid.

Dr. Todd Risley: That's right.

David Boulton: It comes down to one of the things that’s so difficult for adults is to break out of the frame of reference they experience reality in.

Parent-Baby Dancing and Head Start:

Dr. Todd Risley: Yes. What I've been doing is recommending that somebody needs to be making example videos, not of any instructional techniques, but of parents dancing with their babies in the car, in the stroller, while they're doing things, folding the clothes, in the shopping cart. I mean, it's wherever they are, wherever parents spend time with babies. They need to be examples that look enough like whoever it is you're working with for them to identify with, of people doing the chatty silly things with babies.  

That's where social learning starts. It's easy. But there are lots and lots of programs that have got a lot of content and are organized to interact with parents, but almost none of them have that feature.

David Boulton: Well, I think there's a great movement that's heading in your direction. We interviewed Sarah Greene, who is the Director of the Head Start Association, which is the professional organization that Head Start practitioners participate in. She said as much, that a few years ago they thought it was taboo to engage in explicit instruction and they also were unconscious to the parent language dimension. But now they teach their people to go through the world and observe the conversations that are going on between parents and children as a way of kind of dropping into this. Greene did a good job of describing their movement in this direction.

I'm doing work with the National Center for Family Literacy, and they're the ones that gave me the video of yours. You've got a number of advocates and fans there. And of course they have had a big influence on Even Start.

So, I think there is a movement that you've awakened with your work that's getting these organizations that are working closer to the family to start to carry this as an organizing priority.

What’s Missing in Mainstream Thinking:

Dr. Todd Risley: Right. You know, I went back and looked at the instructional books and the basic textbooks on child development and in other places, and seeing what people said about talking. It turns out they didn't say very much. The American Academy of Pediatrics, in their monthly news handout, the one pediatricians send to parents with new babies every month for the first two years of the baby's life, they don't talk about talking to your baby until the twelfth month. It's sort of like, ‘Well, because that's when the baby is starting to talk.’ Well, they've missed it.

David Boulton: It's a matter of what they consider to be the start of the baby learning to talk. The baby is starting to learn to talk before it's born.

Dr. Todd Risley: That's right. And parents that are talkative didn't change the amount they talked to the baby when the baby started to talk.

Meaningful Differences:

Dr. Todd Risley: Parents, if they were talkative, were talkative that amount to their seven month old baby. If they were taciturn, they were talking about that little to the baby when they were seven months old. In both cases it continued all the way, at about that same amount, all the way through thirty-six months, when the child was relatively established talker.

David Boulton: So again, you've actually shown that this underlying developmental difference, occasioned by this language exposure/experience engagement difference, carries its imprint all the way through to the third grade.

Dr. Todd Risley: That's right, exactly. We followed the kids up to the third grade. Then we looked at the relationship between what we saw the parents doing, their talkativeness in the early years and the child's oral IQ test and the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test.  When the kids were nine in the third grade, both tests correlated that same high amount to the early parent talkativeness.

David Boulton: I think it's so good that you've done this.

Language and Cultural Transmission:

Dr. Todd Risley: On the social and the cultural side, I've talked not only with, of course, Navaho and Native Americans, and I'm on the board of some programs that deal with tribes, but also I've done this in New Zealand with the Maori people, working with the universities. I was trying to deal with this issue about some cultures are taciturn and some cultures are talkative. And I said, “Well, I'm not sure that's true, that there's probably more difference within in a culture in terms of talkativeness and taciturnity than there is between cultures, and that the leaders are from the talkative members of the culture.”

David Boulton: So this could be an artifact of the generational transmission of social dynamics within a culture.

Dr. Todd Risley: Remember, with Native Americans, we're working with the Native Americans who are in trouble. With the Hispanics, we're working with the Hispanics who are in trouble. With the African-Americans, we're working with African-American families who are in trouble.

So we get kind of this notion that those cultures are, in a sense, taciturn. But it's the taciturn members of those cultures that we're working with.

David Boulton: It's the strata within those cultures that have learned to be taciturn in the structure of that culture.

Dr. Todd Risley: Exactly. The micro culture of their family, their own personal family.

David Boulton: Yes. Well, it's really clear that ninety-five-plus percent (1, 2) of the variation in human literacy abilities are learned.

Dr. Todd Risley: That's right.

David Boulton: That's why I come back to "stewarding the health of learning" as the centerpiece.

Dr. Todd Risley: Right.

David Boulton: This is another example of that. Here we are looking for some kind of other variation, and it's the nested cultural-family learning environments that these children are growing in.

Dr. Todd Risley: Yes, that's right. This work is so interesting because so many people are finding it. For example, somebody at Gallaudet was going to be doing her dissertation on children learning sign language, deaf children learning, and putting video cameras on little hats so that they can record what the children -- the language input that the children are actually seeing, of deaf children. Then in the spring I'm going to the association of people who are doing cochlear implants. So those are the two sides of the political side of the deaf community.

David Boulton: That's great. Well, I think that your work really needs to be lifted up and become a reference that people have to deal with. I mean that in the sense that it's a challenge, it's a stop sign. It's, "Look, we’ve got to deal with this."

Dr. Todd Risley: Yes.