and nature of the linguistic input a child receives has large effects on how often the child actually uses talk about the nonpresent, particularly the past. And the amount and type of talk children hear, in turn, can influence how well they remember events in the past (Reese et al., 1993).

A great deal of attention is now being paid to research indicating that the amount of talk mothers direct to their children is strongly associated with the children's vocabulary growth (Hart and Risley, 1995; Huttenlocher et al., 1991), as well as with the children's performance on measures of emergent literacy and print-related skills (De Temple and Snow, 1992). For example, during the period from 11 to 18 months, children in one study heard, on average, 325 utterances addressed to them per hour (Hart and Risley, 1995). But the range was enormous—one child heard as many as 793 utterances per hours, another as few as 56. And these differences tend to be stable over time. The amount of speech children heard from their parents at 18 months was strongly correlated with the amount of speech they heard at age 3. Moreover, these differences tended to be associated with socioeconomic status, although it is important to recognize that the sample of 42 participating families was small and not representative and so cannot provide firm evidence regarding social class differences.

Often researchers videotape mothers and their young children to explore parental verbal input and child output. One study (Hoff-Ginsberg, 1991), for example, videotaped mothers while they dressed, fed, and played with their 18- to 29-month-old children. They all talked when they played with their children, but there were big differences in how much they talked and whether they used a rich vocabulary and asked questions during dressing and feeding. The children whose mothers talked more during the mundane activities had larger vocabularies, indicating the importance of integrating conversations throughout the day.

Although differences in mother's talk are associated with their social class, it is critical to recognize that other characteristics that can be more easily targeted by early interventions are as strongly related to children's accomplishments as the advantages conferred by socioeconomic status. A composite of parental behaviors that included “just talking,” “trying to be nice,” “telling children about things, ” “giving children choices,” and “listening” accounted for over 60 percent of the variance in the rate of children 's vocabulary growth and vocabulary use and almost 60 percent of the variance in their IQ scores at age 3 (Hart and Risley, 1995). Moreover, it is important to recognize that even the large differences in mother talk and child vocabulary that characterized the children in this study had more specific than pervasive effects on the children's school-related outcomes. For example, while the children's vocabulary use at age 3 was strongly associated with their vocabulary test and reading comprehension scores in third grade, the rate of vocabulary growth was not associated with children's