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Ayoub, Catherine Marie

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Ayoub

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Catherine Marie

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Ayoub, Catherine Marie
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    Maltreated Children Use More Grammatical Negations
    (Springer US, 2017) Knolle, Franziska; Vallotton, Claire D.; Ayoub, Catherine Marie
    Many studies reveal a strong impact of childhood maltreatment on language development, mainly resulting in shorter utterances, less rich vocabulary, or a delay in grammatical complexity. However, different theories suggest the possibility for resilience—a positive adaptation to an otherwise adverse environment—in children who experienced childhood maltreatment. Here, we investigated different measures for language development in spontaneous speech, examining whether childhood maltreatment leads to a language deficit only or whether it can also result in differences in language use due to a possible adaptation to a toxic environment. We compared spontaneous speech during therapeutic peer-play sessions of 32 maltreated and 32 non-maltreated children from the same preschool and equivalent in gender, age (2 to 5 years), home neighborhood, ethnicity, and family income. Maltreatment status was reported by formal child protection reports, and corroborated by independent social service reports. We investigated general language sophistication (i.e., vocabulary, talkativeness, mean length of utterance), as well as grammatical development (i.e., use of plurals, tense, grammatical negations). We found that maltreated and non-maltreated children showed similar sophistication across all linguistic measures, except for the use of grammatical negations. Maltreated children used twice as many grammatical negations as non-maltreated children. The use of this highly complex grammatical structure shows an advanced linguistic skill, which shows that childhood maltreatment does not necessarily lead to a language deficit. The result might indicate the development of a negativity bias in the structure of spontaneous language due to an adaptation to their experiences.
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    Predictors of Variation in Maternal Talk to Children: A Longitudinal Study of Low-Income Families
    (2005) Rowe, Meredith; Pan, Barbara; Ayoub, Catherine Marie
    Objective. The goals of this study were (1) to examine the extent of variation in amount and lexical diversity of maternal talk to young children within a sample of low-income families, (2) to determine the patterns of change over time in maternal talk during the early childhood years, and (3) to consider specific predictors of variation in maternal communicative input. Design. Low-income mother – child dyads (n = 108) were videotaped at child ages 14, 24, and 36 months during semistructured play in the home. Videotapes were transcribed and analyzed using the conventions of the Child Language Data Exchange System to determine amount (word tokens) and lexical diversity (word types) of maternal talk to children. Background information collected from mothers at study entry served as predictors of variation in communicative input. Individual growth modeling methods were used to analyze data. Results. Mothers varied greatly in the number of tokens and types produced during interaction. Mothers were found to increase in their total amount of talk and diversity of vocabulary as children aged. In addition to child age, maternal education, language and literacy skills, depression, and age helped explain variation in level of maternal talk, but none of the predictors explained variation in growth. Different combinations of predictors explained variation in tokens versus types. Conclusions. Findings highlight the importance of studying specific predictors of parental talk to children, as even in low-income samples large variation in communicative input is evident.