Person:

Rowe, Meredith

The current study explored the bidirectional association of children’s individual characteristics, fathers’ control strategies at 24 months, and children’s regulatory skills at prekindergarten (pre-K). Using a sample of low-income, minority families with 2-year-olds from the Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project (n = 71), we assessed the association between child gender and vocabulary skills, fathers’ control strategies at 24 months (e.g., regulatory behavior and regulatory language), and children’s sustained attention and emotion regulation at prekindergarten. There were three main findings. First, fathers overwhelmingly used commands (e.g., “Do that.”) to promote compliance in their 24-month-old children. Second, children’s vocabulary skills predicted fathers’ regulatory behaviors during a father–child interaction whereas children’s gender predicted fathers’ regulatory language during an interaction. Third, controlling for maternal supportiveness, fathers’ regulatory behaviors at 24 months predicted children’s sustained attention at pre-K whereas fathers’ regulatory language at 24 months predicted children’s emotion regulation at pre-K. Our findings highlight the importance of examining paternal contributions to children’s regulatory skills.

Individual differences in children’s language skills have been shown to stem in part from variations in the quantity and quality of parent speech input. However, most research focuses on mothers’ input whereas less is known about the effects of variability in father input. In this article, we review the relation between parent input and child language development with a focus on low-income families, and review general findings about similarities and differences in mother and father speech. Within this review, we highlight conversation-eliciting speech, such as wh questions and clarification requests, which occur, on average, more frequently in father input than mother input. Conversation-eliciting speech is challenging for 2-year-old children and has been shown in research with mothers to relate to child vocabulary development.We then report a study examining whether fathers’ use of conversation-eliciting speech relates to children’s developing vocabulary skills at 24 months of age within a sample of lowincome African American families. Understanding that speech input varies among fathers, and specific strengths that fathers bring to interactions with their young children can help speech-language pathologists develop and implement more effective interventions.

Myriad studies support a relation between parental beliefs and behaviours. This study adds to the literature by focusing on the specific relationship between parental goals and their communication with toddlers. Do parents with different goals talk about different topics with their children? Parents’ goals for their 30-month olds were gathered using semi-structured interviews with 47 primary caregivers, whereas the topics of conversations that took place during interactions were investigated via coding videotapes of observations in the home. Parents’ short- and long-term goals spanned several areas, including educational, social–emotional, developmental and pragmatic goals. Parental utterances most frequently focused on pragmatic issues, followed by play and academic topics. Parents who mentioned long-term educational goals devoted more of their talk to academic topics and less to pragmatic topics, controlling for socioeconomic status. Thus, parental goals differ and these differences relate to the conversations parents engage in with their children.

This article discusses the importance of using decontextualized language, or language that is removed from the here and now including pretend, narrative, and explanatory talk, with preschool children. The literature on parents’ use of decontextualized language is reviewed and results of a longitudinal study of parent decontextualized language input in relation to child vocabulary development are explained. The main findings are that parents who provide their preschool children with more explanations and narrative utterances about past or future events in the input have children with larger vocabularies 1 year later, even with quantity of parent input and child prior vocabulary skill controlled. Recommendations for how to engage children in decontextualized language conversations are provided.

Children with unilateral pre- or perinatal brain injury (BI) show remarkable plasticity for language learning. Previous work highlights the important role that lesion characteristics play in explaining individual variation in plasticity in the language development of children with BI. The current study examines whether the linguistic input that children with BI receive from their caregivers also contributes to this early plasticity, and whether linguistic input plays a similar role in children with BI as it does in typically developing (TD) children. Growth in vocabulary and syntactic production is modeled for 80 children (53 TD, 27 BI) between 14 and 46 months. Findings indicate that caregiver input is an equally potent predictor of vocabulary growth in children with BI and in TD children. In contrast, input is a more potent predictor of syntactic growth for children with BI than for TD children. Controlling for input, lesion characteristics (lesion size, type, seizure history) also affect the language trajectories of children with BI. Thus, findings illustrate how both variability in the environment (linguistic input) and variability in the organism (lesion characteristics) work together to contribute to plasticity in language learning.

Children vary widely in how quickly their vocabularies grow. Can looking at early gesture use in children and parents help us predict this variability? We videotaped 53 English-speaking parent-child dyads in their homes during their daily activities for 90-minutes every four months between child age 14 and 34 months. At 42 months, children were given the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT). We found that child gesture use at 14 months was a significant predictor of vocabulary size at 42 months, above and beyond the effects of parent and child word use at 14 months. Parent gesture use at 14 months was not directly related to vocabulary development, but did relate to child gesture use at 14 months which, in turn, predicted child vocabulary. These relations hold even when background factors such as socio-economic status are controlled. The findings underscore the importance of examining early gesture when predicting child vocabulary development.

Children vary widely in the rate at which they acquire words—some start slow and speed up, others start fast and continue at a steady pace. Do early developmental variations of this sort help predict vocabulary skill just prior to kindergarten entry? This longitudinal study starts by examining important predictors (socioeconomic status [SES], parent input, child gesture) of vocabulary growth between 14 and 46 months (n = 62) and then uses growth estimates to predict children’s vocabulary at 54 months. Velocity and acceleration in vocabulary development at 30 months predicted later vocabulary, particularly for children from low-SES backgrounds. Understanding the pace of early vocabulary growth thus improves our ability to predict school readiness and may help identify children at risk for starting behind.

Using data from a racially and ethnically diverse sample of low-income fathers and their 2-year-old children who participated in the Early Head Start Research Evaluation Project (n = 80), the current study explored the association among paternal depressive symptoms and level of education, fathers’ language to their children, and children’s language skills. There were three main findings. First, there was large variability in the quality and quantity of language used during linguistic interactions between low-income fathers and their toddlers. Second, fathers with higher levels of education had children who spoke more (i.e. utterances) and had more diverse vocabularies (i.e. word types) than fathers with lower levels of education. However, fathers with more depressive symptoms had children with less grammatically complex language (i.e. smaller MLUs) than fathers with fewer depressive symptoms. Third, direct effects between fathers’ depressive symptoms and level of education and children’s language outcomes were partially mediated by fathers’ quantity and quality of language.