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.

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.

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.

Discussions that occur during book reading between parents and preschool children relate to children’s language development, especially discussions during picture books that include extended discourse, a form of abstract language. While a recent report shows increased chapter book reading among families with preschool children, it is unknown whether chapter books also facilitate these types of conversations. Further, the substantial variation in preschoolers’ language ability raises the question of whether chapter book reading may be beneficial for all children of this age. The current study examined the discussions between five-year-old children (N = 33) and their parents while reading both a picture book and the first chapter of a chapter book. Findings are discussed in terms of the variation observed in the amount and types of discussion, how chapter book discussions compare to picture book discussions, and finally, how children’s narrative skill can serve as an indicator of children’s ability to participate in discussions, especially during chapter book reading.

Prior studies indicate that children vary widely in their mathematical knowledge by the time they enter preschool and that this variation predicts levels of achievement in elementary school. In a longitudinal study of a diverse sample of 44 preschool children, we examined the extent to which their understanding of the cardinal meanings of the number words (e.g., knowing that the word “four” refers to sets with 4 items) is predicted by the “number talk” they hear from their primary caregiver in the early home environment. Results from 5 visits showed substantial variation in parents’ number talk to children between the ages of 14 and 30 months. Moreover, this variation predicted children’s knowledge of the cardinal meanings of number words at 46 months, even when socioeconomic status and other measures of parent and child talk were controlled. These findings suggest that encouraging parents to talk about number with their toddlers, and providing them with effective ways to do so, may positively impact children’s school achievement.

This study examines the role of a particular kind of linguistic input––talk about the past and future, pretend, and explanations, that is, talk that is decontextualized––in the development of vocabulary, syntax, and narrative skill in typically developing (TD) children and children with pre- or perinatal brain injury (BI). Decontextualized talk has been shown to be particularly effective in predicting children’s language skills, but it is not clear why. We first explored the nature of parent decontextualized talk and found it to be linguistically richer than contextualized talk in parents of both TD and BI children. We then found, again for both groups, that parent decontextualized talk at child age 30 months was a significant predictor of child vocabulary, syntax, and narrative performance at kindergarten, above and beyond the child’s own early language skills, parent contextualized talk and demographic factors. Decontextualized talk played a larger role in predicting kindergarten syntax and narrative outcomes for children with lower syntax and narrative skill at 30 months, and also a larger role in predicting kindergarten narrative outcomes for children with BI than for TD children. The difference between the two groups stemmed primarily from the fact that children with BI had lower narrative (but not vocabulary or syntax) scores than TD children. When the two groups were matched in terms of narrative skill at kindergarten, the impact that decontextualized talk had on narrative skill did not differ for children with BI and for TD children. Decontextualized talk is thus a strong predictor of later language skill for all children, but may be particularly potent for children at the lower-end of the distribution for language skill. The findings also suggest that variability in the language development of children with BI is influenced not only by the biological characteristics of their lesions, but also by the language input they receive.

This study examines whether children’s decontextualized talk—talk about nonpresent events, explanations, orpretend—at 30 months predicts seventh-grade academic language proficiency (age 12). Academic language(AL) refers to the language of school texts. AL profi ciency has been identified as an important predictor ofadolescent text comprehension. Yet research on precursors to AL proficiency is scarce. Child decontextualizedtalk is known to be a predictor of early discourse development, but its relation to later language outcomesremains unclear. Forty-two children and their caregivers participated in this study. The proportion of childtalk that was decontextualized emerged as a significant predictor of seventh-grade AL proficiency, even aftercontrolling for socioeconomic status, parent decontextualized talk, child total words, child vocabulary, andchild syntactic comprehension.

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.