Maternal Inferential Input and Children's Language Skills

Abstract

Researchers have consistently found a link between the quality of early parent–child book‐reading interactions and children's language skill. Two aspects of quality (level of abstraction and utterance function) were examined simultaneously in the current study to further refine our understanding of how parents’ talk during shared reading predicts children's vocabulary growth and elicits children's participation in book reading. To achieve this aim, the authors examined mothers’ extratextual utterances while reading to their preschool children across a continuum of four levels of abstraction (two literal and two inferential) and in terms of utterance function (wh‐ question, yes/no question, and statement). In a sample of 49 mother–child dyads (mean child age = 4.47 years), the authors found that mothers’ inferential yes/no questions and statements predicted children's receptive vocabulary growth over six months, controlling for children's age, mothers’ education, and frequency of reading, and that mothers’ inferential wh‐ questions and literal utterances of all types were not predictive of children's vocabulary growth. Using sequential analysis, the authors also found significant contingencies between mothers’ utterances and children's responses during shared reading that were within the same level of abstraction across all utterance functions. These results are discussed in relation to prior work that has largely examined these two qualities of parent–child book interactions separately.

The Effectiveness of Online Dialogic Storytelling on Vocabulary Skills of Hard of Hearing Children

“…Enhancing frequency and quality of storytelling by parents can also have positive effects on lexical skills in such children [59]. It should be noted that the quality of storytelling means that parents have interactions and dialogues with their children in addition to storytelling [60][61][62] and storytelling techniques need to be taught to parents [63,64]. Both parents also need to participate in storytelling, tell the story in their language instead of reading it out, and increase the interest of children in reading books [64].…”

The contribution of emotion knowledge, language ability, and maternal emotion socialization style to explaining toddlers’ emotion regulation

“…Clearly, as we will explore more fully in the next section, the adult plays a crucial role in fostering language, and hence emotion competence. The more parents speak to their children about internal emotional and affective states, for example during shared‐book reading or in response to the children’s emotional displays, the greater the children’s gains in linguistic, social, and emotional competence (Aram, Fine, & Ziv, ; Tompkins, Bengochea, Nicol, & Justice, ). Both parents and teachers may encourage children to express emotions verbally rather than through physical actions, thereby helping them to deal more effectively with their emotions.…”

Triangulating Multi-Method Assessments of Parental Support for Early Math Skills

“…In addition to differences in the content being discussed during parent-child interactions, verbal input and scaffolding can occur in the form of questions, directives, or statements (see Mermelshtine, 2017 for a review). Variation in parental language input by utterance format has been explored in the language domain, but evidence is mixed regarding whether questions, statements, or both predict children's language skills (Ard and Beverly, 2004;Strouse et al, 2013;Tompkins et al, 2017). On the one hand, through statements, parents can provide rich descriptions or explanations of the events occurring within an activity, expand on their child's utterances, or rephrase their child's speech with more detail or complex vocabulary.…”

“…On the one hand, through statements, parents can provide rich descriptions or explanations of the events occurring within an activity, expand on their child's utterances, or rephrase their child's speech with more detail or complex vocabulary. On the other hand, questioning can encourage children to verbalize their current knowledge, generate inferences, problem solve, or engage in a higher quantity and diversity of verbal responses (Tompkins et al, 2017).…”