Maternal Linguistic Input to Toddlers With Slow Expressive Language Development

Abstract

Maternal speech styles to children between 20 and 34 months of age who were slow to acquire expressive language were compared to those of mothers with normally speaking toddlers. Aspects of the mothers’ speech examined included use of various sentence types (declaratives, negative, questions, etc.), the mother’s lexical contingency with regard to the child’s utterance; mother’s use of pragmatic functions such as requests, comments, and conversational devices; and the mother’s use of topic management. Results revealed that mothers of toddlers with slow language development are different from mothers of normal speakers only in their frequency of use of lexical contingency devices, specifically, expansion and extension. However, the proportion of expansions and extensions relative to the number of child utterances is not different, indicating that when late talkers give their mothers something to expand, the mothers do so, but that the late talkers do not give their mothers as much speech to work with as do the normal toddlers. Implications of these findings for parent training are discussed

Self-Reported Parenting Behavior and Child Temperament in Families of Toddlers With and Without Speech—Language Delay

“…The differences in parental language with children who have a language delay might represent the parents' adjustment to the child's language ability rather than reflect abnormal parental behavior that could possibly be implicated in the etiology of the language disorder (Whitehurst et al, 1988). Parents may provide fewer extensions and expansions because their children with language delay talk less and are less reinforcing to parents in their attempts to verbally engage their child (Paul & Elwood, 1991).…”

Causal effects on child language development: A review of studies in communication sciences and disorders

“…Even though the examiner was naïve to the research purpose at the time the study was conducted, the linguistic complexity of her utterances correlated positively with the complexity of the children's productions, suggestive of child effects (see also Cramblit & Siegel, 1977;Paul & Elwood, 1991;Rescorla & Ratner, 1996). In addition, a behavioral genetic design by Dale, Tosto, Hayiou-Thomas, and Plomin (this issue) including over 8000 twin pairs demonstrated shared genetic influences on a self-reported measure of parental language stimulation and indices of child language development, thereby supporting the presence of gene-environment correlation.…”

Genetic Effects on Children’s Conversational Language Use

“…Instead, studies of children's conversational language have largely used correlation or group designs of parentchild interaction (e.g., Hart & Risley, 1995;Paul & Elwood, 1991), which do not control for potential genetic influences on language use. For example, associations between child language ability and amount of language exposure could result from innate differences in child language ability, which in turn elicit differences in environmental exposure.…”