Parents' Role in Infants' Language Development and Emergent Literacy

Abstract

In this chapter, we highlight specific behaviors in parents that positively influence children's language development and emergent literacy. In particular, we point to the importance of parent language that is diverse in word types and communicative functions; parent language that is contingently responsive to infant behaviors; parent language that is coordinated with cues that saliently mark referents for children; parent language that is grammatically complex and attuned to children's growing language skills; and parents' engagement of children in routine activities of book sharing, storytelling, rhyming, drawing, and writing, all of which indoctrinate children into the larger literate society.

Teachers’ Conversational Style and Children’s Language Development in German Childcare Centers: A Culture-Sensitive Intervention

“…Importantly, this relation has been revealed across different cultural contexts and milieus (e.g., Reese, 1995; Reese, Leyva, Sparks, & Grolnick, 2010; Sparks, Carmiol, & Ríos, 2013; Sparks & Reese, 2013; Wang, 2007) and is also supported by intervention studies (see Reese, Sparks, & Leyva, 2010, for a review). This result is in line with studies that have explored conversational interactions in general, demonstrating that adults’ diversity of speech is significant for children’s language development (e.g., vocabulary size, phonological awareness, grammatical skills; see Snow, 2014; Tamis-LeMonda, Luo, & Song, 2014, for reviews). Accordingly, we aimed to increase these conversational behaviors in teachers’ everyday language.…”

Routine Language: Speech Directed to Infants During Home Activities

“…Infants are armed with powerful statistical learning mechanisms that allow them to detect regularities among adjacent speech sounds (Saffran et al., ), track word/object co‐occurrences across multiple events (Smith & Yu, ; Xu & Tenenbaum, ), and exploit social cues such as eye gaze and touch to infer speaker intention (Baldwin, ; Tomasello, ). Reciprocally, caregivers reduce referential ambiguity by responding contingently to infant behaviors with language that is accompanied by gesture, touch, and exaggerated actions (“motionese”) to elicit infant attention and signal the referents of talk (Brand, Baldwin, & Ashburn, ; Rowe, Özçalışkan, & Goldin‐Meadow, ; Tamis‐LeMonda, Luo, & Song, ). Caregiver contingent language increases the odds that naming events occur when a target object is visually salient and centered from the infant's perspective (Smith, Suanda, & Yu, ; Yurovsky, Smith, & Yu, ).…”

“…It is unclear whether differences in the language input of mothers was attributable to stable, individual tendencies in verbosity and elaboration, differences among infants, or other unexamined factors. Indeed, language learning is transactional (e.g., McLean & Snyder, 1978), and infants play a central role in parents’ language (Woynaroski, Yoder, Fey, & Warren, 2014) by engaging in exploratory and communicative behaviors that provide parents with opportunities to respond verbally (Tamis‐LeMonda et al., ).…”

Mother and child narrative elaborations during booksharing in low‐income Mexican‐American dyads

“…Understanding these reciprocal influences requires attention not only to how much children contribute overall but also to the types of contributions they make. Parents must be attuned to their children's skills to adapt their scaffolding styles, but children's contributions might elicit different types of parent contributions (Roy, ; Song, Spier, & Tamis‐LeMonda, ; Tamis‐LeMonda, Luo, & Song, ). For instance, children who frequently ask questions might elicit high levels of information and questioning from their parents, whereas children who spontaneously initiate story events might result in parents allowing their children greater storytelling independence.…”