Quality of Early Parent Input Predicts Child Vocabulary 3 Years Later

Abstract

Children greatly vary in the number of words they know when they enter school, a major factor influencing subsequent school and workplace success. This variability is partially explained by the differential quantity of parental speech to preschoolers. However, the contexts in which young learners hear new words are also likely to vary in referential transparency; that is, in how clearly word meaning can be inferred from the immediate extralinguistic contexts, an aspect of input quality. To examine this aspect, we asked 218 adult participants to guess 50 parents’ words from (muted) videos of their interactions with 14- to 18-mo-old children. We found systematic differences in how easily individual parents’ words could by identified purely from this socio-visual context. Differences in this kind of input quality correlated with the size of the children's vocabulary 3 years later, even after controlling for input quantity. Although input quantity differed as a function of socio-economic status, input quality (as here measured) did not, suggesting that the quality of nonverbal cues to word meaning that parents offer to their children is an individual matter, widely distributed across the population of parents.

Put Your Data to Use: Entering the Real World of Children and Families

“…Although the world mobilized around the 30-million-word gap (i.e., the quantity of talk), we thought that these conversational duets contained the quality to foster children’s language learning. Our findings and a number of other studies supported these conclusions (Cartmill et al, 2013; Gilkerson et al, 2018; Perry et al, 2018; Romeo et al, 2018; Rowe, 2012). Remedies for the word gap were likely to be found in the serve-and-return of conversation rather than playing the television to increase language input or overheard speech from conversations between adults (Golinkoff, Hoff, Rowe, Tamis-LeMonda, & Hirsh-Pasek, 2018).…”

Print exposure predicts pronoun comprehension strategies in children

“…Another line of research suggests that language development in children is influenced by the complexity of language heard in the home. For example, vocabulary at 54 months is correlated with the quantity of speech produced in samples between 14 and 18 months (Cartmill, Armstrong, Gleitman, Goldin-Meadow, Medina, & Trueswell, 2013; see also Huttenlocher, Haight, Byrk, Seltzer, & Lyons, 1991;Rowe, 2008Rowe, , 2012. Syntactic development is also correlated with the syntactic complexity of parental speech (Huttenlocher, Vasilevya, Cymerman, & Levine, 2002. The quality and quantity of maternal speech has been argued to account for the effects of socio-economic status (SES) on language development.…”

Analyzing input quality along three dimensions: interactive, linguistic, and conceptual

“…For example, 18-month-olds are more likely to learn the name of an object that is labeled while it is the dominant object in that child's view (Yu & Smith, 2012). Similarly, the literature on facilitative features in cross-situational word learning highlights the connection between the linguistic and conceptual levels of input quality: parents who more consistently make clear what they are referring to in language with 14-to 18-month-olds have children who learn words faster (Cartmill et al, 2013). For example, within joint attention episodes at 15 months, frequency of maternal talk about objects the child was already focused on was correlated with vocabulary at 21 months, whereas maternal redirecting talk was negatively correlated with later vocabulary (Tomasello & Farrar, 1986).…”