The home language environment in rural China: variations across family characteristics

Abstract

Background A rich language environment is an important element of a nurturing home environment. Despite their proven importance, vocabulary and conversation have been shown to vary widely across households—even within the same socio-economic class. One significant gap in the existing literature is its nearly exclusive geographic focus on Western and developed settings, with little attention given to poorer communities in lower/middle income countries. The purpose of this study was to empirically illustrate the characteristics of the home language environment in the low SES, non-Western cultural setting of rural China. Methods Using Language Environment Analysis (LENA) automated language-analysis system, this study measured the home language environment of 38 children aged 20-27 months in Northwest rural China. Our primary measures of the home language environment were Adult Word Count (AWC), Conversational Turn Count (CTC) and Child Vocalization Count (CVC). Multivariate linear regression models were used to examine the association between home language environment and family/child characteristics, and language skills (Measured by MacArthur-Bates Communicative Developmental Inventory score). Results In this paper, by comparison, we found that the home language environment of our rural sample fell far behind that of urban households. We also identify significant, positive correlations between language skills and both AWC and CTC. Our analysis finds no significant correlations between home language environment and family/child characteristics. Conclusion In this paper, we present the first ever findings using the LENA system to measure the home language environment of young children from poor rural communities in China. We found that the home language environment of lower-SES household was significantly worse than high-SES households, and demonstrated the importance of the home language environment to language skills, pointing to a need for more high-quality studies of the home language environment in rural China to better understand possible mechanisms behind low levels of parent-child language engagement and ways to improve the home language environment.

Associations between urbanization and the home language environment: Evidence from a LENA study in rural and peri‐urban China

“…We acknowledge several limitations of this study. First, while LENA has been validated and confirmed reliable in Mandarin Chinese (Gilkerson et al., 2015; Ma et al., 2023) and used previously among children aged 0 through 3 years in China (Ma et al., 2021; Zhang, Xu, et al., 2015), other studies suggest that the accuracy of CTC (especially in the measures of initiated segments, etc.) is not fully reliable (Cristia et al., 2020, 2021).…”

“…LENA‐reported AWC, CTC, and CVC have all been reliably used in previous studies in the United States, China, and other countries (Busch et al., 2018; Canault et al., 2016; Gilkerson et al., 2018; Pae et al., 2016; Weisleder & Fernald, 2013; Zhang, Xu, et al., 2015). All three measures have been found to correlate closely with word counts generated from human manual transcription, including among Chinese‐speaking populations (Standard Mandarin and Shanghai dialect; Gilkerson et al., 2015; Ma et al., 2023).…”

“…Moreover, studies in rural China show that rural children are exposed to a less rich HLE than their urban peers. For instance, a LENA study in rural Shaanxi Province (Ma et al., 2023) found that a sample of children aged 20–27 months heard significantly fewer words and engaged in fewer conversational turns than a sample of even younger urban children from Shanghai (Zhang, Xu, et al., 2015).…”

“…One widely used and validated assessment for child language development is the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDI;deMayo et al, 2021;Frank et al, 2021). Studies have repeatedly found measures of the HLE to be associated with higher CDI scores, including adult speech (Ma et al, 2023), adult-child conversation (Ma et al, 2023;Ramírez et al, 2020;Zhang et al, 2023), and child vocalizations (Zhang et al, 2023). Understanding the HLE, therefore, can help researchers pinpoint the factors that impact children's language development and their long-term outcomes by extension.…”

Factors of parental investment in the home language environment in peri-urban China: A mixed methods study

“…There is also evidence of rural-urban disparities in the home language environment: a series of studies describing and comparing the home language environments of young children in low-SES households in rural Shaanxi Province to that of high-SES households in urban Shanghai demonstrated that rural children overheard significantly less adult speech and have fewer adult-child verbal interactions compared to their urban peers [ 35 – 37 ], demonstrated that rural children overhear significantly less speech and have fewer adult-child verbal interactions compared to their urban peers. Another study among low SES rural households in two southwestern counties of China similarly found lower counts of adult words and adult-child conversation [ 38 ].…”