Child-directed speech: relation to socioeconomic status, knowledge of child development and child vocabulary skill*

By Meredith Rowe. Journal of Child Language, 2008

754 citations recorded by the source corpus.

ABSTRACT This study sought to determine why American parents from different socioeconomic backgrounds communicate in different ways with their children. Forty-seven parent–child dyads were videotaped engaging in naturalistic interactions in the home for ninety minutes at child age 2 ; 6. Transcripts of these interactions provided measures of child-directed speech. Children's vocabulary comprehension skills were measured using the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test at 2 ; 6 and one year later at 3 ; 6. Results indicate that: (1) child-directed speech with toddlers aged 2 ; 6 predicts child vocabulary skill one year later, controlling for earlier toddler vocabulary skill; (2) child-directed speech relates to socioeconomic status as measured by income and education; and (3) the relation between socioeconomic status and child-directed speech is mediated by parental knowledge of child development. Potential mechanisms through which parental knowledge influences communicative behavior are discussed.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/63db161c1b944fe896ecf18bc375d1d657639a27

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In Developmental and Educational Psychology

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Citations in the corpus

Mapping the Early Language Environment Using All-Day Recordings and Automated Analysis. (2017, background): “However, studies using transcriptional analyses have reported significant correlations between the quantity of adult input and the quality of the speech in terms of lexical diversity, as well as grammatical and syntactic complexity (Hoff, 2003; Rowe, 2008).”
Sources of Variability in Children’s Language Growth (2010, background): “Previous research on children’s vocabulary growth suggests that SES differences might be mediated by variations in caregiver speech (Hoff, 2003b; Rowe, 2008).”
Talking to children matters: Early language experience strengthens processing and builds vocabulary (2013, background): “…parents from different sociocultural groups have different beliefs about the role they play in children’s communicative development (Heath, 1983), and Rowe (2008) found that parents’ knowledge and beliefs about child development mediated the relation between SES and caregiver speech to children.”
Parenting Matters: Supporting Parents of Children Ages 0-8 (2016, positive): “, 2012; Pancsofar and Vernon-Feagans, 2006; Rowe et al., 2004). Language development studies have found that providing an instructional platform in a child’s early language experience, such as offering a social context for communication and asking more “what,” “where,” and “why” questions, is associ”
Putting Students on the Path to Learning: The Case for Fully Guided Instruction. (2012, background): “Parents who know more about how children learn and grow talk to their children in more complex ways and more often solicit ideas from their children, and high-SES parents more often have this knowledge.(42) There is also evidence that the crowded homes of low-SES families contribute: when the home i”
Child-Directed Speech Is Infrequent in a Forager-Farmer Population: A Time Allocation Study. (2019, neutral): “Much current work on verbal input to infants focuses on a single adult who is the child’s primary caregiver, often the mother (e.g., Hoff & Naigles, 2002; Rowe, 2008).”
The Contribution of Early Communication Quality to Low-Income Children’s Language Success (2015, background): “Poverty has been repeatedly associated not only with a decreased quantity of language input, but also with decreased quality (Hart & Risley, 1995; Hoff, 2003; Rowe, 2008) and with decreased levels of sensitive parenting (NICHD Early Child Care Research Network, 2005).”
How socioeconomic status, executive functioning and verbal interactions contribute to early academic achievement in Chinese children (2017, background): “exhibit deficits in oral language (Rowe, 2008), phonological awareness (Noble, Farah, & McCandliss, 2006; Schiff & Lotem, 2011) and have lower executive functioning particularly when it comes to working memory and inhibitory control.”
Does prosody make the difference? A meta-analysis on relations between prosodic aspects of infant-directed speech and infant outcomes. (2017, background): “…no specific studies that explore the relationship between IDS prosody and SES, but the few studies on IDS linguistic features suggest that low-SES parents use a linguistically less complex stimulating speech that in turn negatively influences infant language development (Hoff, 2003; Rowe, 2008).”
Language intervention research in early childhood care and education: A systematic survey of the literature (2020, neutral): “…replicated since Hart and Risley’s study (e.g., Hoff, 2003; uttenlocher, Waterfall, Vasilyeva, Vevea, & Hedges, 2010; Pace, uo, Hirsh-Pasek, & Golinkoff, 2017; Rowe, 2008, 2017; and see olinkoff, Hoff, Rowe, Tamis-LeMonda, & Hirsh-Pasek, 2018 and he introduction to this issue Walker & Carta, 2020).”
Question-asking in childhood: A review of the literature and a framework for understanding its development (2018, background): “…is a robust correlation between the onset and frequency of children’s pointing and their subsequent vocabulary size (Camaioni, Castelli, Longobardi, & Volterra, 1991; Fenson et al., 1994; Rowe, 2008) suggesting that children might learn labels from receiving informative replies to their points.”
Supermarket Speak: Increasing Talk Among Low-Socioeconomic Status (2015, background): “In particular, low-SES parents tend to use more directives, ask fewer questions, and engage less in conversation with their children (Hart & Risley, 1995; Rowe, 2008).”