Participants: 18- to 25-month-olds

Observational studies with English-speaking families show that the amount and quality of parental speech are reliably associated with measures of children’s language development (Huttenlocher, et. al., 1991. Hart & Risley, 1995, Hoff, 2003). This literature on early language environments has focused overwhelmingly on English-learning children.  This study explores relations between maternal talk, and language development in Latino children learning Spanish as a first language, a large and growing population of children in the U.S.  Although a few studies have characterized teaching styles of Latina mothers, no previous research has examined children’s interactions with Spanish-speaking parents in relation to child-language outcomes. We present results from a longitudinal study of Spanish-learning children examining features of maternal input that are predictive of children’s efficiency in online comprehension and of their lexical and grammatical development using parental report measures.

Participants were mother-child dyads (n=28) from monolingual Spanish-speaking families.  Online comprehension was evaluated at 18 and 24 months.  At each age, parents completed the Spanish-language MacArthur-Bates CDI.  At 18-months, mother and child were videotaped in a 30-min structured play session; these interactions were transcribed and coded for structural measures (e.g., quantity, lexical/grammatical complexity), and functional measures of maternal talk (e.g., intrusiveness/supportiveness).  Preliminary analyses indicate that the total number of utterances, total number of words, total number of different words and the length of the utterances in maternal talk are reliably associated with children’s vocabulary outcomes and also their efficiency in spoken language processing from 18 & 24 months. These findings extend our understanding of the relation of early language experience to language development by Spanish-learning children.

Presented at the Biennial Conference of the Society for Research on Child Development, Boston, MA, 2007

Our thanks to all the parents and children who participated in this study! You have made a valuable contribution to the scientific understanding of early language learning, and we very much appreciate your generosity.