Poster #2 - Parent comparison speech is affected by variation of present visual display and child language comprehension

• In Event: 1-061 - Poster Session 02
  In Poster Session: PS 02 Section - Attention, Learning, Memory

Integrative Statement

Sometimes parents use comparison in speech to children and sometimes they do not. Comparison has been shown to have multiple benefits for learning. This study investigates what types of situations afford and engender parent comparison talk. We examined parent speech to children 20 to 24 months of age in a free form picture book context. The pages contained three pictures each and varied within a page on color and/or object. Figure 1 presents examples of the pages. There were 18 pages to display all combinations of variation for objects and colors, and no objects appeared on more than one page. Parent speech was analyzed for color, object, question/statement use, and comparison/contrast use. Children’s color understanding, measured with a comprehension test, and MCDI score was compared to the parent speech. The results indicated that parents used comparison more often when their children knew more color words. Parents also used comparison more when the page had only one dimension held constant across pictures (i.e., more often in picture B where one feature is held constant, than picture A where none are held constant, or picture C where all are held constant). The results of this study inform existing understanding of comparison by demonstrating how this speech correlates with children’s understanding of language, and specifically color words. Contexts that elicit comparison are more likely to be ones in which there is a balance between the similarities and differences within the object set; the objects are neither too similar to prompt an explanation of group membership (i.e., page C), nor too different to provide grouping terms (i.e., page A), but with just enough difference that drawing attention to the similarity requires the additional linguistic support of comparison for children who are equipped to understand the feature in common (i.e., color in page B).

Authors

• Gwendolyn Price, University of California, Los Angeles
  Presenting Author

• Catherine Sandhofer, UCLA
  Non-Presenting Author