Poster #146 - Parental language input in maltreating families: the role of parenting interventions

• In Event: 3-053 - Poster Session 10
  In Poster Session: PS 10 Section - Parenting & Parent-Child Relationships

Integrative Statement

Child maltreatment affects children all across the globe and it can have deleterious consequences for children’s language development and other domains of development (Cicchetti & Toth, 2005). Language problems might be the first link in a chain of accumulating developmental problems and expanding harsh or neglecting parenting behavior, as many of the potential consequences of maltreatment are related to child language development (Carson, Carson, Klee, & Jackman-Brown, 2007; Kastner, May, & Hildman, 2001; Petersen, Bates, & Staples, 2015; Vallotton & Ayoub, 2011; Van Balkom, Verhoeven, & Van Weerdenburg, 2010). To be able to intervene early in this chain, knowledge on the mechanisms in the relation between maltreatment and language development is needed. Maternal language input is one of those potential mechanisms, as the language that parents provide to their children is lower in maltreating families (Coster & Cicchetti, 1993; Eigsti & Cicchetti, 2004).
Eighty-two mother-child dyads from maltreating families and 43 non-maltreating control families participated in this study. Mothers and children were first observed in a free-play setting when children were 12 months old (pre-intervention). Transcripts of these motherchild interactions were analyzed with Computerized Language Analysis (CLAN; MacWhinney, 2009). The number of different words (‘types’) was taken as an indicator of lexical diversity in maternal language input. After the pre-intervention assessment maltreating families were randomized to the intervention group who received either the infant-parent psychotherapy (IPP) or the psychoeducational parenting intervention (PPI), or to the community standard control group. Mother-child interactions at the post-intervention freeplay observation (child age 26 months) were also transcribed and analyzed with CLAN to determine the lexical diversity in the maternal language input.
A repeated-measures ANOVA showed that although maltreating and non-maltreating families did not differ in the changes in lexical diversity over time (F = 0.29, p = .590), there were significant between-subject effects (F = 5.41, p = .022) with maltreating mothers generally providing language input that was more lexically diverse than non-maltreating mothers (see Figure 1). Differences in lexical diversity between the intervention group and the maltreating and non-maltreating control groups were not significant.
These results confirm that the quality of maternal language input is a potential mechanism through which maltreatment is related to child language outcomes. The results also show that a general parenting intervention does not affect the quality of maternal language input as a side effect. This implies that a more specific focus on maternal language input is needed to get the quality of maternal language input in maltreating families to a level comparable to nonmaltreating families and in turn prevent or decrease delays in language development for maltreated children.

Authors

• Mariëlle J.L. Prevoo, Leiden University
  Presenting Author

• Fred Rogosch, University of Rochester
  Non-Presenting Author

• Sheree Toth, University of Rochester
  Non-Presenting Author