BackHome
Refresh: OffView Personal Schedule
Individual Submission Summary
Share...

Direct link:

Language Interactions in the Homes of Latino Infants in the First Year of Life

Thu, March 21, 2:15 to 3:45pm, Hilton Baltimore, Floor: Level 1, Latrobe

Integrative Statement

A day in the life of an infant abounds with talk from multiple sources in a variety of different contexts. While most research on the effects of early language input has focused on interactions with a single caregiver, infants also hear child-directed speech from siblings, overheard speech from adults and children, and overlapping speech in multi-party conversations. Studies with English-learning children suggest that early language interactions vary as a function of the immediate social context – including the type of activity and interaction partners (Hoff-Ginsberg, 1991; Soderstrom et al., 2013, 2018). For example, mothers' talk during bookreading tends to be denser and more lexically diverse than talk in other settings (Hoff-Ginsberg, 1991), and infants produce more speech-like vocalizations during one-on-one interactions than in multi-party contexts (Ramirez-Esparza et al., 2014).
Do these findings generalize to families from different cultures and socioeconomic backgrounds, who may differ in household characteristics, social structures and childcare arrangements? The current study investigated the language-learning environments of Latino infants from low-income homes in the US. We examine how the type of activity and interaction context are related to language interactions with infants over the first year of life. In particular, we ask: 1) Do language interactions with infants vary across different activity contexts? 2) Do language interactions with infants vary in relation to the number and type of interaction partner? 3) Does the amount of language interaction in different contexts change over the first year of life?
Participants (n=22) were recorded at 2, 6, 9, and 12 months on a typical day in the home using LENA. On the recording day, caregivers completed a logbook indicating the participants present during each 1-hour interval (e.g., mother, father, siblings) and the activities in which the infant was engaged (e.g., eating, bathing, bookreading). Combining quantitative measures of this rich natural language sample with parents’ reports of the social interaction context, we explored differences in the number of adult words and adult-child conversational turns between context. Behavioral coding and transcription of these interactions is ongoing.
Multi-level models revealed differences in language interactions related to activity and interaction context: As early as 2 months, intervals with booksharing exhibited more adult words (b=25.54, p<.001) and conversational turns (b=0.74, p<.001) than intervals without booksharing (Figure 1). In addition, the number of adult words available to infants was higher in the presence of multiple adults (b=20.31, p<.01), while the number of conversational turns with the infant did not differ between social interaction contexts (Figure 2). Finally, while the overall amount of adult words and conversational turns did not change over the first year, the amount of language interaction during booksharing increased after 2 months (Figure 1). These results are a first step toward understanding how the structure of daily activities and social configurations shape language interactions in the homes of Latino infants in the US. We will discuss implications of these findings for understanding language development in diverse groups of children.

Authors