Poster #115 - Using Overheard Speech to Predict the Verbal Achievement of Young Children

• In Event: 3-003 - Poster Session 09
  In Poster Session: PS 09 Section - Language, Communication

Integrative Statement

In the last twenty years, claims of a 30-million-word gap between the number of words heard by poor and affluent children have preoccupied discussions of the cause of poor school achievement. The construct of the word gap described by Hart and Risley (1995) was predicated on the number of words spoken by a single caregiver to the child in joint-attention episodes where a single caregiver interacts with an infant in a face-to-face posture. However, cross-cultural evidence has suggested that this model of language teaching is anomalous on the world stage suggesting that many children learn language predominantly from overhearing the speech of other persons around them (Duranti, Ochs, & Schieffelin, 2012; Lancy, 2015).

Recent studies have suggested, however, that even in cultures where joint-attention episodes are not the norm for caregiver-child interaction, speech heard in joint attention episodes predicts vocabulary acquisition better than does overheard speech (e.g., Shneidman & Goldin-Meadow, 2012). However, these studies treat all overheard speech as alike (Brown & Gaskins, 2014). It is reasonable to assume that the language-learning child might attend to some types of overheard speech more than others, and to speech heard in some contexts more than that heard in other contexts. The purpose of this study is to determine if overheard speech can be reliably differentiated. This question is not trivial, for some children in American communities hear widely varying proportions of their total language input in overheard contexts as opposed to joint attention contexts (Sperry, Sperry, & Miller, 2018).

To date, little is known about overheard speech in young children’s ambient environments in terms of either (a) the social configurations in which it occurs, or (b) the nature of its content. To address this gap, we analyzed the verbatim transcripts from 67.5 hours of observations from a rural, Indiana European American working-class community and from 35 hours of observations from a rural, Alabama African American poor community. All speech not addressed to the focal child was coded along two dimensions: (1) Is the speech about the child? and (2) To what degree is the child involved in the conversation? The latter construct was operationalized along three lines: Conversations between others to which the child contributed, conversations between others to which the child overtly attended as measured by gaze and physical proximity, and conversations between others for which there was no behavioral evidence of attention by the focal child.

Results demonstrate that young children avidly listen to overheard speech, attending to speech that heretofore has either not been considered for analysis at all or has been deemed uninteresting to young children. Furthermore, when the amount of overheard speech is limited to speech to which the child is attending, overheard speech does predict later vocabulary acquisition independent of speech addressed to the child. These results address the importance of discriminating the nature of overheard speech in particular contexts and considering only that speech which is about the child and heard in contexts where the child is evidently involved when assessing later vocabulary development.

Authors

• Linda L. Sperry, Indiana State University
  Presenting Author

• Douglas E. Sperry, Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College
  Non-Presenting Author

• Mariah C. Stout, Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College
  Non-Presenting Author