Evidence of Children’s Future-Oriented Thinking During Conversations with Parents

• In Event: Poster Session 11
  In Poster Session: PS 11 Topic - Language, Communication

Abstract

Introduction
Future-oriented thinking (FOT) is predictive of school readiness, later academic achievement, and social functioning (Mahy et al., 2016). FOT begins to develop during early childhood and is traditionally measured via behavioral assessments (e.g., delay of gratification, planning) (Atance, 2008). Given the connection between language and cognition (Nelson, 1998), there has been recent interest in understanding whether talking about the future might scaffold the development of children’s FOT. For example, a recent set of priming studies shows short-term improvements to 4- and 5-year-olds’ FOT following conversations with experimenters about future events (Chernyak et al., 2017; Leech et al., 2019). This work raises the question of how future-oriented conversation in more naturalistic settings with parents may support children’s future thinking and planning abilities. Indeed, there has long been an emphasis on the role of parent-child interactions for children’s understanding of past events (Nelson, 1996), but this has not yet been applied to future events (c.f. Hudson, 2002; 2006).

This study describes parent-child conversations about future events during home mealtimes over a three-year-period. Coding captured the frequency as well as conceptual and linguistic complexity of children’s future talk. We hypothesized that children’s future talk would become increasingly complex over time, mirroring the developmental patterns seen in behavioral lab-based assessments of FOT.

Method
This study analyzed existing transcripts from the longitudinal HSLLD corpus in CHILDES (MacWhinney, 2000). Transcripts include conversations between low-income mothers and their children (N=65) during mealtimes when children were 3-, 4-, and 5-years-old. Speakers’ future-oriented utterances were automatically extracted using the CLAN program and then verified by a team of research assistants. Here we only present data from children’s future-oriented utterances, which were pooled across transcripts (N=951 utterances). Utterances that passed verification were further coded for conceptual and linguistic complexity (hypotheticals, references to distant future, connections to past events, references to others’ futures; Table 1). Reliability averaged 89.2% (Kappa=.81).

Results and Conclusions
On average, children produced 6.12 future-oriented utterances per mealtime and this frequency did not change significantly over time. However, with age, children’s future talk became increasingly complex in all but one of the coding categories (Figure 1). Across the three-year period, children were significantly more likely to:
- Reference the distant future (more than 24 hours in the future), χ2(2)=18.98, p<.001
- Talk about the future using hypotheticals, χ2(2)=11.96, p=.002
- Make connections between past and future events, χ2(2)=10.10, p=.006
These analyses indicate that conceptual and linguistic complexity of children’s future-oriented talk increases between the ages of 3 and 5, mirroring improvements to future thinking during this period. The implication of this work is that adult-child conversation is a possible mechanism for enhancing aspects of FOT such as delaying gratification, planning, and goal setting. To test this hypothesis, our lab is conducting a study which directly measures parent-child future conversation and its association to behavioral measures of children’s FOT. These results speak to future interventions could use dyadic future-oriented conversation as a lever to foster children’s FOT and ultimately improve children’s school readiness and achievement.

Author

• Kathryn Anne Leech, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
  Presenting Author