The relation between financial concerns and child-directed speech: additional evidence to explain the “word gap”

• In Event: Poster Session 12
  In Poster Session: PS 12 Topic - Language, Communication

Abstract

Research suggests that parents of higher socioeconomic status (SES) talk more to their children than lower SES parents (e.g., Hart & Risley, 1995; Hoff, 2003). In an effort to explain this ‘word gap,’ Ellwood-Lowe, Foushee, and Srinivasan (2020) recently proposed that the cognitive load imposed by resource scarcity could directly suppress parent talk: if parents’ attention is occupied by financial concerns, this leaves less attention to devote to child-directed speech. Consistent with this proposal, they examined corpora of day-long in-home recordings and found that parent-child conversational turns tended to be lower at the end of the month, when Americans report experiencing greater financial strain.
Here we sought to further test Ellwood-Lowe’s proposal that financial stress suppresses child-directed speech. Using several existing corpora of lab-based parent-child interactions, we examined whether the amount of talk that parents directed at their children varied depending on the day of the month when the interaction took place. Based on Ellwood-Lowe’s results, we predicted that parents would talk less near the end of the month when financial concerns were likely to be greatest. We reasoned that if this pattern emerged in a lab-based interaction where it was likely salient to parents that their speech to their child was being observed, this would provide particularly strong evidence that financial strain suppresses child-directed speech.
Participants were 129 parent-child dyads drawn from pre-existing corpora of parent-child interactions (Roby & Scott, 2018; Roby, 2017). The children (64 male, 65 female) ranged in age from 27.3 to 39.3 months (M = 31.9, SD = 3.5). Parents were drawn from a diverse range of socioeconomic backgrounds (Table 1).
Parent-child dyads viewed a wordless picture book (Taumoepeau & Ruffman, 2006). Parents were instructed to go through the book with their child as they would at home. Dyads were then left alone to discuss the pictures. The interaction was recorded and transcribed. We focused on two measures of parent talk: the number of utterances and the number of word tokens that parents produced.
Results revealed that the day of the month when the interaction took place was significantly negatively correlated with the number of utterances, r = -.28, p = .009, and the number of words, r = -.20, p = .021, that parents produced, suggesting that parents who participated later in the month spoke less than those who participated earlier. Consistent with Ellwood-Lowe et al.’s results, parents who participated in the last week of the month produced significantly fewer utterances, t(127) = 2.31, p = .022, d = .47, and marginally fewer words, t(127) = 1.84, p = .068, d = .38, than parents who participated earlier in the month (Figure 1).
These findings support Ellwood-Lowe’s proposal that financial strain might increase parents’ cognitive load, and in turn, reduce parents’ tendency to engage in child-directed speech. This effect emerged even in a context where parents were fully aware that their speech to their children was being observed. These findings suggest that external structural factors related to poverty impact parent-child interactions.

Authors

• Erin Roby, NYU Grossman School of Medicine
  Presenting Author

• Rose M Scott, University of California - Merced
  Non-Presenting Author