Semantically Contingent Responsiveness in Early Parent-Child Interactions

• In Event: Poster Session 07
  In Poster Session: PS 07 Topic - Parenting & Parent-Child Relationships

Abstract

Contingent responsiveness – parent conversational responses that “follow” the child’s focus of attention – is positively associated with children’s language development; i.e., mothers that are more contingent on their child’s communicative behaviors, have children with better language skills (e.g., Tamis-LeMonda, Bornstein, Baumwell & Damast, 1996). One potential reason for the positive association is that caregivers’ contingent responses to infants are found to be simpler than their non-contingent responses (Elmlinger, Schwade & Goldstein, 2019). Yet, we know little about the linguistic features of such responses, and the extent to which mothers and fathers are similar in this type of input. In this study, we extend prior research by comparing the syntactic complexity, as measured by MLU words (MLUw) of semantic contingent responses (SCR) and non-contingent responses in parent’s speech to toddlers, and by including information about such responses in both father-child and mother-child dyads. In line with previous research, we hypothesize that parents adapt the complexity of their contingent speech to their child’s developmental level; (i.e., the fine-tuning hypothesis; Snow, 1995), and thus we should see more syntactically simple utterances during contingent than noncontingent talk. Moreover, we hypothesize that father-child and mother-child dyads would show similar features of responsiveness based on prior research showing more similarities than differences when comparing mothers’ and fathers’ input (e.g., Leaper, Anderson & Sanders, 1998).
Thirty-nine two-year-old children (20 boys, 19 girls) participated in the study. They were all part of a larger study of children’s early development in Norway (Nærde, Janson & Ogden, 2014), and represented a randomly selected subsample that were invited to participate with both parents (father and mother) in structured interactions at one, two and three years. At child age two years, twenty-nine children participated separately with each parent, nine with their mothers only, and one with his/her father only.
To address our research questions, we coded all child and parent responses as either semantically contingent (SCR) or non-contingent. We also coded the relative proportions of parents’ SCR that were expansions. Automated analyses of the transcripts, using the CLAN tool in the CHILDES system (MacWhinney, 2000), provided information about child and parent MLUw, as well as their word types (diversity of vocabulary) and tokens (number of words produced.
Preliminary findings show that father-child and mother-child interactions were highly similar in their proportions of SRC (Table 1). Overall, parents’ SCR were less syntactically complex than their non-contingent responses. Expansions, however, were not different from non-contingent responses (Table 2). In the ongoing analyses, we are investigating associations between parent SCR and non-contingent MLUw and concurrent child language measures.
The findings suggest that fathers and mothers provide their child with the same extent of SCR and that the MLUw of parent SCR and non-contingent responses might relate differently to child language. We will discuss the relationship between parents’ SCR and other types of input, and the ways that children may catalyze the input they receive from their parents.

Authors

• Hanne Roe-Indregard, University of Oslo
  Presenting Author

• Meredith L. Rowe, Harvard University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Veslemøy Rydland
  Non-Presenting Author

• Imac Maria Zambrana
  Non-Presenting Author