Parents’ Tailoring Their Sound Symbolic Input to Develop Infants’ Vocabulary

• In Event: Poster Session 06
  In Poster Session: PS 06 Topic - Language, Communication

Abstract

Sound symbolism is the systematic resemblance between speech sounds and words (e.g., ‘choo choo’ as ‘train’) and is observed in many languages such as Japanese (Kita, 1997) and Turkish (Ido, 1999). It is considered to contribute to infants’ language development, providing an insight about the sound-word associations (Imai & Kita, 2014). For example, in a verb learning paradigm, 3-year-old Japanese- and English-speaking children could generalize the novel sound symbolic, but not non-sound-symbolic verbs to a specific action (e.g., Kantartzis et al., 2011). Parents’ use of diverse and sophisticated vocabulary also supports the growth of children’s language skills (e.g., Rowe, 2012). Do parents’ sound symbolic input, beyond their general linguistic input, contribute to children’s language development? Parents provide more sound symbolic input to 2-year-olds than 3-year-olds (Saji & Imai, 2013). Parents might also tailor their sound symbolic input in response to different child populations such as for children who are born preterm (before 37 weeks of pregnancy) due to pre- and post-natal biological and environmental challenges. This study examines whether (1) there is a difference between preterm (PT) and full-term (FT) infants regarding parental language input especially for sound symbols and (2) there is a relation between children’s vocabulary knowledge and parental sound symbolic input.
We recruited ninety-nine infants (Mage=19.90 months, SD=1.37, 45 PT), and recorded 10-minute free play sessions with their parents. We coded parental linguistic and sound symbolic input. Parental linguistic input was coded as the total number of utterances and linguistic complexity, which classified clauses as simple (i.e., clauses with single predicate) and complex (i.e., clauses with multiple predicates) and calculated by the percentage of complex clauses to total clauses. We also marked sound symbolic instances and the number of sound symbolic utterances during a sound symbol instance and divided them to play session durations. To measure the expressive vocabulary of infants, the parents were asked to fill the Turkish adaptation of MacArthur-Bates CDI (Aksu-Koç et al., 2019).
Among the parental input variables, total utterances of parents, total sound symbol instances, and total sound symbolic utterance inputs were not different for PT and FT infants (ps>.05) whereas linguistic complexity differed, favoring FT infants, t(91)=-2.193, p=.031. Then, the relationship between children word knowledge and parental sound symbolic input was assessed. After controlling for infants’ age, both total sound symbolic instances (r=-.222, p=.034) and total sound symbolic utterances (r=-.222, p=.034) negatively correlated with children’s expressive vocabulary. Total parental linguistic utterances (p=.838) and linguistic complexity (p=.264) did not correlate with infants’ vocabulary knowledge.
Previous research emphasized the role of sound symbolism and parental language input in children’s language development. The current study adds to these findings, emphasizing the parental specific language input. Parents possibly adjust their sound symbol use considering their infants’ vocabulary knowledge such that they use more sound symbols if their infants know less words to facilitate their language development, regardless of their neonatal status. This adjustment is specific to sound symbolic input since general linguistic input and infants’ word knowledge were not related.

Authors

• Şeref Can Esmer, Koç Üniversitesi
  Presenting Author

• Erim Kızıldere, University of California - Davis
  Non-Presenting Author

• Tilbe Göksun, Koç University
  Non-Presenting Author