Poster #75 - Parents of Children with Brain-Injury use More Simple Relational Language than Parents of Typically-Developing Children

• In Event: Poster Session 06

Abstract

The ability to use higher-order thinking talk (HOTT), where thinkers identify relations between representations (e.g., comparison, causality, abstraction) is thought to be critical for later success in many areas, including school, the job market, and creative innovation (Koenig, 2015). However, not all children acquire higher-order thinking skills along the same trajectory (Richland & Burchinal, 2013). Research examining various populations show clear evidence of both biological and social-environmental factors play a role. For example, typically developing (TD) children use more HOTT than children with early brain injury (BI; Frausel et al., 2021), and high-SES children use more talk about and with relations and grow more quickly in their use of relational talk, compared to low-SES children (Frausel et al., 2020). While one possibility is the biological characteristics of the BI impacts language development, another possibility is parental language input. Additionally, it is unknown whether there are differences in the complexity of HOTT.

In this study, we ask: 1) does HOTT differ between TD and BI parents, and 2) do differences depend on the complexity of reasoning. To examine these questions, the role of the environmental input through parent talk was examined in the spontaneous HOTT produced by parents of 64 TD and 46 BI children. We use parent HOTT as an index for the complexity and richness in language in everyday home settings that parents are providing for their children. In this sample, parents and children are observed from 14–58 months in the home for approximately 90 minutes per episode. Across 1,144 90-minute transcripts, a total of 1,055,503 parent utterances were coded for HOTT (TD parents’ surface HOTT, M = 24.97, SD=19.10, structure HOTT M=15.56, SD=17.02; BI parents’ surface HOTT M = 34.47, SD=22.60, structure HOTT M=11.64, SD=11.80).

We answered these questions by constructing hierarchical linear models (HLM; Raudenbush & Bryk, 2002), with age points at Level 1 nested in individuals at Level 2). The outcome (HOTT) is the number of HOTT utterances produced by the parent for dyad i at time t, using a Poisson distribution. The parent’s child’s status as BI or TD as well as socioeconomic status (a composite of family income and parental education level) influenced the amount of higher-order thinking talk produced. Importantly, different patterns were found depending on the types of HOTT produced. Controlling for income, parents of children with BI produced more surface HOT (utterances where relations are more perceptual) than parents of TD children (Figure 1). Conversely, parents of TD children engaged in the highest frequency trajectories of structure HOT (a more sophisticated form of higher-order thinking talk) (Figure 2). We found that HOTT varied overall by SES, with lower frequency in lower-income parents. These results show that parents of children with BI may be providing a richer language environment at the surface level but not the more sophisticated, structural level. Findings from this study suggest that parents differentially engage in higher-order thinking talk, which may be an important tool for understanding reasoning development and the impacts of BI.

Authors

• Elayne Vollman, Lake Forest College
  Presenting Author

• Rebecca Frausel, Pennsylvania State University, Erie

• Deniz Akpinar

• Lindsey Engle Richland, University of California - Irvine

• Susan Goldin-Meadow, University of Chicago

• Susan Cohen Levine, University of Chicago