Examining Links Between Parent-Child Language Style Matching (LSM) and Observed Social Behaviors Using Pre-treatment Data From an Early Intervention for Inhibited Preschoolers

• In Event: Parenting and children's socioemotional wellbeing

Abstract

Behavioral inhibition (BI) is a temperament trait describing an inborn bias to respond to both social and nonsocial novelty with fear, anxiety, and withdrawal (Kagan et al., 1984). Differences in children’s BI outcomes have often been attributed, in part, to variation in parenting behaviors (Rubin & Chronis-Tuscano, 2021). Reciprocal interactions (e.g., coregulation) between parents and children are crucial for the development of children’s emotion regulation (ER) abilities (Feldman, 2007; Sroufe, 1997), which may underlie children’s capacities to overcome fear and anxiety in unfamiliar situations. One index of coregulation is Language Style Matching (LSM; Gonzales et al., 2010), a linguistic construct thought to measure a parent-child dyad’s history of behavioral matching and affective attunement (Rasmussen et al., 2017) through function word use. Function word use (i.e., pronouns, prepositions, articles, conjunctions, and auxiliary words) is an unconscious process that does not vary across contexts, making LSM a reliable, unbiased index of coregulation (Gonzales et al., 2010). Higher parent-child LSM has been linked to secure attachment (Borelli et al., 2017), and to less child emotion reactivity in stressful situations (Borelli et al., 2017; Rasmussen et al., 2017). However, researchers have yet to test whether parent-child LSM relates to BI children’s social behavior. Therefore, in this study, we examined whether there is an association between parent-child LSM and BI children’s observed social behaviors with familiar peers. This study used pretreatment data from a longitudinal randomized controlled trial with 149 parents (Mage = 38.72 yrs; SD = 5.165) and their inhibited preschool-age children (Mage = 4.21 yrs; SD = 1.02). LSM, which was calculated using speech transcriptions from a parent-child free play task and processed using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count software (LIWC22; Pennebaker et al., 2022), assessed the dyad’s similarity of function-word use. Children’s social behaviors with peers were coded using The Play Observation Scale (POS; Rubin, 2001) during a classroom group free play. Social behavior was calculated as the sum of the proportion of time spent in group play, the number of initiations made to peers, and the number of initiations received from peers. After controlling for children’s age, sex, race, parent education, and cohort effects, results showed that higher LSM predicted more observed social behaviors (B = 3.83, p = 0.001). These findings provide support for the potential role of parent-child coregulation in predicting inhibited children’s social outcomes and suggest that parent-child interventions may be beneficial for fostering BI children’s social abilities.

Authors

• Kathy Sem, Boston University
  Presenting Author

• Nila Shakiba, Boston University

• Hong N. T. Bui, University of Maryland - College Park

• Danielle Novick, University of Maryland - College Park

• Christina Danko

• Andrea Chronis-Tuscano, University of Maryland, College Park

• Kenneth H Rubin, University of Maryland - College Park

• Nicholas James Wagner, Boston University