Parent talk: What’s on the page matters

• In Event: Poster Session 05
  In Poster Session: PS 05 Topic - Language, Communication

Abstract

While reading picture books, parents might comment on different features: the objects (“That’s a cat!”), the colors (“He’s red”), or the number of things (“One, two eyes!”). Parent speech is an important source of input for children’s language development. The current study investigated how variations in what is perceptually available affects whether parents use color words, number words, or object names in speech to children. To examine this we designed a picture book that varied the number of, and kinds of similarities between, objects on the page.
Thirteen children (20 to 30 months) participated in this study (4 female). Parents were given a 12-page picture book and asked to read it to their child as they normally would. Sessions were recorded, transcribed, and coded for parent speech characteristics. The 12 pages of the book all had pictures of inanimate objects, and they differed on number of objects (i.e., either 2, 3, or 5), color (i.e., either all the same color or different colors), and type of object (i.e., all the same or different kind of object). Parent speech about these pages was coded for use of color, object, and number words, and use of comparison and contrast.
Parent speech was analyzed to see whether the construction of the picture book pages promoted different kinds of parent speech along the color, object, comparison, and number dimensions. First, parents’ color word use did not differ by object/color page type (F(3,36)=1.569, p=.214). However, color word use did differ by number of objects on the page (F(2,24)=4.796, p=.018), such that color word use was more prevalent on pages with more items (t(12)=3.074, p=0.010). This suggests that the more opportunity there is to talk about objects may lead parents to pick out this characteristic.
Second, parents’ object word use did vary by object/color page type (F(3,36)=8.122, p<0.001) and by number of objects on the page (F(2,24)=16.578, p<0.001). Further t-tests suggest that parents’ use of object words is higher on pages that differed on both shape and color, especially when compared to pages that had the same shape (t(12)=5.159, p<0.001; t(12)=4.109, p<0.001). Parent use of object words is also higher on pages with more items (t(12)=4.340, p=0.001; t(12)=4.936, p<0.001). This seems to suggest that the more objects there are, and the more distinct they are from each other, the more likely parents will take time to talk about the shapes and objects individually.
Third, parent number speech did vary by object/color page type (F(3,36)=6.903, p=0.001) such that number word speech is higher on pages when the pictures are all of the same object (t(12)=3.199, p=.008; t(12)=2.703, p=.016; t(12)=3.327, p=.006; t(12)=3.488, p=.004). However, parent number speech did not vary by number of items on the page (F(2,24)=2.304, p=.122). This suggests that when there are many of the same objects, parents tend to count them, regardless of how many items are on the page. Overall, this work will help us to understand the situations that afford and engender different kinds of words in language input to children.

Authors

• Gwendolyn Price, University of California - Los Angeles
  Presenting Author

• Catherine Sandhofer, University of California - Los Angeles
  Non-Presenting Author