The Influence of Parent Stress on Child-Directed Speech: The Role of Interaction Engagement

• In Event: Poster Session 04
  In Poster Session: PS 04 Topic - Language, Communication

Abstract

Research suggests that the quantity and quality of parents’ speech to their children is related to many developmental outcomes. For instance, the amount of child-directed speech children hear is positively correlated with their vocabulary size (Fernald et al., 2008), and children who hear more parental mental-state talk (want, think) perform better on tests of mental-state understanding (Devine & Hughes, 2018; Roby & Scott, 2018). It is thus important to understand sources of variability in parent talk.

One potential influence on such talk is parent stress. Two recent studies found that when parents were asked to assist their child with a challenging task, parents who reported low amounts of stress produced higher quantities of talk (Thompson et al., 2016) and more questions involving mental-state terms (Thompson & Foster, 2013). This suggests that stress might impact both the amount and nature of child-directed speech that parents produce.

Here we sought to provide additional evidence for the association between parent stress and child-directed speech while exploring one potential cause for this relationship. Specifically, we hypothesized that parent stress might influence the duration of parent-child interactions: parents who are under greater stress might spend less time engaged with their child, limiting the opportunities for child-directed speech.

Participants were a socioeconomically diverse sample of 45 preschoolers (43.7-66.0 months, M = 56.5 months) and their parent who participated in a larger project on socio-cognitive development. Parents completed the Parental Stress Scale (Berry & Jones, 1995); higher scores indicate greater stress. Children’s receptive and productive language was assessed with the Test of Early Language Development, fourth edition (TELD-4; Hresko et al., 2017).

To examine child-directed speech, dyads participated in a picture-book activity: parents were given a wordless picture-book and instructed to talk about the pictures with their child like they normally would at home. Parents were left alone to complete the activity and told that the experimenter would return in about ten minutes. Parents were allowed to go through the book at their own pace and could complete it before the ten minutes was up. The parent-child interaction was recorded, transcribed, and coded for parent use of mental-state terms. The duration of the interaction was measured from when the parent first began speaking about the book to when they made their last utterance about any of the pages.

Transcription and coding have been completed for 50% of participants; all coding will be completed within the next 3 months. Preliminary analyses indicate that controlling for children’s language abilities, there is a significant negative correlation between parent stress and the duration of the activity, r = -.47, p = .03. This suggests that, as predicted, parents who are under greater stress spend less time engaged in the interaction with their child. Once coding is completed, we will examine whether parent stress predicts the amount of talk they produce and their use of mental-state terms, and whether these relationships are mediated by the duration of the activity. Implications for children’s language abilities and socio-cognitive development will be discussed.

Authors

• James Z Sullivan, University of California - Merced
  Presenting Author

• Maritza Miramontes, University of California - Davis
  Non-Presenting Author

• Allison Gabouer, University of California, Merced
  Non-Presenting Author

• Rose M Scott, University of California - Merced
  Non-Presenting Author