Low-Income Fathers’ and Mothers’ “Serve and Return” Interactions with Infants: Link to Early Language Development

• In Event: Unique Contributions of Fathers, Mothers and Children to Language Skills in the First Years.

Abstract

Introduction. The language gap between children from lower- and higher-income families is observed as young as 18 months (Fernald et al., 2013). A strong predictor of language development is responsive parent-child interactions; when parents verbally respond to children’s bids for attention in timely and meaningful ways, children engage in a word-to-world mapping process that helps them learn concepts and words (Tamis-LeMonda et al., 2014). These back-and-forth social exchanges (aka “serve and return”) have been found to children’s promote vocabulary skills (McGillion et al., 2013).
However, there is lack of consistency in how “serve and return” is measured (e.g., whether a timely return is defined within 2 sec or 5 sec after the child’s serve; Gros-Louis et al., 2014; Smith et al., 2018). Also, these studies are conducted with small samples of middle-class White families, thus we know little about the patterns of “serve and return” among ethnically and economically diverse families. Lastly, this literature excludes fathers who uniquely contribute to language development (Malin et al., 2014). Understanding “serve and return” among low-income ethnically diverse families can increase our knowledge of the variation in parent-child interactions and inform interventions that aim to reduce the achievement gap.
Hypotheses. We describe the pattern of “serve and return” interactions among fathers and mothers and their infants at 9 months. We hypothesize that mothers’ and fathers’ “serve and return” behaviors at 9 months will predict children’s language skills at 18 months. In addition, we explore the factors that may explain the variation in fathers’ and mothers’ “serve and return” behaviors at 9 months and hypothesize that mothers and fathers who report lower levels of education and more depressive symptoms will engage in fewer “serve and return” behaviors.
Study Population & Methods. We use observational data from an ongoing intervention with children (n = 150) and their low-income ethnically diverse mothers and fathers. We transcribed parent and child speech during a play interaction and coded child serves (e.g., babble, look) and parental returns (i.e., close in time and semantically relevant) at 9 months. Fathers and mothers also reported on their education and depressive symptoms. We assessed children’s language skills with PLS-4 at 18 months.
Results. Preliminary results showed that there was large variability in the number of infant serves (M = 98.31, SD = 29.62). Although infants in our sample rarely babbled during the interaction, half of their babbles were returned within 2 sec by mothers and fathers. In addition, 24% of mothers’ returns and 21% of fathers’ returns were meaningful to the object of the child’s attention. About a third of mothers’ and fathers’ meaningful returns occurred within 2 sec after the child’s nonverbal serve. In addition, mothers’ returns that occurred beyond 2 sec were negatively, although marginally significant, related to children’s expressive language skills (r = -.44, p = .07). With the full sample coded, we will further examine the sources of variation in mothers’ and fathers’ “serve and return” behaviors and the association with language development while controlling important sociodemographic factors.

Authors

• Yu Chen, New York University School of Medicine
  Presenting Author

• Natasha J Cabrera, University of Maryland - College Park
  Non-Presenting Author

• Audrey Sauer
  Non-Presenting Author

• Taylor Horowitz, Duke University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Stephanie M Reich, University of California - Irvine
  Non-Presenting Author