Journal article
Quality of early parent input predicts child vocabulary 3 years later
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS, v 110(28), pp 11278-11283
09 Jul 2013
PMID: 23798423
Featured in Collection : UN Sustainable Development Goals @ Drexel
Abstract
Children vary greatly in the number of words they know when they enter school, a major factor influencing subsequent school and workplace success. This variability is partially explained by the differential quantity of parental speech to preschoolers. However, the contexts in which young learners hear new words are also likely to vary in referential transparency; that is, in how clearly word meaning can be inferred from the immediate extralinguistic context, an aspect of input quality. To examine this aspect, we asked 218 adult participants to guess 50 parents’ words from (muted) videos of their interactions with their 14- to 18-mo-old children. We found systematic differences in how easily individual parents’ words could be identified purely from this socio-visual context. Differences in this kind of input quality correlated with the size of the children’s vocabulary 3 y later, even after controlling for differences in input quantity. Although input quantity differed as a function of socioeconomic status, input quality (as here measured) did not, suggesting that the quality of nonverbal cues to word meaning that parents offer to their children is an individual matter, widely distributed across the population of parents.
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Details
- Title
- Quality of early parent input predicts child vocabulary 3 years later
- Creators
- Erica A. Cartmill - University of ChicagoBenjamin F. Armstrong - University of PennsylvaniaLila R. Gleitman - University of PennsylvaniaSusan Goldin-Meadow - University of ChicagoTamara N. Medina - Drexel UniversityJohn C. Trueswell - University of Pennsylvania
- Publication Details
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS, v 110(28), pp 11278-11283
- Publisher
- National Academy of Sciences
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- Psychological and Brain Sciences (Psychology)
- Web of Science ID
- WOS:000321827000032
- Scopus ID
- 2-s2.0-84879958708
- Other Identifier
- 991021874015704721
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- Collaboration types
- Domestic collaboration
- Web of Science research areas
- Psychology, Developmental