A naturalistic home observational approach to children's language, cognition, and behavior
Katrina d'Apice1, Rachel M Latham2, Sophie von Stumm1
1Department of Education.
Abstract:
Although early life experiences of language and parenting are critical for children's development, large home observation studies of both domains are scarce in the psychological literature, presumably because of their considerable costs to the participants and researchers. Here, we used digital audio-recorders to unobtrusively observe 107 children, aged 2.03 to 3.99 years (M = 2.77, SD = 0.55), and their families over 3 days (M = 15.06 hr per day, SD = 1.87). The recording software estimated the total number of words that a child heard over the course of a day. In addition, we transcribed six 5-min excerpts per family (i.e., 30 min overall) to extract estimates of children's and their parents' lexical diversity, positive and critical parenting, and children's internalizing and externalizing behaviors. We found that home language input (i.e., number of words and lexical diversity) was positively associated with children's cognitive ability and lexical diversity but not with their behaviors. In addition, we observed that home language input varied as much within as between families across days (intraclass correlation = .47). By comparison, parenting predicted children's behavioral outcomes but was not related to their cognitive or lexical ability. Overall, our findings suggest that home language input affects child development in cognition and language, while positive and parenting informs their behavioral development. Furthermore, we demonstrated that digital audio-recordings are useful tools for home observation studies that seek to disentangle the complex relationships between early life home environments and child development. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).
More Related Videos
14:05Behavioral Assessment of Hearing in 2 to 4 Year-old Children: A Two-interval, Observer-based Procedure Using Conditioned Play-based Responses
Published on: January 23, 2017
05:35Experience is Instrumental in Tuning a Link Between Language and Cognition: Evidence from 6- to 7- Month-Old Infants' Object Categorization
Published on: April 19, 2017
Related Concept Videos
Naturalistic Observations
Cognitivism
Previously dominated by behaviorism, which prioritized observable behaviors and largely ignored mental processes, psychology transformed in the 1950s. Cognitive psychologists argue that understanding how we think and process information is...
Observational Learning
Language Development
The critical period for language acquisition suggests that the ability to acquire language is at its peak early in life. As people age, this proficiency decreases. Language development begins very...
Language and Cognition
The Nativist Approach
