Representation of Nouns and Verbs During Play Between Caregivers and Children With Language Impairment

This project compared how children and caregivers use gestures and objects during play interactions and their relationship to input in the form of nouns and verbs. Observations of play interactions between children with primary or secondary language impairment and their caregivers were used to determine these connections and whether there was any differentiation in how children or caregivers used gestures and/or objects along with models of nouns and verbs within the play context.

Observations of parent-child dyads were recorded at a local children's museum. All dyads included children with primary or secondary language impairment between 4 and 6 years of age. The child's and caregiver's use of gestures and objects during their play interactions at the museum was coded to identify relationships between use of gestures and objects and subsequent models of nouns or verbs by caregivers.

Children's use of various gestures (deictic or iconic) and different forms of interaction with objects impacted the word type modeled by their caregivers. Caregivers also differentiated how they paired gestures and objects when they were presenting nouns or verbs during the interactions.

The results of this project show that the child's gestural and object use impacts whether they are exposed to nouns or verbs. These results also show that caregivers differentiate their gestural and object use when modeling nouns and verbs. This furthers implications related to the social pragmatic theory of learning suggesting there are unique environmental factors that differentiate these word types. Clinically, these results could have implications for both training caregivers and highlighting the active role of children within these interactions.