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Investigating Distribution of Talk During Day-Long Naturalistic Recordings in English- and Spanish-Speaking Children

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Abstract
Children vary substantially in their rates of language growth (Fenson et al., 2007). Numerous studies in Western societies have shown that at least some of this variation is attributable to the overall amount of talk that children hear. Caregivers who verbally engage more with their children have children who demonstrate stronger later language skills (Hart & Risley, 1995; Weisleder & Fernald, 2013). However, studies conducted with children living in non-Western societies (e.g.,Casillas et al., 2019) have questioned the universal nature of this relation, showing normative language development even when children hear very little talk. This suggests that features of the language environments that extend beyond the overall amount of talk are also relevant for learning. This study directly contrasts mean overall talk (i.e., Adult Word Count, AWC) with two new measures that sought to capture variation in the moment-to-moment distribution of talk across the day: (1) consistency (i.e., degree of difference between higher and lower periods of talk) and (2) density (i.e., number of consecutive periods of dense talk). Participants were children in English- (n=56) and Spanish-speaking (n=49) families with 18-24-month-old children. Caregiver talk was estimated using day-long naturalistic audio recordings in the home using LENA technology (Xu et al., 2009). Outcome measures were real-time language processing and vocabulary size. Results revealed striking variability among families in all three measures of talk. Children in English-speaking families who experienced higher overall AWC and more consistent talk were more efficient in real-time language processing. However, AWC was the only unique predictor. Surprisingly, in the Spanish-speaking families, no links were observed to vocabulary. However, the number of dense periods of talk predicted later processing skills in Spanish-speaking families. Similar results were obtained after filtering the audio recordings for likely periods of child-directed speech. Future analyses should continue to explore measures of consistency and density by listening to all-day recordings.

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Type of resource text
Date created [ca. June 3, 2021]

Creators/Contributors

Author Ramirez Jr, Joel

Subjects

Subject language learning
Subject language processing
Subject distribution of talk
Genre Thesis

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Ramirez Jr, Joel. (2021). Investigating Distribution of Talk During Day-Long Naturalistic Recordings in English- and Spanish-Speaking Children. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: https://purl.stanford.edu/fp015cx7475

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Undergraduate Honors Theses, Symbolic Systems Program, Stanford University

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joelramirezjunior@gmail.com

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