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Abstract
BackgroundThere is evidence that parents from more socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds engage in fewer verbal interactions with their child than more advantaged parents. This leads to the so-called, ‘30 million-word gap’. This study aims to investigate the number of words children hear and the number of vocalizations children produce in their first year of life and examines whether these aspects of the early language home environment differ by maternal education.MethodsMothers were recruited into a five-year prospective cohort study and categorized into either high or low maternal education groups. Data was derived from the first two waves of the study, when the children were six and twelve months old. At both waves, children were involved in day-long audio recordings using the Language Environment Analysis software that provided automatic counts of adult words spoken to the child, child vocalizations and conversational turns. Descriptive results are presented by maternal education groups.ResultsThere was large variation within each maternal education group, with the number of adult words spoken to the child ranging from 2958 to 39,583 at six months and 4389 to 45,849 at twelve months. There were no meaningful differences between adult words, child vocalizations or conversational turns across maternal education groups at either wave of data collection.ConclusionsThese results show that a word gap related to maternal education is not apparent up to twelve months of age. The large variability among both maternal education groups suggests that universal interventions that encourage all parents to talk more to their child may be more appropriate than interventions targeted towards disadvantaged families during the first year of life.
Highlights
There is evidence that parents from more socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds engage in fewer verbal interactions with their child than more advantaged parents
The present study aims to quantify the number of adult words that are spoken to the child, number of child vocalizations, and number of times the adult and child engage in a conversational turn over a day, when children are aged six and twelve months
The study aims to examine whether these aspects of the early language home environment differ by maternal education
Summary
There is evidence that parents from more socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds engage in fewer verbal interactions with their child than more advantaged parents. In the Australian context, results from the 2018 Australian Early Development Census, a triennial census of children’s development at age 5, showed that 6.6% of children were developmentally vulnerable on the language and cognitive skills domain and 8.2% were vulnerable on the communication skills and general knowledge domain [6]. Both domains were socioeconomically patterned, with the highest levels of vulnerability amongst children from the most disadvantaged backgrounds. Poorer language skills have been shown to strongly predict poorer education outcomes in the mid and long term [3, 7]
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