Abstract
This study investigated predictors of growth in toddlers' vocabulary production between the ages of 1 and 3 years by analyzing mother-child communication in 108 low-income families. Individual growth modeling was used to describe patterns of growth in children's observed vocabulary production and predictors of initial status and between-person change. Results indicate large variation in growth across children. Observed variation was positively related to diversity of maternal lexical input and maternal language and literacy skills, and negatively related to maternal depression. Maternal talkativeness was not related to growth in children's vocabulary production in this sample. Implications of the examination of longitudinal data from this relatively large sample of low-income families are discussed.
Highlights
The findings reported here are based on research conducted as part of the national Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project funded by the Administration on Children, Youth and Families (ACYF), U.S Department of Health and Human Services through Grant 90YF0009 to Harvard University Graduate School of Education
We examined data from 108 low-income families residing in rural New England and participating in the national evaluation of Early Head Start (EHS)
The current study helps address the serious dearth of observational data on children from other than middle-class and professional families
Summary
Parental reports on children’s productive vocabularies during infancy and toddlerhood document large individual variation in vocabulary size across early development (Fenson et al, 1994). The findings reported here are based on research conducted as part of the national Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project funded by the Administration on Children, Youth and Families (ACYF), U.S Department of Health and Human Services through Grant 90YF0009 to Harvard University Graduate School of Education. Goldfield and Reznick (1990), using parental report, found that for most of the 18 middle-class children they studied, growth started with a period of slow word accumulation, followed by a prolonged period of accelerated word learning, beginning somewhere between 14 and 22 months. Goldfield and Reznick’s study is notable because it was a longitudinal study that charted children’s individual growth trajectories, albeit for only a small number of children
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