Child's Language Environment Research Articles

Picturebooks Increase the Frequency and Diversity of Emotion Vocabulary in Children’s Language Environments: Modeling Potential Benefits to Emotional Literacy, with Pedagogical Resources

ABSTRACT Research Findings: This study examines the frequency and diversity of emotion vocabulary in children’s picturebooks, as well as its deviation from typical spoken language environments. We analyzed a corpus of 2146 transcripts of individuals reading picturebooks aloud on social media platforms, using an emotion-specific vocabulary list, and two emotion-related word lists: the Valence Aware Dictionary for Sentiment Reasoning (VADER) List, and the NRC Word-Emotion Lexicon Intensity Lists. Models of daily input assess how regular book reading impacts the diversity and quantity of emotion vocabulary in children’s language environments. The findings reveal that emotion vocabulary in children’s picturebooks is more diverse than found in typical samples of child-directed speech and that regular reading substantially increases exposure to emotion vocabulary in the language environment of children beyond their input from child-directed speech alone. The study underscores the significant role of regular picturebook reading in enriching children’s quantity and quality of emotion vocabulary exposure and the opportunities this may provide for emotional literacy development. Practice or Policy: The findings are supplemented with emotion vocabulary wordlists produced by the study and provided here (https://tinyurl.com/4pvcb8b4). These constitute new resources for supporting children’s emotion vocabulary acquisition during early education and development.

Chinese mothers use idioms in shared book reading: A predictor for children's Chinese vocabulary growth?

Idioms play an important role in language; however, little research has examined idioms in children's natural language settings. This study explored idioms usage in maternal talk during mother-child shared book reading and its relation to children's vocabulary development. Thirty-three Chinese children in Norway (aged 3;0-5;5) and their mothers participated. We observed shared reading at the onset of the study and assessed children's receptive and expressive vocabulary in Chinese three times across one year. Results demonstrated that mothers used an average of 1.8 idioms and explained one-third of the idioms. Maternal idiom usage was correlated with their talk amount and lexical diversity. Individual growth modeling revealed that the number of idioms mothers used predicted the growth of children's receptive vocabulary in Chinese. We speculate that idiom usage could be an effective and understudied marker of parental linguistic sophistication. This study underscores the importance of idiom exposure in children's language environment.

Screen Time and Parent-Child Talk When Children Are Aged 12 to 36 Months

Growing up in a language-rich home environment is important for children's language development in the early years. The concept of "technoference" (technology-based interference) suggests that screen time may be interfering with opportunities for talk and interactions between parent and child; however, limited longitudinal evidence exists exploring this association. To investigate the longitudinal association between screen time and 3 measures of parent-child talk (adult words, child vocalizations, and conversational turns) when children are 12 to 36 months of age. This Australian prospective cohort study used advanced speech recognition technology to capture young children's screen time and home language environment, on an average 16-hour day. Data were collected from 220 families once every 6 months in the family home when children were 12, 18, 24, 30, and 36 months of age, from January 1, 2018, to December 31, 2021. Statistical analysis took place from November 1, 2022, to July 31, 2023. Language Environment Analysis (LENA) technology provided automated counts of children's language environment and exposure to electronic noise. The exposure of interest was screen time, which was calculated based on manual coding of LENA electronic noise audio segments. Three measures of parent-child talk were outcomes of focus: adult words, child vocalizations, and conversational turns. Separate models were run for each of the 3 outcomes and included adjustment for child sex, child age, maternal educational level, number of children at home, number of home activities, and primary caregiver's psychological distress. The study included 220 families (120 girls [54.6%]; mean [SD] gestational age of children, 39.3 [1.5] weeks; mean [SD] age of mother at childbirth, 31.3 [4.8] years). Adjusted linear mixed-effect models demonstrated that increases in screen time were associated with decreases in measures of parent-child talk. The largest decreases were seen at 36 months, when an additional minute of screen time was associated with a reduction of 6.6 (95% CI, -11.7 to -1.5) adult words, 4.9 (95% CI, -6.1 to -3.7) child vocalizations, and 1.1 (95% CI, -1.4 to -0.8) conversational turns. Findings of this study support the notion of technoference for Australian families, whereby young children's exposure to screen time is interfering with opportunities to talk and interact in their home environment. This finding has implications for interventions and supports aimed at promoting a language-rich home environment, with families needing support in understanding the potential association of screen time with opportunities for children and adults to talk and interact in their home environment.

Rethinking household size and children's language environment.

The number of U.S. children living in households with extended families has greatly increased in the last 4 decades. This demographic shift calls for a reevaluation of the impact of household size on children's development. Household density (HHD), measured as the ratio of people to bedrooms in a home, has been shown to negatively relate to children's language. Here, we propose that while greater HHD may result in poorer language abilities, more adults in relation to the number of children in the home may have a positive impact on children's language. To test this hypothesis, we studied relations between HHD and adult-to-child ratio with children's vocabulary scores, as well as whether maternal education and household chaos accounted for these associations. Participants included families from a range of socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds (N = 275; Mage = 10.85; 51% female; 51% Hispanic; annual income range less than $10,000-over $100,000). In general, higher HHD was related to lower child vocabulary scores. Conversely, higher adult-to-child ratio was related to higher child vocabulary and lower household chaos. These patterns were primarily driven by effects in Hispanic families. Our results suggest that a reevaluation of household size is needed, as more adults in the home can be protective for children's language development in larger families, an effect that may vary by culture. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Relating referential clarity and phonetic clarity in infant-directed speech.

Psycholinguistic research on children's early language environments has revealed many potential challenges for language acquisition. One is that in many cases, referents of linguistic expressions are hard to identify without prior knowledge of the language. Likewise, the speech signal itself varies substantially in clarity, with some productions being very clear, and others being phonetically reduced, even to the point of uninterpretability. In this study, we sought to better characterize the language-learning environment of American English-learning toddlers by testing how well phonetic clarity and referential clarity align in infant-directed speech. Using an existing Human Simulation Paradigm (HSP) corpus with referential transparency measurements and adding new measures of phonetic clarity, we found that the phonetic clarity of words' first mentions significantly predicted referential clarity (how easy it was to guess the intended referent from visual information alone) at that moment. Thus, when parents' speech was especially clear, the referential semantics were also clearer. This suggests that young children could use the phonetics of speech to identify globally valuable instances that support better referential hypotheses, by homing in on clearer instances and filtering out less-clear ones. Such multimodal "gems" offer special opportunities for early word learning. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: In parent-infant interaction, parents' referential intentions are sometimes clear and sometimes unclear; likewise, parents' pronunciation is sometimes clear and sometimes quite difficult to understand. We find that clearer referential instances go along with clearer phonetic instances, more so than expected by chance. Thus, there are globally valuable instances ("gems") from which children could learn about words' pronunciations and words' meanings at the same time. Homing in on clear phonetic instances and filtering out less-clear ones would help children identify these multimodal "gems" during word learning.

The Language Environment at Home of Children With (a Suspicion of) a Developmental Language Disorder and Relations With Standardized Language Measures.

This study compares the home language environments of children with (a suspicion of) developmental language disorder (DLD) with that of children with typical development (TD). It does so by adopting new technology that automatically provides metrics about children's language environment (Language ENvironment Analysis [LENA]). In addition, relationships between LENA metrics and standardized language tests are explored in the DLD group. Ninety-nine 2- to 4-year-old toddlers participated: 59 with (a suspicion of) DLD and 40 with TD. LENA metrics on adult word count, conversational turn count, and child vocalization count were obtained. For all children, data on parental education and multilingualism were available. In the DLD group, data were collected on receptive and expressive vocabulary and grammar, and on nonverbal intelligence, using standardized tests. We found lower adult word count, conversational turn count, and child vocalization count in the DLD group, independent of multilingualism but not of parental education. In the DLD group, receptive vocabulary was related to conversational turn count and child vocalization count, but not to adult word count. Expressive vocabulary, receptive grammar, and expressive grammar were not related to LENA metrics. Toddlers with (a suspicion of) DLD vocalize less at home than children with TD. They also hear fewer adult words and experience fewer conversational turns. Children with DLD's language outcomes are to a limited extent related to language environment at home. Conversational turns and child vocalizations are in this respect more important than adult words, in line with findings for TD populations.

COVID-19 and bilingual children's home language environment: Digital media, socioeconomic status, and language status.

Input is considered crucial in bilingual children's language development. This is especially true for bilingual children's mother tongue language learning given its common reduction in input opportunities due to the dominance of one language within society, as seen in countries and regions from Wales to Singapore. Previous studies tend to focus on the quantity and quality of conventional active communication and resources (e.g., speaking and reading with parents) on bilingual children's language development, and substantially, fewer studies have explored this topic from the perspective of digital media. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has accentuated the critical role of digital media in various aspects of life, including bilingual children's home language environment. Thus, to holistically understand bilingual children's daily language input patterns, it is imperative to explore both their conventional and digital media input resources. The current study focuses on English-Mandarin bilingual children in Singapore and would like to explore (1) whether their conventional and digital media language environments have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and (2) whether the societal status of a language and familial socioeconomic status (SES) would affect bilingual children's conventional and digital media input. Survey data from 162 parents of English-Mandarin bilingual preschoolers (3 to 6 years old) were used to explore the two research questions. Two online parental questionnaires were employed for data collection. One-way repeated-measures MANOVA and path models were used to address the questions. The results indicated that input patterns from nuclear family members had not been affected by COVID-19; however, the amount and frequency of conventional and digital media materials and activities increased significantly since COVID-19. Higher-SES families possessed more conventional materials and conducted conventional activities more often, while lower-SES families possessed more digital media materials. Both conventional and digital media materials and activities were richer in English than in Mandarin. Higher-SES families perceived digital media usage for learning to be of less importance than lower-SES families. The implications for early bilingual learning following COVID-19 are discussed.

Language Exposure and Brain Myelination in Early Development.

The language environment to which children are exposed has an impact on later language abilities as well as on brain development; however, it is unclear how early such impacts emerge. This study investigates the effects of children's early language environment and socioeconomic status (SES) on brain structure in infancy at 6 and 30 months of age (both sexes included). We used magnetic resonance imaging to quantify concentrations of myelin in specific fiber tracts in the brain. Our central question was whether Language Environment Analysis (LENA) measures from in-home recording devices and SES measures of maternal education predicted myelin concentrations over the course of development. Results indicate that 30-month-old children exposed to larger amounts of in-home adult input showed more myelination in the white matter tracts most associated with language. Right hemisphere regions also show an association with SES, with older children from more highly educated mothers and exposed to more adult input, showing greater myelin concentrations in language-related areas. We discuss these results in relation to the current literature and implications for future research.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT This is the first study to look at how brain myelination is impacted by language input and socioeconomic status early in development. We find robust relationships of both factors in language-related brain areas at 30 months of age.

A comparison of automatic and manual measures of turn-taking in monolingual and bilingual contexts.

The Language ENvironment Analysis system (LENA) records children's language environment and provides an automatic estimate of adult-child conversational turn count (CTC) by automatically identifying adult and child speech in close temporal proximity. To assess the reliability of this measure, we examine correlation and agreement between LENA's CTC estimates and manual measurement of adult-child turn-taking in two corpora collected in the USA: a bilingual corpus of Spanish-English-speaking families with infants between 4 and 22 months (n = 37), and a corpus of monolingual families with English-speaking 5-year-olds (n = 56). In each corpus for each child, 100 30-second segments were extracted from daylong recordings in two ways, yielding a total of 9300 minutes of manually annotated audio. LENA's CTC estimate for the same segments was obtained through the LENA software. The two measures of CTC had low correlations for the segments from the monolingual 5-year-olds sampled in both ways, and somewhat higher correlations for the bilingual samples. LENA substantially overestimated CTC on average, relative to manual measurement, for three out of four analysis conditions, and limits of agreement were wide in all cases. Segment-level analyses demonstrated that accidental contiguity had the largest individual impact on LENA's average CTC error, affecting 12-17% of analyzed segments. Other factors significantly contributing to CTC error were speech from other children, presence of multiple adults, and presence of electronic media. These results indicate wide discrepancies between LENA's CTC estimates and manual CTCs, and call into question the comparability of LENA's CTC measure across participants, conditions, and developmental time points.

Predictors of preschool language environments and their relations to children's vocabulary

AbstractDespite support for the importance of early language environments, little is known about the naturally occurring experiences children have in preschool settings. The current study sample included 91 children (Mage = 4.72 years; 56% male; 67% White) from 23 preschool classrooms and nearly 1500 h of language environment data from three waves throughout the preschool year. Of the sociodemographic characteristics, family income is most closely related to children's preschool language environments. A standard deviation increase in family income was related to children hearing approximately one million more adult words in their preschool classroom. However, conversational turns were the more robust predictor of vocabulary skills with effect sizes around 0.20, depending on model specification. Theoretical and policy implications of these findings are discussed.

Selecting educational apps for preschool children: How useful are website app rating systems?

AbstractIn the present paper, we assess whether website rating systems are useful for selecting educational apps for preschool age children. We selected the 10 highest scoring and 10 lowest scoring apps for 2–4‐year‐olds from two widely used websites (Good App Guide; Common Sense Media). Apps rated highly by the two websites had a higher educational potential as assessed by a validated questionnaire for evaluating the educational potential of apps and were more likely to include a learning goal and feedback compared to low scoring apps. However, high scoring apps scored on average just 9/20 for indicators of educational potential, and both high and low scoring apps had poor language quality as determined by psycholinguistic and construction type analyses. We argue that website rating systems should also include quality of feedback, adjustable content, social interactions, storyline and a more fine‐grained analysis of language in their assessments. Practitioner notesWhat is already known about this topic Appropriately designed apps for preschool age children have the potential to teach early school readiness skills. Selecting high quality educational apps for preschool age children is challenging. The children's app marketplace is currently unregulated. What this paper adds We assess whether two leading app rating websites are useful for selecting educational apps for preschool age children. Children's apps rated highly by two app website rating systems had a higher educational potential than low rated apps as measured by a research informed app evaluation tool. In‐depth analysis of the language in apps shows that highly rated children's apps on app rating websites may not enrich a child's early language environment. Implications for practice and/or policy Children's app rating website assessments should include potential for feedback, language, adjustable content, storyline and social interactions. Policy should be implemented for app ratings in the app stores or on website app rating systems.

Efficient Estimation of Children's Language Exposure in Two Bilingual Communities.

Purpose The language that children hear early in life is associated with their speech-language outcomes. This line of research relies on naturalistic observations of children's language input, often captured with daylong audio recordings. However, the large quantity of data that daylong recordings generate requires novel analytical tools to feasibly parse thousands of hours of naturalistic speech. This study outlines a new approach to efficiently process and sample from daylong audio recordings made in two bilingual communities, Spanish-English in the United States and Quechua-Spanish in Bolivia, to derive estimates of children's language exposure. Method We employed a general sampling with replacement technique to efficiently estimate two key elements of children's early language environments: (a) proportion of child-directed speech (CDS) and (b) dual language exposure. Proportions estimated from random sampling of 30-s segments were compared to those from annotations over the entire daylong recording (every other segment), as well as parental report of dual language exposure. Results Results showed that approximately 49 min from each recording or just 7% of the overall recording was required to reach a stable proportion of CDS and bilingual exposure. In both speech communities, strong correlations were found between bilingual language estimates made using random sampling and all-day annotation techniques. A strong association was additionally found for CDS estimates in the United States, but this was weaker at the Bolivian site, where CDS was less frequent. Dual language estimates from the audio recordings did not correspond well to estimates derived from parental report collected months apart. Conclusions Daylong recordings offer tremendous insight into children's daily language experiences, but they will not become widely used in developmental research until data processing and annotation time substantially decrease. We show that annotation based on random sampling is a promising approach to efficiently estimate ambient characteristics from daylong recordings that cannot currently be estimated via automated methods.

Speaking of State of Mind: Maternal Mental Health Predicts Children's Home Language Environment and Expressive Language.

Maternal depression and anxiety are potential risk factors to children's language environments and development. Though existing work has examined relations between these constructs, further work is needed accounting for both depression and anxiety and using more direct measures of the home language environment and children's language development. We examined 265 mother-infant dyads (49.6% female, Mage = 17.03 months) from a large city in the Western United States to explore the relations between self-reports of maternal depression and anxiety and observational indices of the home language environment and expressive language as captured by Language Environment Analysis (LENA) and parent-reported language comprehension and production. Results revealed maternal depressive symptoms to be negatively associated with home language environment and expressive language indices. Maternal anxiety symptoms were found to be negatively associated with children's parent-reported language production. These findings provide further evidence that maternal mental health modulates children's home language environments and expressive language.

Comparing Automatic and Manual Measures of Parent–Infant Conversational Turns: A Word of Caution

The Language ENvironment Analysis system (LENA) records children’s language environment and provides an automatic estimate of adult–child conversational turn count (CTC). The present study compares LENA’s CTC estimate to manually coded CTC on a sample of 70 English‐speaking infants recorded longitudinally at 6, 10, 14, 18, and 24 months of age. At each age, LENA’s CTC was significantly higher than manually coded CTC (all ps < .001, Cohen’s ds: 0.9–2.05), with the largest discrepancies between the two methods observed at younger ages. The Limits of Agreement Analyses confirm wide disagreements between the two methods, highlighting potential problems with automatic measurement of parent–infant verbal interaction. These findings suggest that future studies should validate LENA’s CTC estimates with manual coding.

A thorough evaluation of the Language Environment Analysis (LENA) system.

In the previous decade, dozens of studies involving thousands of children across several research disciplines have made use of a combined daylong audio-recorder and automated algorithmic analysis called the LENAⓇ system, which aims to assess children's language environment. While the system's prevalence in the language acquisition domain is steadily growing, there are only scattered validation efforts on only some of its key characteristics. Here, we assess the LENAⓇ system's accuracy across all of its key measures: speaker classification, Child Vocalization Counts (CVC), Conversational Turn Counts (CTC), and Adult Word Counts (AWC). Our assessment is based on manual annotation of clips that have been randomly or periodically sampled out of daylong recordings, collected from (a) populations similar to the system's original training data (North American English-learning children aged 3-36 months), (b) children learning another dialect of English (UK), and (c) slightly older children growing up in a different linguistic and socio-cultural setting (Tsimane' learners in rural Bolivia). We find reasonably high accuracy in some measures (AWC, CVC), with more problematic levels of performance in others (CTC, precision of male adults and other children). Statistical analyses do not support the view that performance is worse for children who are dissimilar from the LENAⓇ original training set. Whether LENAⓇ results are accurate enough for a given research, educational, or clinical application depends largely on the specifics at hand. We therefore conclude with a set of recommendations to help researchers make this determination for their goals.

Háblame Bebé: A phone application intervention to support Hispanic children's early language environments and bilingualism.

The early language environments of low-income Hispanic children can be negatively affected when their Spanish-speaking caregivers face racism, assimilation pressure, and/or misinformed advice based on English-only ideologies. This article reports on the design and efficacy of Háblame Bebé, a language-promoting phone application that encourages low-income Hispanic mothers to talk more to their children in their native Spanish with the goals of (1) improving their children's early language environment, (2) promoting bilingualism, and (3) monitoring developmental milestones. The app was designed and tested across three phases as mandated by the US HRSA Bridging the Word Gap Challenge. In Phase I, we developed a curriculum that promotes high-quality language interactions in Spanish and designed the app components. In Phase II, we tested the app with 20 Hispanic mothers (half high school-educated, half college-educated) in a pretest-posttest design in which we examined their language interactions before and after two months of using the app. Preliminary results indicated that mother-child verbal interactions increased, but not always in their native Spanish, and the difference was not statistically significant. Focus group data revealed that many of the mothers had experienced linguistic racism and that tropes surrounding Spanish-speaking identity in the USA needed to be explicitly addressed within the intervention. In Phase III, a sociolinguistic pride component was added and the app was again tested with 12 additional Hispanic mothers (all high school-educated only). This time, a statistically significant increase in mother-child verbal interactions was found. Mothers also reported feeling prouder to use Spanish with their children. These results suggest that Háblame Bebé may be a viable means to reach low-income Hispanic caregivers who face obstacles in accessing health information and/or home-visiting programs for their children.

The impact of positive parenting behaviors and maternal depression on the features of young children's home language environments.

This study investigated the associations between maternal depression when infants were 3 to 11 months old (M = 6 months), and positive parenting behaviors when children were between 12 and 22 months (M = 17 months) and the home language environment assessed when children were 18 to 28 months old (M = 23.5 months) in a sample of 29 low-income mother-child dyads. After controlling for maternal education, only teaching behaviors remained a moderate and significant predictor of adult word counts. Observed teaching behaviors significantly predicted conversational turns and marginally predicted child vocalizations; effects sizes were small. Encouraging behaviors were a small and significant predictor of conversational turns and a marginally significant predictor of adult word counts. Maternal depression was a moderate and significant predictor of children's vocal productivity scores and a small, marginal predictor of conversational turns. These findings have important implications for parenting and children's language outcomes.

What Do North American Babies Hear? A large-scale cross-corpus analysis.

A range of demographic variables influences how much speech young children hear. However, because studies have used vastly different sampling methods, quantitative comparison of interlocking demographic effects has been nearly impossible, across or within studies. We harnessed a unique collection of existing naturalistic, day-long recordings from 61 homes across four North American cities to examine language input as a function of age, gender, and maternal education. We analyzed adult speech heard by 3- to 20-month-olds who wore audio recorders for an entire day. We annotated speaker gender and speech register (child-directed or adult-directed) for 10,861 utterances from female and male adults in these recordings. Examining age, gender, and maternal education collectively in this ecologically valid dataset, we find several key results. First, the speaker gender imbalance in the input is striking: children heard 2-3× more speech from females than males. Second, children in higher-maternal education homes heard more child-directed speech than those in lower-maternal education homes. Finally, our analyses revealed a previously unreported effect: the proportion of child-directed speech in the input increases with age, due to a decrease in adult-directed speech with age. This large-scale analysis is an important step forward in collectively examining demographic variables that influence early development, made possible by pooled, comparable, day-long recordings of children's language environments. The audio recordings, annotations, and annotation software are readily available for reuse and reanalysis by other researchers.

Maternal education influences Australian infants' language experience from six months.

Disparities in children's early language skills associated with socioeconomic factors have led to many studies examining children's early language environments, but few as yet in the first year of life. This longitudinal study assessed the home language environments of 50 Australian infants, who varied in maternal education (university education, or not). Full-day audio recordings were collected and analyzed using the LENA system when infants were aged 6-9months and 12-15months. Using the device-specific analysis software, we assessed 12-h projected counts of (1) adult speech input, (2) conversational interactions, and (3) child vocalizations. At both ages, higher maternal education was associated with higher counts of adult words and conversational turns, but not child vocalizations. The study adds to the literature by demonstrating disparities in the infants' language experience within the first year of life, related to mothers' education, with implications for early intervention and parenting supports.

Bilingual language experience and children's social-emotional and behavioral skills: a cross-sectional study of Singapore preschoolers

ABSTRACT The current study examines the relationship between bilingual children's dual language experience (i.e. language input, language output and vocabulary proficiency), and their social-emotional and behavioral skills. Data were analysed from 805 Singaporean bilingual preschoolers (ages 4; 1–5; 8 years), who are learning English and either Mandarin (n = 551), Malay (n = 105), or Tamil, (n = 149). A parent questionnaire and standardized vocabulary tests were used to assess children's bilingual language environment and vocabulary knowledge. Children's social-emotional and behavioral skills were evaluated by teachers using the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire. A series of variables which might influence social-emotional and behavioral skills (e.g. gender, non-verbal IQ, SES, and emotion recognition) were controlled and mixed-effects models were used to conduct data analysis. Results demonstrated that children who had larger bilingual receptive vocabulary and had frequently spoken both languages for a longer time had better social-emotional and behavioral skills. Gender and emotion recognition ability were also found to be significantly related to children's social-emotional and behavioral skills. Such findings held true for children across different Mother Tongue language backgrounds. This suggests that a good language environment for bilingual children should be promoted not only for the sake of their early language development, but also because of the potential benefits to their social-emotional and behavioral skills.