Young Children’s Language in Context
... Individuals within the field of early care and education increased in their efforts to provide opportunities and experiences for children to improve in his or her communication and language abilities (Hertzog, 1998;Massey, 2004;Perry, 2003;Honig, 2001). Active and engaged adults were listed as a primary variable in the success of language acquisition among young children within early childhood environments (Perry, 2003;Massey, 2004). ...
... Individuals within the field of early care and education increased in their efforts to provide opportunities and experiences for children to improve in his or her communication and language abilities (Hertzog, 1998;Massey, 2004;Perry, 2003;Honig, 2001). Active and engaged adults were listed as a primary variable in the success of language acquisition among young children within early childhood environments (Perry, 2003;Massey, 2004). Children who experienced rich conversations with adults, conversations where timely and quality feedback was provided and appropriate language was modeled during preschool experiences achieved greater academic success in later years (Massey, 2004;Honig, 2001). ...
... Verbal communications were opportunities for learning that he recommended occur throughout the day; especially during conversations between children and between children and their teachers (Perry, 2003). Various activities within varying context provided opportunities for teachers to evoke responses, respond to comments made by children and to increase the quality of the feedback and interactions between children and teachers (Massey, 2004;Honig, 2001;Perry, 2003;Hertzog, 1998). ...
This study adopted a sociocultural framework to investigate how educators interacted with young children in reminiscing and future talk conversations. Participants included 85 educator–child dyads from seven early childhood centers in Sydney, Australia. Younger children (n = 40) were 27–36 months and older children (n = 45) were 48–60 months. Each dyad discussed four past events (two novel, two familiar) and four future events (two novel, two familiar). A subsample of mother–child dyads (n = 42) completed the same tasks. Educators’ total elaborations varied by event novelty. Degree-qualified educators were, on average, as highly elaborative as mothers, while diploma-qualified educators were less elaborative. Although children elaborated more with their mothers than with their educators, the findings highlight a role for both mothers and educators in scaffolding children’s contributions in elaborative reminiscing and future talk conversations. Educator professional development interventions in elaborative talk, together with research into their effectiveness, are recommended.
Purpose
Parent–child interaction therapy refers to a number of interventions mediated by trained parents to treat developmental difficulties, including speech, language, and communication. Understanding the experiences of parents who take part in parent–child interaction therapy is a key aspect of determining how this intervention can be implemented successfully. However, to date, there has been limited work on synthesizing parental views of this intervention.
Method
We used qualitative evidence synthesis that involved searching the literature for qualitative studies addressing the experiences and perceptions of parent–child interaction therapy for parents of preschool children with communication difficulties. We identified 27 studies (from 32 publications) and synthesized the data using thematic synthesis. We appraised the quality of included studies using Critical Appraisal Skills Programme (CASP) and assessed our confidence in the review findings using GRADE Confidence in the Evidence from Reviews of Qualitative research (CERQual).
Results
At the beginning of this intervention, parents may have competing demands and varied expectations about the intervention. Their engagement is facilitated when the intervention is tailored to their individual family, their preferences for learning, and when they have a trusting relationship with the clinician. At the end of the intervention, although most parents perceive an improvement in their child's communication and feel empowered to facilitate this, they have concerns about their child's future needs.
Conclusions
It is important that clinicians explore parents' readiness for this intervention by discussing their needs and preferences openly, and that they facilitate their engagement through a supportive relationship. They also need to consider how parents will transition out of the intervention and continue to support their child's language development.
Supplemental Material
https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.14978454
Using the concept of a trajectory, we trace one child’s negotiation of his sense of belonging within his early childhood centre through analysing his participation in conflict and conflict-like interactions. Video data were gathered 2 days a week over a 6-month period from the start of his attendance at the centre. Sociolinguistic interactional analysis showed the child’s experience was one of learning and testing the norms and rules of centre life allowing him to negotiate a sense of belonging that straddled the identities of being a helper and eventually a member of the ‘big boys’ group.
Chinese fathers, who have been understudied, traditionally were expected to act as emotionally distant educators and disciplinarians of their children as well as heads of the household. Their dual roles as parents and as men evolved during modern social transformations following divergent paths, with their parental role departing from the Confucian patriarchal ideal further than did their gender role. Today, in Chinese societies, fathers are more involved in child‐rearing and warmer to their children than their predecessors, but comparable progress toward a quantitatively and qualitatively equal division of child‐rearing responsibilities between parents remains lacking. Chinese fathers’ involvement varies by geolocation, social class, and maternal support; their participation in their children’s lives benefits children’s adjustment, possibly through secure father–child attachment, and is influenced by the relationship between fathers and mothers. Researchers should address how Chinese fathers’ increasing but gendered involvement affects children’s and families’ functioning, study fathers in diverse families, and incorporate grandparents into research on fathering.
Chinese-speaking parents are believed to use less cognitive mental-state-talk than their English-speaking counterparts on account of their cultural goals in socializing their children to follow an interdependence script. Here, we investigated bilingual English–Mandarin Singaporean mothers who associate different functions for each language as prescribed by their government: English for school and Mandarin for in-group contexts. English and Mandarin maternal mental-state-talk from bilingual English–Mandarin mothers with their toddlers was examined. Mothers produced more ‘’cognitive’’ terms in English than in Mandarin and more ‘’desire’’ terms in Mandarin than in English. We show that mental-state-talk differs between bilingual parents’ languages, suggesting that mothers adjust their mental-state-talk to reflect the functions of each language.
Early childhood education serves an increasing number of multilingual children, and teachers are challenged to create high-quality learning opportunities in the classroom for all children. The child’s engagement and interactions with the teacher are important in this respect. The present study therefore examined how multilingualism relates to engagement and teacher-child interactions, taking a person-oriented approach. During one school year, 76 kindergarteners (43 multilingual) from 19 classrooms were observed for behavioral engagement and individual teacher-child interactions. Five engagement profiles were identified that reflect different levels of engagement across classroom settings. Multilingual children were overrepresented in profiles that showed lower engagement in one or more settings. Also, five interaction profiles were identified that showed strong diversity in the interactions of teachers with children in their classroom. Monolingual and multilingual children were equally represented across these profiles. Children in the more beneficial interaction profiles were also often in the moderate-to-high engagement profiles.
Standardized writing assessments based in linear progressions position teachers for deficit views of young children’s emergent writing development. Consequently, the researcher videorecorded a writing assessment of his son, Daniel, at age 5 years, 4 months, as he composed a story across pages of a blank book, using an assortment of writing tools. Data sources included the transcription of the writing session and Daniel’s final product. The researcher first used open coding then coding based in systemic functional linguistics. Based in ecological and social semiotic perspectives, the researcher shows how Daniel’s writing development was expressed interpersonally, with the emerging text functioning as mediational tool. Findings show Daniel’s emergent sense of self as a writer, the role of the adult facilitator, and the dynamics of interaction and dialectic of Daniel’s internalization process. As formative assessment, next steps in instruction are suggested. The author discusses the necessities of closely observing and supporting young children’s composing process and the imperative of a developmental assets perspective when assessing young children’s writing, with implications for policy, teacher education, teaching, and research.
To elucidate cultural contrasts in children’s family environments, we conducted in‐depth, direct comparisons of mind‐mindedness and self‐other distinction from maternal speech. The study included 5‐minute speech samples of 225 mothers from Japan (N = 111) and the UK (N = 114) talking about their 3‐ to 6‐year‐old children (including 11 sibling pairs, n = 236). Compared with Japanese mothers, British mothers spoke significantly more, gave a significantly higher proportion of child‐focused and mind‐related comments, and also showed a stronger self–other distinction. In addition, within each country, there was a positive relation between mothers’ references to children in the singular (as opposed to plural) form and their mind‐mindedness. Together, the current findings highlight cultural variations in maternal mind‐mindedness, explicit–implicit communication style, and self–other distinction, and also suggest further exploration of relations among them.
Early years are a critical period for skill development. In this sense, the Early Childhood
Education and Care (ECEC) programmes have an important role in promoting children’s
learning during this period. This study aimed to explore the effectiveness of ECEC
programmes by analysing the relationship between students’ ECEC attendance and their
later academic proficiency using PISA 2015 data. PISA results show that across the OECD
countries, students who had attended ECEC tend to have higher scores in academic
proficiencies at the age of 15. However, these differences in academic proficiencies
between those who attended ECEC versus those who did not attend are almost nil when
students’ socio-economic status (SES) is considered. This relationship reflects differential
access to learning opportunities for children from deprived contexts. Furthermore, results
show that entering ECEC programmes earlier than the typical time is associated with lower proficiencies at the age of 15. Therefore, earlier entry to ECEC is not necessarily beneficial.
Learning benefits of ECEC provision vary considerably across PISA countries illustrating
the importance of a country-specific policy context and the quality of their ECEC provision.
The analyses of several quality indicators point out that the improved quality of ECEC
programmes is associated with higher academic skills at later stages. These results highlight that mere attendance to ECEC programmes is not enough to ensure better academic performance. The quality of the educational provision, especially concerning those students from disadvantaged backgrounds, should be ensured.
Research findings
No research to date has compared mental state language (MSL) in conversations between children and different adult talk partners, such as mothers and educators. The aim of this study was to investigate the use of MSL (verbalization of mental states such as remembering, knowing and thinking) by children, educators, and mothers during conversations about the past and future. Eighty-five educator-child dyads from seven childcare centers in Sydney, Australia participated in eight conversations that varied by temporal (past/future) and novelty (novel/familiar) focus. Ten educators talked with 40 younger children (27–36 months), and 11 talked with 45 older children (48–60 months). A subsample of 42 mother-child dyads completed the same tasks: 20 with the younger children (27–36 months) and 22 with the older children (48–60 months). Educators used significantly more MSL than mothers. Compared to diploma-qualified educators, degree trained educators were especially likely to use more MSL. Educators’ MSL was significantly associated with children’s MSL for future talk conversations only. Practice or Policy: Educators’ and mothers’ MSL may influence children in different ways. Pre-service teacher training appears to facilitate educators’ own use of MSL. More research is needed to determine why children use more MSL with their mothers than with their educators.
Sociocultural theories of development privilege the role of parent-child conversation as a critical interpersonal context for cognitive and socioemotional development. Research on maternal reminiscing suggests that mothers differ on the elaborative nature of their reminiscing style. Individual differences in maternal elaborative style are thought to contribute to children's cognitive development in at least 3 critical areas: (a) memory; (b) language; and (c) theory of mind (ToM). Further, mothers are thought to be more elaborative with daughters than sons. After more than 30 years of research on maternal reminiscing, there has yet to be a quantitative summary of the literature. As such, we conducted a series of meta-analyses to summarize the effect sizes present in the literature, focusing on the 3 domains listed above as well as the potential impact of child gender on maternal elaborative style. The mean age range for children was set to include 30-60 months; roughly the developmental onset of autobiographical memory. Given these criteria, k 38 studies (51 independent samples) with N 2,492 mother-child dyads were included in this meta-analysis. Results indicated that maternal elaborative style did not differ by child gender. However, elaboration was positively associated with child memory, child language ability, and ToM. Ethnicity significantly moderated maternal elaborations by child gender, such that samples with majority non-Caucasian mothers elaborated more with daughters than sons. Public Significance Statement This meta-analysis suggests that the quality of mother-child conversations about the past influences a variety of child cognitive abilities, including memory, language, and understanding the perspectives of others.
Families’ mealtime talk has significant implications for children’s language development. This study investigated five middle-class Australian Chinese families that differ in their lifestyles and meal routines. It aims to explore (1) the nature of the Chinese parents’ language use in interactions with children at mealtime and (2) the factors that may impact the quality of mealtime talk. Drawing on systemic functional linguistic theory, the parents’ language was analysed in terms of interpersonal functions and cohesive patterns. The findings show distinctive differences among the families. The parents sitting with children for meals generated a higher quality of language that contained informational functions, expanded in various cohesive patterns, than the families where parents were positioned separately from children or where fathers were absent from dinner. This study indicates the diversity of Chinese children’s language experiences at home. Lifestyles and meal routines could be a mediator affecting the nature of mealtime talk.
Recent studies suggest that mind-mindedness is an important element of caregiver–child interactions in family and childcare context. This study investigated caregivers’ mind-mindedness in a nationally representative Dutch sample and its relation with structural quality factors (i.e., group size, caregivers’ education and work experience, group type, and situation) and caregivers’ interactive skills. Participants were 99 caregivers recruited in 50 childcare centers. Mind-mindedness was assessed with observations during free-play and lunch situations in infant, preschool, and mixed-age groups (0–4-year-olds). Caregivers’ appropriate and nonattuned mind-related comments were coded as individual (over/toward one child) or group related (over or toward more than one child). Caregivers’ interactive skills were assessed using the Caregiver Interaction Profile (CIP) scales. Research Findings: Caregivers generally refer to children’s desires, thoughts, and emotions in about 10% of their verbal interactions, with a low incidence rate of nonattuned comments (< 1%). Mind-mindedness was found to be significantly associated with structural quality characteristics and caregivers’ interactive skills. Caregivers with greater interactive skills produced fewer individual and more group appropriate mind-minded comments in mixed-age groups. Practice or Policy: We discuss the relevance of mind-minded comments at individual and group level for the future study of mental-state talk in early childhood education and care. © 2019, © 2019 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
In early childhood education, storytelling has traditionally been seen as a learning activity that lays the groundwork for children’s vocabulary and literacy development. The present study uses video-recorded storytelling events to examine young children’s emotional involvement and aesthetic experiences dur- ing adult storytelling in a regular Swedish preschool for 1- to 3.5-year-olds. By adopting a multimodal interactional perspective on human sense-making, socialization, and literacy (Goodwin, 2017), it con- tributes to research examining multimodality in early childhood literacy (Kyratzis & Johnson, 2017). The analytical focus is on co-operation in aesthetic experience: the teachers’ ways of organizing an entertain- ing, affectively valorized and ‘enchanting’ storytelling, and the children audience’s verbal and nonverbal participation (Goodwin & Goodwin, 2004).
The study shows that teachers used ‘lighthouse’ gaze, props, marked prosody and pauses to invite the child audience to participate, join the attentive multiparty participation frameworks and share the affective layering of story. The young children exploited the recognizability of the story and contributed by co-participating through bodily repetitions, choral completions, elaborating or volunteering anticipatory contributions, and pre-empting the upcoming story segment. The study suggests that through adult- child co-operation, the embodied telling becomes a site for children’s affective and aesthetic literacy socialization.
Scoping reviews, a type of knowledge synthesis, follow a systematic approach to map evidence on a topic and identify main concepts, theories, sources, and knowledge gaps. Although more scoping reviews are being done, their methodological and reporting quality need improvement. This document presents the PRISMA-ScR (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews) checklist and explanation. The checklist was developed by a 24-member expert panel and 2 research leads following published guidance from the EQUATOR (Enhancing the QUAlity and Transparency Of health Research) Network. The final checklist contains 20 essential reporting items and 2 optional items. The authors provide a rationale and an example of good reporting for each item. The intent of the PRISMA-ScR is to help readers (including researchers, publishers, commissioners, policymakers, health care providers, guideline developers, and patients or consumers) develop a greater understanding of relevant terminology, core concepts, and key items to report for scoping reviews.
The present study examined the relationship between parent-child interaction and children's emotion understanding ability. The participants were 56 three-year-old children and their mothers from Beijing, China. Mothers and children took part in three dyadic interaction tasks and were video recorded for coding of both mothers’ and children's behaviours. Each child completed three individually administered tests of emotion understanding, including the facial expression recognition task, emotion perspective-taking task, and emotion reason understanding task. Results demonstrated that both mothers’ and children's interaction behaviours were related to children's emotion understanding. Gender differences were found in the relationships between interaction behaviours and children's emotion understanding. Girls’ emotion understanding was associated with children's positive behaviours. In contrast, boys’ emotion understanding was not associated with children's positive behaviours, but related to mothers’ negative behaviours.
This paper is concerned specifically with the pedagogies applied in supporting learning through children’s play, and it is framed outside mainstream discourses on the nature of play. The development of the paper also represents one stage in a continuing effort to develop a better understanding of sustained shared thinking in early childhood education. The paper focuses on the educational potential of shared playful learning activities. However, given the overwhelming consensus regarding the importance of play in early childhood development, even a diehard educational pragmatist must begin by addressing subjects that are most commonly considered by psychologists. The paper begins with an account of ‘sustained shared thinking’, a pedagogical concept that was first identified in a mixed method, but essentially educational effectiveness study. Then a consideration of the nature and processes of ‘learning’ and ‘development’ is offered. It is argued that popular accounts of a fundamental difference in the perspectives of Piaget and Vygotsky have distracted educational attention from the most important legacy that they have left to early childhood education; the notion of ‘emergent development’. Pedagogic progression in the early years is then identified as an educational response to, and an engagement with, the most commonly observed, evidence based developmental trajectories of young children as they learn through play.
Psychology must confront the bias in its broad literature towards the study of participants
developing in environments unrepresentative of the vast majority of the world’s population. Here,
we focus on the implications of addressing this challenge, highlight the need to address over-reliance
on a narrow participant pool, and emphasize the value and necessity of conducting research with
diverse populations. We show that high impact-factor developmental journals are heavily skewed
towards publishing papers with data from WEIRD populations (Western, Educated, Industrialized,
Rich and Democratic). Most critically, despite calls for change and supposed widespread awareness
of this problem, there is a habitual dependence on convenience sampling and little evidence that the
discipline is making any meaningful movement towards drawing from diverse samples. Failure to
confront the possibility that culturally-specific findings are being misattributed as universal traits has
broad implications for the construction of scientifically defensible theories and for the reliable public
dissemination of study findings.
Diverse immigrants have significantly transformed the ethnic make-up of New Zealand, and they have brought with them diverse identities to this country. Findings from a doctoral research project which involved exploring Chinese immigrant parents’ identity choices for themselves and their children highlight the complex politics of identity. Within the field of education, children’s acquisition of a positive identity is closely related to valued self-worth, and a sense of shared identity is further believed to promote beneficial relationships, sense of belonging and social cohesion. Identity theories, nonetheless, argue that contemporary individual identities are fluid and hybrid, and an over-emphasis on collective identity creates boundaries, exclusion and tension. This article applies some of these theoretical frames to critically examine the identity choices of Chinese immigrant parent participants and argues for the need to re-examine the notion of identity. The implications of these identity choices on their children’s childhood and social and education practices are also analysed.
This article briefly investigates the role that ethno-methodology has played in sociological analyses of language and interaction. The work of Harvey Sacks is investigated in relation to membership categorization and the analysis of talk-in-interaction. More specifically, the authors focus on how this strand of work has been developed in recent years and now represents a powerful apparatus for conducting sociological analyses of interaction in a diverse range of settings in a way that is sensitive to issues related to social organization, normativity, identity, macro-micro synthesis, knowledge and developments in social theory.
Speakers use a variety of different linguistic resources in the construction of their identities, and they are able to do so because their mental representations of linguistic and social information are linked.
While the exact nature of these representations remains unclear, there is growing evidence that they encode a great deal more phonetic detail than traditionally assumed and that the phonetic detail is linked with word-based information. This book investigates the ways in which a lemma’s phonetic realisation depends on a combination of its grammatical function and the speaker’s social group. This question is investigated within the context of the word like as it is produced and perceived by students at an all girls’ high school in New Zealand. The results are used to inform an exemplar-based model of speech production and perception in which the quality and frequency of linguistic and non-linguistic variants contribute to a speaker’s style.
This book is a slightly modified version of my 2009 PhD dissertation, with one additional chapter.
A note on the publisher: Language Science Press is an open access publisher of peer-reviewed books on linguistics. It is free for authors to contribute and free to readers of the pdf version. Hard copies can be purchased at cost. My experience with Language Science has been overwhelmingly positive.
More information about the book and the publisher can be found at: http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/75
We investigated how educators, mothers and children used temporal language in reminiscing and future talk conversations. Participants initially included 40 educator-younger child dyads (27–36 months) and 45 educator-older child dyads (48–60 months) from early childhood centres in Sydney, Australia. Educators were asked to nominate and discuss four past and future events with the participating children. To determine how conversations about different events might vary, temporal focus (past/future) and event novelty (novel/familiar) were manipulated. To enable comparisons between educator–child and mother–child use of temporal language 42 mother–child dyads also completed the same tasks. Educators were noted to use timeless present references to add new information about events. With the older children, educators made significantly more future action and future hypothetical references. Educators’ use of future hypothetical references was significantly greater than that of mothers. Educators used reminiscing and future talk conversations to extend children’s exposure to temporal language.
This meta-analysis examined associations between the quantity and quality of parental linguistic input and children's language. Pooled effect size for quality (i.e., vocabulary diversity and syntactic complexity; k = 35; N = 1,958; r = .33) was more robust than for quantity (i.e., number of words/tokens/utterances; k = 33; N = 1,411; r = .20) of linguistic input. For quality and quantity of parental linguistic input, effect sizes were stronger when input was observed in naturalistic contexts compared to free play tasks. For quality of parental linguistic input, effect sizes also increased as child age and observation length increased. Effect sizes were not moderated by socioeconomic status or child gender. Findings highlight parental linguistic input as a key environmental factor in children's language skills.
This study investigated the characteristics of educators’ talk about decontextualised events with young children in seven early childhood long day care centres in Sydney, Australia. Educators were partnered with up to six children aged between 27 and 60 months. Across two time points, 85 educator–child dyads discussed past and future events. Educators’ use of questions, contextual statements, evaluations and prompts and children’s use of questions, open-ended responses, yes-no responses and spontaneous information statements were examined. Educators’ evaluative statements were highly correlated and educators’ questions were moderately correlated with children’s open-ended responses in past event conversations. Educators’ evaluative statements were highly correlated with children’s open-ended responses in future event conversations and were the only significant predictor for children’s talk. Given the important role of educators in scaffolding children’s thinking and communication skills, the recommended strategies for educators’ talk in decontextualised conversations include: sharing the conversational load, making frequent contextual statements and following the child’s lead/interests.
This book brings a surprisingly wide range of intellectual disciplines to bear on the self-narrative and the self. The same ecological/cognitive approach that successfully organized Ulric Neisser's earlier volume on The Perceived Self now relates ideas from the experimental, developmental, and clinical study of memory to insights from post-modernism and literature. Although autobiographical remembering is an essential way of giving meaning to our lives, the memories we construct are never fully consistent and often simply wrong. In the first chapter, Neisser considers the so-called 'false memory syndrome' in this context; other contributors discuss the effects of amnesia, the development of remembering in childhood, the social construction of memory and its alleged self-servingness, and the contrast between literary and psychological models of the self. Jerome Bruner, Peggy Miller, Alan Baddeley, Kenneth Gergen and Daniel Albright are among the contributors to this unusual synthesis.
Importance
There is considerable public and scientific debate as to whether screen use helps or hinders early child development, particularly the development of language skills.
Objective
To examine via meta-analyses the associations between quantity (duration of screen time and background television), quality (educational programming and co-viewing), and onset of screen use and children’s language skills.
Data Sources
Searches were conducted in MEDLINE, Embase, and PsycINFO in March 2019. The search strategy included a publication date limit from 1960 through March 2019.
Study Selection
Inclusion criteria were a measure of screen use; a measure of language skills; and statistical data that could be transformed into an effect size. Exclusion criteria were qualitative studies; child age older than 12 years; and language assessment preverbal.
Data Extraction and Synthesis
The following variables were extracted: effect size, child age and sex, screen measure type, study publication year, and study design. All studies were independently coded by 2 coders and conducted in accordance with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines.
Main Outcomes and Measures
Based on a priori study criteria, quantity of screen use included duration of screen time and background television, quality of screen use included co-viewing and exposure to educational programs, and onset of screen use was defined as the age children first began viewing screens. The child language outcome included assessments of receptive and/or expressive language.
Results
Participants totaled 18 905 from 42 studies included. Effect sizes were measured as correlations (r). Greater quantity of screen use (hours per use) was associated with lower language skills (screen time [n = 38; r = −0.14; 95% CI, −0.18 to −0.10]; background television [n = 5; r = −0.19; 95% CI, −0.33 to −0.05]), while better-quality screen use (educational programs [n = 13; r = 0.13; 95% CI, 0.02-0.24]; co-viewing [n = 12; r = 0.16; 95% CI, 0.07-.24]) were associated with stronger child language skills. Later age at screen use onset was also associated with stronger child language skills [n = 4; r = 0.17; 95% CI, 0.07-0.27].
Conclusions and Relevance
The findings of this meta-analysis support pediatric recommendations to limit children’s duration of screen exposure, to select high-quality programming, and to co-view when possible.
Evidence suggests that parental mind-mindedness is important for children’s social-emotional development; however, almost all research exploring mind-mindedness has been conducted with families from Western backgrounds. The current study explored cross-cultural differences in mind-mindedness based on observed real-time interactions between urban Australian ( N = 50, M age = 30.34 years, SD = 3.14) and urban mainland Chinese ( N = 50, M age = 29.18 years, SD = 4.14) mothers and their toddlers (Australian: M age = 18.98 months, SD = 0.87; Chinese: M age = 18.50 months, SD = 2.25). Controlling for education, the Australian mothers used a higher proportion of appropriate mind-related comments and were less likely to use non-attuned mind-related comments than their Chinese counterparts, adjusting for total number of comments. Transcript analysis showed that the Australian mothers used more mental state terms referring to desires and preferences than Chinese mothers. Findings are discussed in relation to cultural influences in child-rearing goals, beliefs, and values and the need for cross-cultural validation of the mind-mindedness construct.
From the “verbal deprivation” and “restricted codes” of the 1960s to contemporary “language gap” discourses, deficit models of children's language have been posited to explain social ills ranging from school failure to intergenerational poverty. However, researchers from a range of disciplines have problematized such models on the basis of the power of language to reflect, articulate, produce, and reproduce structural inequality. This review considers how the discursive construction of language, poverty, and child development contributes to deficit-based research agendas and the resulting interventions aimed at remediating language use in homes and schools. We suggest that an anthropolitical language socialization approach deconstructs ideologies of linguistic (in)competence and more accurately traces how children across cultures and social contexts develop communicative resources, cultural knowledge, and social practices in the face of political and economic adversity; it also helps articulate alternative ways of respecting and building on difference.
Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 48 is October 23, 2019. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
This study examines the frequency of reasoning talk used by 56 educators during their naturally occurring play interactions with infants in their early childhood education and care (ECEC) centers. Using Hasan’s semantic framework, reasons were coded as social (based on social rules) or logical (based on rules of nature). The communicative function of reasoning talk was coded as regulatory (when the reason served to regulate infants’ behavior) or non-regulatory. On average, educators’ reasoning talk comprising only 4.43% of their total talk, with social reasoning used slightly more frequently than logical reasoning. Educators used significantly more social reasoning when regulating infants’ behavior, whereas logical reasoning occurred more frequently during non-regulatory interactions. Educators’ qualification level explained individual differences. Bachelor-qualified educators used significantly more reasoning talk than lower-qualified educators, and this finding was explained by their more frequent use of both social and logical reasoning when regulating infants’ behavior. Practice or Policy: The study identifies reasoning talk as an important element of language environment quality in ECEC infant rooms, and highlights the learning potential of language used for different communicative purposes. Findings demonstrate that well-qualified educators appear well versed to capitalize on the educative potential of this type of talk.
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. We analyzed adult‐ and child‐directed speech (ADS, CDS) in daylong home recordings of infants in 4 N.A. cities. We found large effects of talker (but not child) gender and a small maternal education effect. Intriguingly, older (vs. younger) infants heard relatively more CDS, due to decreasing ADS in the input.
This multicase study explores students’ understandings about revision in the light of successive findings that they typically revise their texts little and at superficial levels. Students’ limited revising has been variously explained, both in terms of cognitive-metacognitive factors and restrictive school models. Few studies, however, have examined students’ thinking about revision. This investigation considers the impact students’ concepts of purpose have on their revising and the extent to which perceived expectations and school routines inform the scope of their achievement. One-to-one observations of writing, post hoc interviews and analyses of students’ texts were repeated over the course of an extended classroom writing task. Findings suggest that whilst students’ definitions of revision were narrow and their text changes primarily superficial, they did not necessarily lack the understanding or skill to revise more effectively. Able writers explicitly chose an instrumental approach, attributing limited revision to tightly-prescribed and time-controlled tasks. They perceived a dichotomy between school purposes and more authentic possibilities. The study highlights the contextualised nature of students’ decision-making and argues that poor revision may be an adaptive response to school requirements rather than an innate limitation.
This study compared the effects of mother-child reminiscing coaching on mothers of typically developing children (community sample) and mothers of children with conduct problems (clinical sample). It also tested whether intervention effects generalize to mothers' preferences for elaborative and mental-state oriented talk with their children in other contexts. Mother-child dyads (n = 88) in each sample were randomly allocated to condition: reminiscing intervention or active control. Pre-intervention, sample differences emerged. Mothers in the community sample were more elaborative during reminiscing than mothers in the clinical sample, and also expressed stronger preferences for elaborative talk in everyday contexts. Post-intervention, an intervention effect emerged. In both the community and clinical samples, mothers who had participated in the elaborative reminiscing intervention were more elaborative and emotion-focused during reminiscing than mothers in the active control condition. They also increased their preferences for elaborative and mental-state-oriented language in everyday contexts. While the mothers in the community sample remained more elaborative than mothers in the clinical sample, both experienced equivalent intervention gains. These findings highlight the value of reminiscing coaching for changing mothers' interactional preferences and behaviours.
In this chapter, we explore membership categorization analysis (MCA) as a method for interrogating the systematic ways in which gender, as an everyday members' category, is invoked, given meaning, and sustained in various spoken and textual forms of social interaction. To this end, the chapter begins with a discussion of recent developments within MCA and how they allow for the possibility not just of a categorial systematics, but of a categorial systematics that can contribute to the project of language and gender studies. A practical, step-by-step explanation of how to do categorial systematics is then followed by three case studies that exemplify the method in use. In this way, the chapter shows that and how MCA works as a corpus-based approach which, like conversation analysis (CA), can use collections of naturally occurring data to reveal people's discourse practices for accomplishing social action.
Measurements of infants’ quotidian experiences provide critical information about early development. However, the role of sampling methods in providing these measurements is rarely examined. Here we directly compare language input from hour‐long video‐recordings and daylong audio‐recordings within the same group of 44 infants at 6 and 7 months. We compared 12 measures of language quantity and lexical diversity, talker variability, utterance‐type, and object presence, finding moderate correlations across recording‐types. However, video‐recordings generally featured far denser noun input across these measures compared to the daylong audio‐recordings, more akin to ‘peak’ audio hours (though not as high in talkers and word‐types). Although audio‐recordings captured ~10 times more awake‐time than videos, the noun input in them was only 2–4 times greater. Notably, whether we compared videos to daylong audio‐recordings or peak audio times, videos featured relatively fewer declaratives and more questions; furthermore, the most common video‐recorded nouns were less consistent across families than the top audio‐recording nouns were. Thus, hour‐long videos and daylong audio‐recordings revealed fairly divergent pictures of the language infants hear and learn from in their daily lives. We suggest that short video‐recordings provide a dense and somewhat different sample of infants’ language experiences, rather than a typical one, and should be used cautiously for extrapolation about common words, talkers, utterance‐types, and contexts at larger timescales. If theories of language development are to be held accountable to ‘facts on the ground’ from observational data, greater care is needed to unpack the ramifications of sampling methods of early language input.
Research Findings: Mental state verbs (MSV), a component of literate and academic language, may facilitate vocabulary growth, as they relate to metacognitive and metalinguistic awareness as well as decontextualized talk, all of which have been associated with vocabulary growth. In this study, we examined teacher MSV use in group content instruction and book reading in Head Start classrooms (N = 49) to determine the prevalence of teachers’ use of MSV. We sought to determine whether there was an association between teachers’ MSV use and children’s (N = 402) receptive and expressive vocabulary scores across 1 year of preschool. Results from hierarchical linear modeling revealed that teachers’ use of MSV in group content instruction was positively associated with children’s end-of-year receptive, but not expressive, vocabulary scores. No significant relations emerged for book reading. Positive associations between MSV in which the child was the referent of the verb and children’s receptive vocabulary were found, which indicates a potential scaffolding effect. Practice or Policy: Results indicate that teachers should consider including MSV in their content-rich instruction and provide support by placing the child as the referent of the verb. Additional instructional implications are addressed.
Since Garfinkel brought our attention to the moral order implied in everyday activities, studies on social interaction have described the practices through which members constitute the moral dimensions of everyday life. Drawing on Duranti’s notion of the ‘sense of the Other’, this article illustrates how mundane morality is presupposed and (re)constructed in the micro-order of everyday life. Examples of video-recorded family dinner interactions are discussed, adopting a conversation analytic approach. The analysis illustrates how the sense of the Other is made relevant by parents as an organizing principle of ongoing activities and ‘talked into being’ to manage ordinary tasks (e.g. pursuing synchronicity and distributing food). The analysis reveals that parents use siblings as a resource to embody the ‘generalized other’ and socialize children to take the other’s perspective. Our study contributes to demonstrating the relevance of looking at ordinary practices as powerful means through which members orient to a moral version of the world and treat it as a natural one.
PLAY-BASED LEARNING IS a cornerstone of early childhood education provision. Play provides opportunities for young children to explore ideas, experiment with materials and express new understandings. Play can be solitary, quiet and reflective. Play can also be social, active and engaging. While play is commonly understood as the basis for learning in early childhood education, this is not always the situation in all settings. Cultural variations in learning and play suggest that social interactions and observational learning also create powerful pedagogical learning environments for young children. International and national research highlights the value of sustained and reflective interactions between children and educators in promoting children's learning. Increasingly, the notion of quality in play-based pedagogy invites educators to integrate traditional beliefs about play with new insights into the role of social interactions, modelling and relationships in young children's learning.
Overseas, the movement towards quality play-based pedagogy reflects debate and policy initiatives captured by the notion of intentional teaching. In Australia, the Early Years Learning Framework makes explicit reference to intentional teaching. Intentional teaching arguably engages educators and children in shared thinking and problem solving to build the learning outcomes of young children. However, the pedagogical relationship between play-based learning and intentional teaching remains difficult to conceptualise. This is because the value placed on the exploratory potential of play-based learning can appear to be at odds with the role of intentional teaching in promoting knowledge development. This paper reaches beyond binary constructs of play and intentional teaching, and invites consideration of a new Pedagogical Play-framework for inspiring pedagogical and curriculum innovation in the early years.
This paper was a keynote address at the 2016 Early Childhood Australia National Conference addressing the theme Inspire-be inspired to reach beyond quality.
Mind-mindedness refers to the caregiver’s ability to be attuned to the child’s mental states. Within the parent-child relationship, mind-mindedness relates to parents’ sensitive caregiving, and to children’s secure attachment. However, the same relations are still unexplored in out-of-home care settings. We investigated the associations between childcare professionals’ mind-mindedness, sensitive responsiveness and respect for autonomy, and child-caregiver attachment security. Moreover, we examined whether these relations are influenced by caregivers’ and children’s gender. Participants were 17 caregiver couples (17 males, 17 females) and 34 three-year-old children (17 boys, 17 girls), recruited in childcare centers. Mind-mindedness toward the boy or the girl (dyadic) or both children (non-dyadic), sensitive responsiveness and respect for autonomy were assessed during a semi-structured play. Attachment security was assessed through observations. Male and female caregivers had equivalent scores of mind-mindedness, sensitive responsiveness, and respect for autonomy. Similarly, children were securely attached to male and female caregivers. Girls’ and boys’ secure attachment was predicted by caregivers’ use of non-dyadic mind-related comments. For girls, but not for boys, the relation was partially mediated by caregivers’ respect for autonomy. The results are discussed in terms of their relevance for the quality of child-caregiver relationships, and children’s socio-emotional development.
Parental mentalizing, which is the capacity to understand behavior in terms of mental states and to reflect this back to a child through speech, is a key construct in child development. Adults with high mentalization promote children’s secure attachment, mentalization and self-regulation. This study describes this competency in a sample of teachers from Chilean nurseries in interaction with 12-month-old children during a storytelling scenario and compares it with the children’s mothers. The sample comprised 208 adults (104 teachers and 104 mothers). The adults were asked to tell 2 stories to the children, and these situations were recorded, transcribed, and codified using guidelines that identified 4 references to mental states (desires, cognitions, emotions, and attributes) and 4 references to nonmental states (causal and factual talk, physical states, and connections with the child’s life). Research Findings: The results showed significant differences between the educational staff and the mothers, and the teachers performed better than the mothers in terms of both greater mentalization and a greater number of references to desires, causal talk, emotions, and physical states. Practice or Policy: The results provide evidence regarding the supportive role played by educational staff in children’s development, especially in underprivileged sectors.
Educare is a birth to age 5 early education program designed to reduce the achievement gap between children from low-income families and their more economically advantaged peers through high-quality center-based programming and strong school–family partnerships. This study randomly assigned 239 children (< 19 months) from low-income families to Educare or a business-as-usual control group. Assessments tracked children 1 year after randomization. Results revealed significant differences favoring treatment group children on auditory and expressive language skills, parent-reported problem behaviors, and positive parent–child interactions. Effect sizes were in the modest to medium range. No effects were evident for observer-rated child behaviors or parent-rated social competence. The overall results add to the evidence that intervening early can set low-income children on more positive developmental courses.
This article examines familial interactions, which are mediated through information and communication technologies, during domestic mealtimes. We seek to understand how technologies are used and negotiated among family members and the influence of technology on commensality. We conducted an observational study of six families. The findings showed how technologies are integrated into the mealtime activities. Our study identifies domestic circumstances where background technologies are raised to the foreground, visible devices are hidden, unwanted distractions become desired, and ordinary technologies are integrated into mealtime experiences. We identify four patterns of arrangement between technologies and family members during mealtimes, and we discuss how technologies contribute to mealtime satiety and commensality. Finally, we present implications of our findings and directions for technological advancements focusing on the social and celebratory nature of family mealtimes.
How children acquire knowledge about and use written language has been examined in a range of disciplines or fields. While formal education settings provide instruction for children to develop literacy, support occurs during everyday activities in the family home. This chapter examines a number of extended sequences of talk during one breakfast of an Australian family comprising the mother and the father and their five children. The interactions were video recorded and then transcribed using conversation analysis conventions. This chapter focuses on how the family members deploy interactional resources to support access to the text of a bookclub brochure, assess the appropriateness of the books for individual family members, and fill in the forms to order books. Analysis shows how the multiparty context and the incipient agenda of purchasing a book from the bookclub brochure are consequential for when and how literacy events are accomplished. Second, analysis shows how the provision of assistance with literacy practices is accomplished interactionally. Also identified in the analysis is the way in which literacy events happen ‘on the hop’ with a shifting in and out of other activities. The chapter contributes understandings about how family members accomplish reading and writing interactionally during an ordinary everyday family occasion, having breakfast.