2018 Sat Session B 1700

Saturday, November 4, 2018 | Session B, Conference Auditorium | 5pm

Language input varies by activity and social context in Latino infants from Spanish-speaking homes
A. Weisleder, A. Mendelsohn, A. Villanueva, A. Seery, C. Canfield

Evidence suggests that characteristics of early language input – such as amount, diversity, and complexity of speech – are associated with language development (Hoff, 2006). Some studies also suggest that language input varies as a function of the social interaction context – including the type of activity and number of conversational partners. For example, mothers’ talk during bookreading tends to be denser and more lexically diverse than talk in other settings (Hoff-Ginsberg, 1991), and infant-directed speech during one-on-one interactions has been found to be more strongly related to language development than speech in multi-party interactions (Ramirez-Esparza, 2014).

Few studies have investigated these factors in Latino infants from Spanish-speaking homes, especially during early infancy. Given possible cultural and social environment differences between English monolingual and Latino bilingual children, it is important to understand how aspects of the social context shape language interactions in Latino families. In the current study, we investigated the language learning environments of Latino infants from Spanish-speaking homes longitudinally from 2-12 months. We examine how two characteristics of the immediate social context – number of conversational partners and type of activity – are related to everyday language interactions in these families.

We collected daylong audio recordings, allowing us to capture infants’ natural language environment over a variety of social interaction contexts. Participants (n=22) were recorded at 2, 6, 9, and 12 months using LENA, a digital audiorecorder and software that records infants’ audio environment and provides quantitative estimates of the amount of speech. On each recording day, caregivers also completed a logbook indicating who was present during each 1-hour interval (e.g., mother, father, siblings) and the activities in which the infant was engaged (e.g., eating, bathing, bookreading).

Combining quantitative measures of this rich natural language sample with parents’ reports of the social interaction context, we explored differences in the number of adult words (AW), conversational turns (CT), and child vocalizations (CV) between social configurations and activity contexts. (Behavioral coding and transcription of these recordings is ongoing.)

Multi-level models revealed differences in language interactions that were related to context: 1) Intervals with bookreading exhibited more AW (b=25.03, p<.001), CT (b=0.71, p<.001), and CV (b=1.99, p<.001) than non-bookreading intervals (Figure 1); 2) There were also more AW, CT, and CV when infants engaged in multi-party interactions with their parents and/or siblings than in one-on-one interactions with a single caregiver (all p’s<.001; Figure 2); 3) Activity and social context were related: bookreading was more frequent in multi-party than one-on-one interactions; 4) There was wide individual variability in the amount of English, Spanish, and mixed input during booksharing interactions (30-77% Spanish only, 0-6% English only, 8-62% Spanish-English mixed). These results are a first step toward characterizing language interactions in the homes of 2-12 month-old infants from Spanish-speaking US families, revealing both similarities and differences with findings from monolingual English-learning children. We will discuss implications of these findings for understanding language development in diverse groups of children.