Socio-economic Differences in Parental Spatial Language and its Relation with Children?s Performance in a Spatial Task

MAITA, MARÍA DEL ROSARIO; PERALTA, OLGA

Seattle

Congreso; Society for Research in Child Development SRCD. Biennial Meeting; 2013

Society for Research in Child Development

During daily parent-child interactions, parents employ spatial language, such as when describing the location of objects: "it is in the bottom shelf", "your backpack is next to the TV". Recently, it was demonstrated that parents vary in the use of spatial language, and that this variability is an important predictor of both: children?s spatial linguistic production and performance in spatial tasks (Pruden, Levine & Huttenlocher, 2011; Szechter & Liben, 2004). This research is one of the few addressing the relationship between parental spatial language and children?s spatial reasoning. In particular, we examined whether socioeconomic status (SES) is a source of variation of parental spatial language and, if so, whether it affects children?s spatial performance. Twenty-two children (M=48.0 months, DS=6.2) with their parents (6 fathers, 16 mothers) so far participated. They were contacted through the kindergartens children attended. Boys and girls were equally represented. All participants were from Rosario and Corrientes, two large cities in Argentina; they belonged to two SES groups, low and middle. In order to determine the SES we administered an interview to the parent. The principal indicators were parental education, family income, and housing conditions. The observations were conducted in a quiet room of the kindergarten. We employed a small space (120 cm width x 100 cm high x 100 cm long), a toy, and five identical boxes (14 cm x 14 cm); three were located in a vertical line in the middle of the space, the fourth in the back left corner and the fifth in the right front corner. The task consisted in the parent hiding the toy in one of the boxes and then guiding the child?s search verbally. Interactions were videotaped and transcribed. We elaborated a coding system to capture parental spatial language (spatial terms and frames of reference) and children?s responses (correct, incorrect, ambiguous). Spatial terms compromised: 1- Location: 1.1 proximity (close, near, next, far); 1.2 horizontal axis (left, right); 1.3 vertical axis (back, front, above, below); 1.4 middle. 2- Amount (numbers). 3- Spatial features (corner). Frames of references were classified in Egocentric and External. Interactions were divided into Episodes: phrase(s) containing spatial content. The analysis of the data indicated that MSES dyads displayed more episodes than the LSES ones (Mdn MSES= 9, Mdn LSES=6, U=21.50, p