SOCIOECONOMIC DIFFERENCES IN THE QUANTITY AND QUALITY OF CHILD DIRECTED SPEECH ACROSS ACTIVITIES IN DIVERSE AREGENTINIAN HOUSEHOLDS

ROSEMBERG CELIA RENATA; ALAM FLORENCIA; RAMÍREZ MARÍA LAURA; IBAÑEZ, MARÍA ILEANA; GARBER, LEANDRO

Philadelphia

Congreso; IASCL Conference; 2021

A handful of studies have started to consider the language that constitute the ebb and flow of daily activities in which children are embedded (eg. Tamis-LeMonda, Custode, Kuchirko & Escobar, 2018). As suggested by Nelson (1996), the social, spatial, temporal and linguistic dimensions of the activities configure the context in which children experience language, and likely influence their language trajectories. Though these dimensions vary in different socioeconomic (SES) backgrounds (Bradley & Corwin, 2002), studies have not considered SES differences in the amount, lexical diversity, syntactic complexity, and semantics of language across children?s everyday activities. We assessed these aspects in a socio-economically diverse sample of Argentinian children.Thirty low and middle SES children (8 to 20 months), were audio-recorded for 4 hours. The 2 middle hours were transcribed. We used CLAN to: (a) calculate lexical quantity(tokens), lexical diversity(VOCD) and syntactic complexity(MLU); (b) identify nouns and verbs. We coded child directed speech for ongoing activities with defined spatial and temporal boundaries: feeding, play, booksharing, grooming and households chores. Following Tamis-LeMonda et al. (2018), we calculated the proportion of 21 types of concrete nouns and action verbs (see figure). We conducted regression analysis. Results showed (a) no SES nor activity differences in the quantity of tokens and MLU; (b) effects of SESand type of activityon VOCD; (c) semantic regularities in word-activity associations, however their magnitude varies across activities ; (d) an effect of SES on a variety of nouns and verbs (eg. toys; utensils . These results highlights qualitative differences in input across daily activities and the contribution of SES to variance in lexical diversity and semantics.