Variation sets in everyday home activities. A study with Argentinean children

ALAM, F.; GARBER, L.; ROSEMBERG, C.; STEIN, A.

Sheffield

Simposio; Child Language Symposium; 2019

Child-directed speech (CDS), compared to speech between adults, shows a higher amount of repetitiveness, particularly of sequences of utterances with self-repetitions (Hoff-Ginsberg, 1986). This phenomena, known as variation sets (Kuntay & Slobin, 1996, 2002), has been found to be beneficial for learning (Waterfall, 2006). Findings from a previous study indicates that socio-economic status (SES) influences the quantity of variation sets. However, their findings were based on data from child-parent dyadic interactions in relatively brief play situations in the home or in the lab (Tal & Arnon, 2018). Given that SES implies interrelated financial, educational, and social resources, that affect children?s quotidianity (Pace, Luo, Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff, 2017) here we examine the effect of SES-related differences on the use of variation sets during everyday activities in the household environment of Argentinian children. We ask if the quantity of variation sets differs according to mother?s education and household size.Participants were 30 socio-economically diverse Argentinian children (8 to 20 months). Families varied regarding mothers? education (primary, secondary, graduate and postgraduate degrees) and household size (ranging from 2 to 9 people living with the child). Children were audio-recorded for 4 hours. Transcriptions were done according to CHAT format. Each utterance was coded according to the activity and clustered into: 1) structured activities -those organizing adult and child?s non-verbal and verbal interactions, eg. booksharing, regulated play and adult-child conversations-, and 2) non-structured activities, eg. feeding, grooming, exploratory object and physical play, household chores, conversations between adults, outings, watching TV, in which the objective and the actions implied in the activity do not necessarily structure the verbal interaction. Variation sets were automatically extracted from CDS provided by all the participants. We conducted a descriptive analysis of variation sets in structured and non-structured activities and, then, lineal regression analysis to estimate the effects of socio-demographic variables (mother?s education and household size) on the quantity of variation sets heard by the children in structured and non-structured activities, controlling for age. Results demonstrated the effect of mother´s education only on variation sets produced in structured activities: in the families in which mothers? have the higher level of education (post-graduate degree) children heard significantly more variation sets than in families were mothers have lower levels of education(B: 33.377, SE: 9.2474,p