Media exposure and language experience: Examining associations from home observations in Mexican immigrant families in the US

Language environment and early language production in Slovenian infants: An exploratory study using daylong recordings

Daylong recordings provide an ecologically valid option for analyzing language input, and have become a central method for studying child language development. However, the vast majority of this work has been conducted in North America. We harnessed a unique collection of daylong recordings from Slovenian infants (age: 16-30 months, N = 40, 18 girls), and focus our attention on manually annotated measures of parentese (infant-directed speech with a higher pitch, slower tempo, and exaggerated intonation), conversational turns, infant words, and word combinations. Measures from daylong recordings showed large variation, but were comparable to previous studies with North American samples. Infants heard almost twice as much speech and parentese from mothers compared to fathers, but there were no differences in language input to boys and girls. Positive associations were found between the social-interactional features of language input (parentese, turn-taking) and infants' concurrent language production. Measures of child speech from daylong recordings were positively correlated with measures obtained through the Slovenian MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory. These results support the notion that the social-interactional features of parental language input are the foundation of infants' language skills, even in an environment where infants spend much of their waking hours in childcare settings, as they do in Slovenia.

Estimating infants' language exposure: A comparison of random and volume sampling from daylong recordings collected in a bilingual community

In North America, the characteristics of a child's language environment predict language outcomes. For example, differences in bilingual language exposure, exposure to electronic media, and exposure to child-directed speech (CDS) relate to children's language growth. Recently, these predictors have been studied through the use of daylong recordings, followed by manual annotation of audio samples selected from these recordings. Using a dataset of daylong recordings collected from bilingually raised infants in the United States as an example, we ask whether two of the most commonly used sampling methods, random sampling and sampling based on high adult speech, differ from each other with regard to estimating the frequencies of specific language behaviors. Daylong recordings from 37 Spanish-English speaking families with infants between 4 and 22 months of age were analyzed. From each child's recording, samples were extracted in two ways (at random/based on high adult speech) and then annotated for Language (Spanish/English/Mixed), CDS, Electronic Media, Social Context, Turn-Taking, and Infant Babbling. Correlation and agreement analyses were performed, in addition to paired sample t-tests, to assess how the choice of one or the other sampling method may affect the estimates. For most behaviors studied, correlation and agreement between the two sampling methods was high (Pearson r values between 0.79 and 0.99 for 16 of 17 measures; Intraclass Correlation Coefficient values between 0.78 and 0.99 for 13 of 17 measures). However, interesting between-sample differences also emerged: the degree of language mixing, the amount of CDS, and the number of conversational turns were all significantly higher when sampling was performed based on high adult speech compared to random sampling. By contrast, the presence of electronic media and one-on-one social contexts was higher when sampling was performed at random. We discuss advantages of choosing one sampling technique over the other, depending on the research question and variables at hand.

Social interactions offset the detrimental effects of digital media use on children's vocabulary

Young children's rapid vocabulary growth during the first few years is supported by input during social interactions with caregivers and, increasingly, from digital media. However, the amount of exposure to both sources can vary substantially across socioeconomic classes, and little is known about how social interactions and digital media use together predict vocabulary in the first few years of life. The current study takes a first step toward examining whether increased social interactions with other individuals may buffer the potentially detrimental effects of digital media use on language among a socioeconomically diverse sample. 305 caregivers of children between 17 and 30-months completed questionnaires about their family demographics, their child's technology use, and the child's daily routines and social interactions. Findings suggest children who experience fewer human interactions and greater technology exposure have smaller vocabularies than their peers who socialize more and use less technology, and this disparity becomes greater as children get older. Moreover, the number of social interactions moderates the link between SES, digital media, and vocabulary such that the negative impact of digital media on vocabulary for children from low SES households can be offset with increased social interactions. Together, this suggests that increasing the amount of human interactions may serve as a protective factor for vocabulary outcomes in a world where digital media use is prominent.

Electronic media and social features of language input in bilingually-raised Latinx infants

The present study examines the language environments of bilingually-raised Latinx infants (n = 37) to characterize the relation between exposure to electronic media and infants' language input, with a specific focus on parentese, a near-universal style of infant-directed speech, distinguished by its higher pitch, slower tempo, and exaggerated intonation. Previous research shows that parentese and parent-infant turn-taking are both associated with advances in children's language learning. Here we test the hypothesis that exposure to electronic media is associated with a reduction in these two social features of language input. Using the Language Environment Analysis (LENA) technology, two daylong audio recordings were collected from each family. Exposure to electronic media was measured in three ways: 1) Through LENA's automatic estimate; 2) Through manual annotation of LENA audio recordings; and 3) Through a parental questionnaire. Language of electronic media, parental language input, and child language output were quantified through automatic and manual analyses of LENA recordings. Infants' estimated daily exposure to electronic media varied between the three methods used. There was a significant positive correlation between daily media exposure assessed via the two observational methods, but neither significantly correlated with parental report. Infants experienced electronic media in Spanish and English, and the language of electronic media correlated with the language of paternal and maternal child-directed speech. Linear regression analyses controlling for demographics (infant age, sex, socioeconomic status) demonstrated a negative association between exposure to electronic media and parentese, as well as between exposure to electronic media and turn-taking. Exposure to electronic media was also negatively associated with infants' linguistic vocalizations. The present findings suggest that exposure to electronic media negatively impacts infant vocal activity by reducing parental parentese and parent-infant turn-taking, which are known to positively impact infants' linguistic, socioemotional, and cognitive development. This analysis is an important step forward in understanding Latinx infants' electronic media ecologies and their relation to language input and language development.