The language environments of child care homes and their relation to language development in the second and third years of life.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Observations of caregiver speech to children in 23 child care homes serving low-income children were made when a target child in each setting was 18 months old. The target children were observed bimonthly until age 30 months. Measures of caregiver speech included quantity, syntactic complexity, amount of speech directed at the target child and number of utterances that related to the target child's current focus of attention (“current utterances”). Child language measures included a vocabulary growth rate calculated from bimonthly recordings of children's speech, mean length of utterance at 30 months and a receptive vocabulary test. Results indicated a wide range of language environments in child care homes serving low-income children, with quantity and type of speech skewed toward the lower end of the range. A key finding was that almost half of the observed sample never or almost never commented on topics in the target child's current focus of attention. The rarity of joint attention in naturalistic observations of multi-child settings contrasts with its frequent occurrence in controlled studies of mother-child dyads. Caregivers' quantity of speech, amount of speech directed at the target child and frequency of current utterances were all strongly associated with measures of language development. However, syntactic complexity, as measured by the caregiver's MLU, showed no significant association with child language development. When considered alongside quantity measures in a regression model, only the frequency of current utterances was a significant predictor of individual differences in language development. These results suggest that joint attention, while not available to all children in child care settings, is a source of particularly valuable language input and a key component of attentive, responsive caregiving.