Exploring relationships between parental input and children's expressive vocabulary skills

Abstract

Many studies have investigated the vocabulary growth of children in the early years of life; however, little international and local research was found exploring the relationship between parental vocabulary input and children’s expressive vocabulary skills longitudinally. This study aimed to cover this research gap by measuring the lexical characteristics of the Parental input received by children longitudinally at 12 months of age (Time 1) and later at 24 months (Time 2) in terms of type counts (unique words) and token counts (total numbers of spontaneous and imitated words, considered separately), to measure the expressive vocabulary skills of the child participants at Time 1 and Time 2 in terms of type and token counts, and to find whether change in parent and child type and token counts over time was related. To accomplish these aims, nine parent-child dyads from a secondary database collected by Gatt (2010) were analysed. The data was initially collected when the children were 12 months of age and then a year later. The parents’ and children’s verbal language used during 20-minute audio-recorded free play sessions were transcribed orthographically, coded and analysed. Mean type and token values were compared to identify any statistically significant changes in the parents’ and/or children’s vocabulary use between Time 1 and Time 2. It was found that the parents’ mean increase in type counts (P=0.197) and in tokens (both spontaneous (P= 0.152) and imitated (P=0.733)) between Time 1 and Time 2 was insignificant. However, the children’s vocabulary growth was found to be significant for type counts (P=0.029) and significant for spontaneous token counts (P=0.016), but insignificant for imitated token counts (P=0.131). Results also revealed that the children’s expressive vocabulary longitudinal growth between Time 1 and Time 2 was faster and greater than their mothers’ longitudinal increase in vocabulary use. In conclusion it was observed that even though the parents in this study increased their vocabulary use as the children grew, children’s vocabulary growth exceeded the parents’ increase in vocabulary use.