This article examines the input to Argentinian Spanish-learning children from low and middle socioeconomic status (SES). It aims to determine whether the vocabulary composition (nouns and verbs) of their input varies as a function of SES, the addressee and other contextual variables such as the type of activity and the pragmatic orientation of the utterances. Thirty children (mean: 14.3 months) and their families were audio-recorded for four hours and the middle two hours were analyzed using Computerized Language Analysis (CLAN). The nouns and verbs in child-directed speech (CDS) and overheard speech (OHS) were identified using the CLAN’s part of speech tagger MOR Morphosyntactic Analysis. Regression analyses showed effects of: (a) SES and addressee on the proportion of noun types and tokens; (b) the type of activity and the pragmatic orientation of the utterances on the proportion of nouns in CDS; (c) SES and type of activity on the proportion of entity and action-oriented utterances. These findings reveal that given the complexity of children’s home environments it is crucial to consider these social and contextual dimensions to account for the distribution of different lexical categories. How they are distributed in the input likely influences the developmental course of vocabulary acquisition.
Recent issues around reproducibility, best practices, and cultural bias impact naturalistic observational approaches as much as experimental approaches, but there has been less focus on this area. Here, we present a new approach that leverages cross-laboratory collaborative, interdisciplinary efforts to examine important psychological questions. We illustrate this approach with a particular project that examines similarities and differences in children’s early experiences with language. This project develops a comprehensive start-to-finish analysis pipeline by developing a flexible and systematic annotation system, and implementing this system across a sampling from a “metacorpus” of audiorecordings of diverse language communities. This resource is publicly available for use, sensitive to cultural differences, and flexible to address a variety of research questions. It is also uniquely suited for use in the development of tools for automated analysis.
The study analyzes the relationship between the temporal terms used by fouryear-old children from different socio-economic backgrounds -marginalized urban neighborhoods and middle-income families -and the use of these terms in the spontaneous situations in which they participate in family and community contexts. The analysis assumes that the child develops knowledge about temporal expressions as they are used by others and as the child uses them herself (Nelson 2007;Tomasello 2003). Findings show that children from marginalized urban neighborhoods use fewer temporal terms than children from middleincome backgrounds. These differences correlate with differences in the input of both groups. The analysis shows differences in the interactional and discursive patterns of use of the terms in the homes of both groups of children.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.