The impact of COVID‐19 on infant development: A special issue of infancy

LoBue, Vanessa; Pérez‐Edgar, Koraly; Kirkham, Natasha Z.; Herbert, John

doi:10.1111/infa.12528

Cited by 1 publication

(2 citation statements)

References 22 publications

(26 reference statements)

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“…Thus, the results obtained from parents’ questionnaires in a domestic context are similar to the results found in a preschool classroom context by Mitsven et al (2022) , who also found that pandemic children benefit from teacher’s input as well as pre-pandemic children. Therefore, as suggested by LoBue et al (2023) , measures against COVID-19 might have had an impact on caregivers’ socioemocional behaviour, but the measures seem to have had little or no effect on infants’ development. Alternatively, it might be the case that post-pandemic children are not developing worse than pre-pandemic children, but simply differently, and that those differences are reflected in other areas of language development ( Frota et al, 2022 ; Shuffrey et al, 2022 ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 95%

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Language acquisition in a post-pandemic context: the impact of measures against COVID-19 on early language development

et al. 2023

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Language acquisition is influenced by the quality and quantity of input that language learners receive. In particular, early language development has been said to rely on the acoustic speech stream, as well as on language-related visual information, such as the cues provided by the mouth of interlocutors. Furthermore, children’s expressive language skills are also influenced by the variability of interlocutors that provided the input. The COVID-19 pandemic has offered an unprecedented opportunity to explore the way these input factors affect language development. On the one hand, the pervasive use of masks diminishes the quality of speech, while it also reduces visual cues to language. On the other hand, lockdowns and restrictions regarding social gatherings have considerably limited the amount of interlocutor variability in children’s input. The present study aims at analyzing the effects of the pandemic measures against COVID-19 on early language development. To this end, 41 children born in 2019 and 2020 were compared with 41 children born before 2012 using the Catalan adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (MB-CDIs). Results do not show significant differences in vocabulary between pre- and post-Covid children, although there is a tendency for children with lower vocabulary levels to be in the post-Covid group. Furthermore, a relationship was found between interlocutor variability and participants’ vocabulary, indicating that those participants with fewer opportunities for socio-communicative diversity showed lower expressive vocabulary scores. These results reinforce other recent findings regarding input factors and their impact on early language learning.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 95%

“…The data available so far is controversial ( LoBue et al, 2023 ). On the one hand, some studies do suggest significant developmental differences between babies born during the pandemic and babies born before.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%