Yana Kuchirko

Why Is Infant Language Learning Facilitated by Parental Responsiveness

Parents’ responsiveness to infants’ exploratory and communicative behaviors predicts infant word learning during early periods of language development. We examine the processes that might explain why this association exists. We suggest that responsiveness supports infants’ growing pragmatic understanding that language is a tool that enables intentions to be socially shared. Additionally, several features of responsiveness—namely, its temporal contiguity, contingency, and multimodal and didactic content—facilitate infants’ mapping of words to their referents and, in turn, growth in vocabulary. We close by examining the generalizability of these processes to infants from diverse cultural communities.

‘What happened next?’: Developmental changes in mothers’ questions to children

Developmental changes in the questions mothers asked during book-sharing interactions with their preschool children and associations between mothers’ questions and childrens narrative contributions were examined. Children and mothers from ethnically diverse backgrounds (African American, Dominican and Mexican) were video-recorded sharing the wordless book ‘Frog, Where are You?’ when children were three, four and five years of age. Mothers’ questions were coded as referential (e.g. ‘Whats that?’), story-specific (e.g. ‘Where is the boy looking for the frog?’) and open-ended (e.g. ‘What will happen next?’). Mothers decreased their use of referential questions between the child ages of four and five in both frequency and proportion. Story-specific questions increased in frequency and proportion with increasing child age. Open-ended questions decreased in frequency between the child ages of four and five and did not change in proportion over time. Mothers’ question types related to childrens narrative contributions concurrently and over time.

Taking Center Stage: Infants’ Active Role in Language Leaning

In this chapter, we highlight the ways that infants actively shape their social experiences around language—through their everyday behaviors and developmental advances. We review the perceptual, social, and cognitive capacities that infants bring to the task of learning language. We then show that infant real-time exploratory, play, communicative, and locomotor behaviors are impetuses for social interactions. As infants act on their worlds, they elicit temporally contingent, lexically rich, developmentally attuned, multimodal inputs from parents. Indeed, much of the speech that parents direct to infants is driven by what infants are doing in the moment. Finally, we examine how developmental changes in infants’ language, play, and motor skills expand infants’ opportunities for learning language. As infants progress in abilities such as talking and walking, they engage with the objects and people of their environments in new ways, thereby eliciting novel language inputs from parents and other caregivers.

On differences and deficits: A critique of the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of the word gap:

The word gap, or the language gap, can be traced back to Hart and Risley’s 1995 seminal work on language practices in high- and low-income families, and it is one of the most widely cited explanations for why children from low-income, minority contexts underperform academically in contrast to their white, middle-income counterparts. Despite its widespread influence on research, education and policy, the word gap has been at the centre of vociferous debates in academic circles over whether the word gap is a deficit in language input for infants that should be attended to or a difference in language practices that should be embraced. In this article, I draw on multiple disciplines to highlight the strengths and shortcomings of word gap findings, and I provide future directions for educators, policymakers and researchers seeking to better understand the language experiences of children growing up in low-income contexts from a cultural and contextual perspective.