A longitudinal investigation of factors related to maternal communicative input and child vocabulary growth in low-income American families

This thesis presents two studies of communication during mother-child interaction in low-income families. The first examines predictors of young children's growth in vocabulary production between the ages of one and three years, while the second looks at change over time in maternal communicative input to children and what factors account for variation in this input.; The specific research questions addressed in this thesis include: (1) What are the patterns of growth in vocabulary production among children from low-income families between one and three years of age? (2) Are the rates of change in children's vocabulary production related to maternal communicative input (verbal and nonverbal), maternal education, maternal language and literacy skills or maternal stress and depression, controlling for gender, maternal age, family income, child birth order, and participation in an intervention program? (3) What are the patterns of change over time in maternal communicative input directed to children over the early childhood years? And, (4) Do maternal characteristics such as education, language and literacy skills and depression account for variation in maternal communicative input controlling for maternal age, family income, child gender, child birth order, and participation in an intervention program?; Results indicate large variation among these low-income mothers and children in the amount of communication used during interaction. Specific findings show that diversity of vocabulary in maternal input as well as maternal language and literacy skills are positively related to the rate at which children increase in vocabulary production, whereas maternal depression shows a negative relationship with change over time in child vocabulary growth. In addition, several factors such as maternal age, maternal education and language and literacy skills, and family income were positively related to the amount of verbal and nonverbal communication mothers direct to their young language-learning children.; The findings from this thesis highlight the importance of examining nonverbal as well as verbal communication during mother-child interaction. Furthermore, the results presented here emphasize that multiple factors are related to communication during mother-child interaction and that it is important to investigate diverse aspects of children's early environments to understand their specific influences on language development.