Graduate School of Education, Harvard University.
Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology, University of Maryland, College Park.
Dev Psychol. 2018 Jan;54(1):15-28. doi: 10.1037/dev0000411. Epub 2017 Oct 23.
Preschool children's use of decontextualized language, or talk about abstract topics beyond the here-and-now, is predictive of their kindergarten readiness and is associated with the frequency of parents' own use of decontextualized language. Does a brief, parent-focused intervention conveying the importance of decontextualized language cause parents to increase their use of these conversations, and as a result, their children's? We examined this question by randomly assigning 36 parents of 4-year-old children into a decontextualized language training condition or a no-treatment control condition and used mixed effects modeling to measure change (from baseline) in parent and child decontextualized language at 4 subsequent home mealtimes during the following month (N = 174 interactions including the baseline). Compared with the control condition, training condition dyads significantly increased their decontextualized talk and maintained these gains for the month following implementation. Furthermore, trained dyads generalized the program content to increase their use of similarly decontextualized, yet untrained conversations. These results demonstrate that an abstract feature of the input is malleable, and introduces a simple, scalable, and replicable approach to increase a feature of child language known to be foundational for children's school readiness. (PsycINFO Database Record
学龄前儿童使用非语境化语言，即谈论超越此时此地的抽象话题，这可以预测他们的幼儿园准备情况，并与父母自身使用非语境化语言的频率有关。一个简短的、以父母为重点的干预措施，传达非语境化语言的重要性，是否会促使父母增加使用这种对话，从而提高孩子的非语境化语言能力？我们通过随机将 36 名 4 岁儿童的父母分配到非语境化语言培训组或无治疗对照组，并使用混合效应模型来衡量（从基线开始）在接下来的一个月中的 4 次家庭用餐时间里，父母和孩子的非语境化语言的变化（包括基线的 174 次互动）。与对照组相比，培训组的亲子关系显著增加了他们的非语境化对话，并在实施后的一个月内保持了这些收益。此外，经过培训的亲子关系将课程内容推广开来，增加了类似的非语境化但未经训练的对话的使用。这些结果表明，输入的一个抽象特征是可塑的，并引入了一种简单、可扩展且可复制的方法来增加儿童语言的一个特征，而这个特征是儿童入学准备的基础。
