Telethon Kids Institute, University of Western Australian, Level 15, 31 Flinders St, Adelaide, South Australia, 5000, Australia.
School of Public Health, University of Adelaide, Level 9, Adelaide Health & Medical Science Building, 57 North Terrace, Adelaide, South Australia, 5005, Australia.
BMC Pediatr. 2020 Feb 3;20(1):52. doi: 10.1186/s12887-020-1946-0.
There is evidence that parents from more socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds engage in fewer verbal interactions with their child than more advantaged parents. This leads to the so-called, '30 million-word gap'. This study aims to investigate the number of words children hear and the number of vocalizations children produce in their first year of life and examines whether these aspects of the early language home environment differ by maternal education.
Mothers were recruited into a five-year prospective cohort study and categorized into either high or low maternal education groups. Data was derived from the first two waves of the study, when the children were six and twelve months old. At both waves, children were involved in day-long audio recordings using the Language Environment Analysis software that provided automatic counts of adult words spoken to the child, child vocalizations and conversational turns. Descriptive results are presented by maternal education groups.
There was large variation within each maternal education group, with the number of adult words spoken to the child ranging from 2958 to 39,583 at six months and 4389 to 45,849 at twelve months. There were no meaningful differences between adult words, child vocalizations or conversational turns across maternal education groups at either wave of data collection.
These results show that a word gap related to maternal education is not apparent up to twelve months of age. The large variability among both maternal education groups suggests that universal interventions that encourage all parents to talk more to their child may be more appropriate than interventions targeted towards disadvantaged families during the first year of life.
有证据表明，来自社会经济地位较低背景的父母与孩子进行的言语互动比社会经济地位较高的父母要少。这导致了所谓的“3000 万词汇差距”。本研究旨在调查儿童在生命的第一年听到的词汇量和发出的声音数量，并探讨早期语言家庭环境的这些方面是否因母亲的教育程度而异。
母亲被招募到一项为期五年的前瞻性队列研究中，并分为高或低母亲教育组。数据来自研究的前两个阶段，即儿童 6 个月和 12 个月大时。在这两个阶段，使用语言环境分析软件对儿童进行了为期一天的录音，该软件提供了自动计算的向儿童说话的成人词汇量、儿童发声和对话轮次。按母亲教育组呈现描述性结果。
每个母亲教育组内都有很大的差异，6 个月时向儿童说话的成人词汇量从 2958 到 39583 不等，12 个月时从 4389 到 45849 不等。在数据收集的两个阶段，母亲教育组之间的成人词汇量、儿童发声或对话轮次都没有明显差异。
这些结果表明，与母亲教育相关的词汇差距在 12 个月之前并不明显。两个母亲教育组之间的巨大差异表明，鼓励所有父母更多地与孩子交谈的普遍干预措施可能比在生命的第一年针对贫困家庭的干预措施更合适。
