Attig Manja, Weinert Sabine
Competencies, Personality, Learning Environments, Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories, Bamberg, Germany.
Department Psychology I - Developmental Psychology, University of Bamberg, Bamberg, Germany.
Front Psychol. 2020 Dec 8;11:557751. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.557751. eCollection 2020.
It is well documented that the language skills of preschool children differ substantially and that these differences are highly predictive of their later academic success and achievements. Especially in the early phases of children's lives, the importance of different structural and process characteristics of the home learning environment (HLE) has been emphasized and research results have documented that process characteristics such as the quality of parental interaction behavior and the frequency of joint activities vary according to the socio-economic status (SES) of the family. Further, both structural and process characteristics are associated with children's language development. As most of the studies focus on single indicators or didn't take the dynamics of parenting behavior across age into account, the present paper aims to investigate the associations of different characteristics of the home learning environment as well as their potentially changing impact on the language skills of 2-year-old children. Using data of 2.272 families of the infant cohort study of the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS), longitudinally assessed process characteristics (sensitivity in the sense of maternal responsivity to the child's behavior and signals in mother-child interaction; maternal stimulation behavior which goes beyond the child's actual level of action and development; frequency of joint picture book reading) and structural characteristics (mother's education, equivalised household income, parental occupational status) were considered. Language skills (vocabulary and grammar) of the children at the age of two were measured by a standardized and validated parent report instrument (child language checklist). Results showed that (1) all three process characteristics of the home learning environment (HLE) are associated with the family's SES; (2) across three assessment waves nearly all process characteristics predicted children's vocabulary and grammar skills with some process-specific changes across waves; (3) despite separate direct effects of nearly all HLE-process characteristics in each wave, the amount of explained variance in a joint model including the HLE facets from each wave is hardly higher than in the separate models; and (4) socioeconomic background predicted both language facets of the children in each model even when controlling for the assessed process characteristics of the home learning environment.
有充分的文献记载表明，学龄前儿童的语言技能存在显著差异，而且这些差异对他们日后的学业成功和成就具有高度预测性。特别是在儿童生命的早期阶段，家庭学习环境（HLE）不同的结构和过程特征的重要性得到了强调，研究结果表明，诸如父母互动行为质量和共同活动频率等过程特征会因家庭的社会经济地位（SES）而有所不同。此外，结构和过程特征都与儿童的语言发展相关。由于大多数研究关注单一指标或未考虑不同年龄段养育行为的动态变化，因此本文旨在研究家庭学习环境的不同特征之间的关联，以及它们对2岁儿童语言技能可能产生的变化影响。利用德国国家教育面板研究（NEPS）婴儿队列研究中2272个家庭的数据，纵向评估了过程特征（母亲对孩子行为和信号的反应敏感性；超出孩子实际行动和发展水平的母亲刺激行为；共同绘本阅读的频率）和结构特征（母亲的教育程度、等效家庭收入、父母职业地位）。通过标准化且经过验证的家长报告工具（儿童语言检查表）测量了儿童两岁时的语言技能（词汇和语法）。结果显示：（1）家庭学习环境的所有三个过程特征都与家庭的社会经济地位相关；（2）在三次评估中，几乎所有过程特征都预测了儿童的词汇和语法技能，且各次评估中有一些特定于过程的变化；（3）尽管几乎所有家庭学习环境过程特征在每次评估中都有单独的直接影响，但在包含每次评估中家庭学习环境各方面的联合模型中，解释方差量几乎并不比单独模型中的更高；（4）即使在控制了家庭学习环境的评估过程特征后，社会经济背景在每个模型中都预测了儿童的两个语言方面。
