Department of Pediatrics, NYU Grossman School of Medicine, 550 First Ave., New York, NY, 10016, USA.
Psychological Sciences, University of California Merced, 5200 North Lake Road, Merced, CA, 95343, USA.
Sci Rep. 2022 Jun 2;12(1):9173. doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-13177-2.
Socioeconomic status predicts the quantity and nature of child-directed speech that parents produce. However, the mechanisms underlying this relationship remain unclear. This study investigated whether the cognitive load imposed by resource scarcity suppresses parent talk by examining time-dependent variation in child-directed speech in a socioeconomically diverse sample. We predicted that child-directed speech would be lowest at the end of the month when Americans report the greatest financial strain. 166 parents and their 2.5 to 3-year-old children (80 female) participated in a picture-book activity; the number of utterances, word tokens, and word types used by parents were calculated. All three parent language measures were negatively correlated with the date of the month the activity took place, and this relationship did not vary with parental education. These findings suggest that above and beyond individual properties of parents, contextual factors such as financial concerns exert influence on how parents interact with their children.
社会经济地位预测了父母对子女说话的数量和性质。然而，这种关系背后的机制尚不清楚。本研究通过考察资源匮乏对认知负荷的影响，在一个社会经济多样化的样本中检验了儿童导向言语的时变变化，从而探究了这一关系。我们预测，当美国人报告最大的经济压力时，在月底，父母的谈话量会最低。166 名父母及其 2.5 至 3 岁的孩子（80 名女性）参与了绘本活动；计算了父母使用的话语数量、单词标记和单词类型。父母的这三种语言指标均与活动发生的日期呈负相关，且这种关系不受父母教育程度的影响。这些发现表明，除了父母的个体特征外，财务问题等背景因素也会对父母与孩子的互动方式产生影响。
