Department of Education, University of York, York, UK.
Bristol Medical School, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK.
Br J Dev Psychol. 2022 Nov;40(4):487-503. doi: 10.1111/bjdp.12427. Epub 2022 Jul 26.
Children's early life experiences of language and parenting are thought to have pervasive, long-term influence on their cognitive and behavioural development. However, studies are scarce that collected naturalistic observations to broadly assess children's early life experiences and test their associations with developmental outcomes in middle childhood. Here, we used digital audio-recorders to collect three full days of naturalistic observations from 107 British families with children (46 boys) aged 2-4 years, of whom 89 participated in a follow-up assessment four years later when the children were 5-8 years old. We found that children's early life experiences of language and parenting were not significantly associated with their later language ability, academic performance and behavioural outcomes. We explore differences in methodology, sample characteristics and the role of developmental periods as possible explanations for the discrepancy in findings between the current and previous studies.
儿童早期的语言和养育经历被认为对他们的认知和行为发展有普遍的、长期的影响。然而，很少有研究收集自然观察数据来广泛评估儿童的早期生活经历，并测试它们与儿童中期发展结果之间的关联。在这里，我们使用数字音频记录器从 107 个有 2-4 岁儿童（46 名男孩）的英国家庭中收集了三天的自然观察数据，其中 89 名儿童在四年后参加了后续评估，当时他们 5-8 岁。我们发现，儿童早期的语言和养育经历与他们以后的语言能力、学业成绩和行为结果没有显著关联。我们探讨了方法学、样本特征以及发展阶段的作用，这些可能是当前研究与以往研究结果差异的解释。
