Effects of Maternal and Paternal Responsiveness on Infant Attention and Language Development

在生命的最初几年里，婴儿的语言习得率差异很大。语言发展和词汇增长方面的差异尤其会对儿童日后的学业成功产生长期影响。父母如何与婴儿互动和回应是影响婴儿语言发展的一个重要因素。然而，目前尚不清楚社会互动和父母反应如何影响婴儿的发育变化。目前的研究将探索父母对婴儿发声的反应如何影响婴儿的视觉注意力，作为长期语言发展的潜在途径。理解反应性、视觉注意和随后的语言发展之间的关系可以揭示日常社会互动如何支持语言学习。母亲和父亲与他们6到12个月大的婴儿的社会互动将被观察。观察期将对婴儿发声、父母反应和婴儿在父母反应后的视觉注意进行编码。这些数据将被分析婴儿发声和父母反应之间的关系，父母反应和婴儿注意力之间的关系，以及观察和随后的语言发展之间的关系，这些关系由父母在婴儿15个月和24个月时进行的语言问卷调查索引。广泛的假设包括：父母的反应会影响婴儿的注意力，从而影响语言学习；父母会对更喜欢说话和交流的行为更有反应；不同类型的父母反应会对婴儿的行为产生不同的影响——有些反应会对语言发展产生更积极的影响。该研究项目的一个重要成果将是将父母的反应能力与婴儿的视觉注意力和词汇增长的变化联系起来，以帮助理解语言发展的个体差异。这些发现将通过将即时行为的动态与学习和发展联系起来，为发展理论提供信息。此外，研究结果有可能为干预措施或育儿建议提供信息，以促进所有儿童的语言发展，特别是那些有语言发育迟缓风险的儿童。

Babies vary significantly in their rate of language acquisition during the first few years of life. Disparities in language development and vocabulary growth in particular can have long term impacts for children's later academic success. How parents interact with and respond to their babies is one factor that has an important impact on babies' language development. However, it is unclear how social interactions and parent responses influence developmental change in infants. The current research will explore how parent responses to babies' vocalizations affect the babies' visual attention in the moment as a potential pathway to longer-term language development. Understanding the relations among responsiveness, visual attention, and subsequent language development can reveal how everyday social interactions support language learning. Mothers' and fathers' social interactions with their 6- to 12-month-old infants will be observed. Observation periods will be coded for infant vocalization, parental responsiveness, and infant visual attention following parental responses. The data will be analyzed for relations between infant vocalizations and parent responses, between parent responses and infant attention, and between observations and subsequent language development as indexed by parental report language questionnaires administered when infants are 15 and 24 months of age. Broad hypotheses include: parent responses will affect infant attention and this will influence language learning; parents will be more responsive to behaviors that are more speech-like and communicative; different types of parent responses will affect infant behavior differently --some responses will more positively impact language development. An important outcome of the research project will be linking parents' responsiveness and infants' visual attention and variation in vocabulary growth to help understand individual differences in language development. The findings will inform theories of development by relating the dynamics of moment-to-moment behaviors to learning and development. Furthermore, the research findings have the potential to inform interventions or parenting advice to promote language development in all children, particularly those who are at risk for delays.