Simple strategies to accelerate children's early grammatical growth

加速儿童早期语法发展的简单策略

• 批准号: 8227903
• 负责人: Pamela A Hadley
• 金额: $ 22.58万
• 依托单位: UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 2012
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2012-03-01 至 2014-02-28
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/8227903
• 关键词: Address; Adult; Age; Age-Months; Agreement; Area; Bathing; Biological; Child; Child Development; Childhood; Clinical; Control Groups; Development; Education; Educational Intervention; Effectiveness; Event; Family; Foundations; Growth; Healthy People 2020; Individual Differences; Intervention; Label; Language; Language Development; Learning; Measures; Modeling; Modification; Names; Nose; Oral; Parenting Education; Parents; Persons; Play; Positioning Attribute; Probability; Productivity; Property; Readiness; Reading; Recruitment Activity; Relative (related person); Research; Schools; Structure; Toddler; Toy; Typology; Vocabulary; Work; abstracting; cost effective; design; early childhood; group intervention; improved; innovation; kindergarten; lexical; literate; novel; parent-child communication; phrases; rapid growth; success

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Children's ability to use a literate oral language style, consisting of precise vocabulary and elaborated grammatical structures, is an important foundation for reading readiness and school success. Previous research has focused on the contribution of parent language input to individual differences in children's vocabulary growth. However, much less is known about the contribution of parent language input to individual differences in young children's grammatical development, creating an empirical barrier to the further development of cost-effective early grammatical interventions. In previous research, we have demonstrated that significant individual differences in children's productive use of tense and agreement appear between 21 and 30 months of age (Hadley & Holt, 2006; Rispoli, Hadley, & Holt, 2009), and we have also identified abstract grammatical properties of parents' language input to their 21-month-old toddlers that contribute to the observed between-child differences (Hadley, Rispoli, Fitzgerald, & Bahnsen, in press). The proposed project builds upon our prior success modeling grammatical growth in children under age 3, investigating biological, developmental, and input predictors of grammatical growth, and understanding the way in which sentence diversity, language typology, and parent interaction style influence the grammatical richness of adult input. This project will develop and evaluate the effectiveness of new psycholinguistically-motivated language modeling strategies through a parent education intervention. Twenty-four toddler-parent dyads will be recruited. Parents will learn to talk about the actions, states, and properties of the toys their children are playing with and to use specific noun labels rather than pronouns (e.g., The nose fits, NOT It fits). This new strategy is referred to as "toy talk." Parent input and children's grammatical growth will be compared to an existing no-treatment control group. The specific aims address: (a) whether parents in the toy talk intervention provide richer grammatical input in comparison to parents in the control group, and (b) whether such input modifications accelerate the grammatical development of children in the intervention group between 21 and 30 months of age. Because toy talk strategies are expected to increase the use of 3rd person lexical noun phrases (NP) in subject position, parents' overall input sentence diversity (i.e., unique subject-lexical verb combinations) and input informativeness for tense/agreement marking should also increase. We also hypothesize that the presence of lexical NP subjects in the adult input will strengthen children's abstract grammatical representation of the subject / predicate relation. This, in turn, is expected to support the integration of the clause level grammatical features of tense and subject-verb agreement into the representation, resulting in more rapid grammatical growth for children in the intervention group relative to the control group. If successful, this project will establish the centrality of sentence diversity to the development of tense and agreement and provide crucial theoretical information about how children make use of input in the acquisition of grammar. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: This innovative parent-implemented intervention is relevant to two objectives of Healthy People 2020 in the topic area of Early and Middle Childhood. Specifically, the intervention is designed (a) to evaluate new conversational interaction strategies that can be incorporated into positive parent-child communication practices in the early childhood years (EMC-2) and (b) to improve grammatical precursors to the more literate style of language use children will need to succeed in school (EMC-1).

描述(由申请者提供)：儿童使用识字口语的能力，包括精确的词汇和详细的语法结构，是阅读准备和学校成功的重要基础。以往的研究主要集中在父母语言输入对儿童词汇发展的个体差异的贡献。然而，关于父母语言输入在幼儿语法发展中对个体差异的贡献的了解要少得多，这为进一步发展具有成本效益的早期语法干预创造了经验障碍。在先前的研究中，我们已经证明儿童在时态和协议的有效使用上存在显著的个体差异(Hadley&Holt，2006；Rispoli，Hadley，&Holt，2009)，我们还发现了父母对21个月大的幼儿的语言输入的抽象语法特征，这是导致观察到的儿童之间差异的原因(Hadley，Rispoli，Fitzgerald，&Bahnsen，出版社)。该项目建立在我们之前成功模拟3岁以下儿童语法成长的基础上，调查了语法成长的生物、发展和输入预测因素，并了解了句子多样性、语言类型和父母互动风格如何影响成人输入的语法丰富性。这个项目将通过家长教育干预来开发和评估新的心理语言学动机的语言建模策略的有效性。将招募24名幼儿父母二人组。父母将学会谈论他们孩子玩的玩具的动作、状态和属性，并使用特定的名词标签，而不是代词(例如，鼻子适合，而不是它适合)。这一新策略被称为“玩具式谈话”。父母的输入和孩子的语法发展将与现有的不治疗对照组进行比较。具体目标是：(A)与对照组相比，玩具谈话干预组的父母是否提供了更丰富的语法输入，以及(B)这种输入修改是否加速了干预组21至30个月大儿童的语法发展。由于玩具谈话策略预计会增加第三人称词汇名词短语(NP)在主语位置的使用，父母的整体输入句子多样性(即独特的主语-词汇动词组合)和对时态/协议标记的输入信息量也应该增加。我们还假设，词汇NP主语在成人输入中的存在将加强儿童对主谓关系的抽象语法表征。这反过来将支持将时态和主谓一致的小句层面的语法特征整合到表征中，从而导致干预组儿童的语法发展比控制组更快。如果成功，这个项目将确立句子多样性对时态和协议发展的中心地位，并为儿童如何利用输入获得语法提供重要的理论信息。 公共卫生相关性：这一创新的家长实施的干预措施与2020年儿童早期和中期主题领域的两个健康人目标相关。具体而言，这项干预措施的目的是：(A)评估可纳入幼儿早期积极亲子沟通实践的新对话互动策略(EMC-2)；(B)改善儿童在学校取得成功所需的更识字的语言使用方式的语法先导(EMC-1)。