Low-income fathers' linguistic influence on their children's language development

描述（由申请人提供）：低收入家庭的孩子通常有较高的读写能力问题和学业失败的风险（Fiorentino & Howe, 2004）。这在一定程度上是因为他们比高收入的同龄人更有可能以更小的词汇量进入学校（Duncan et al., 2007; Snow, Burns & Griffin, 1998）。幼儿园语言技能的社会经济差距部分归因于父母对孩子谈话的差异（Hart & Risley, 1995）。特别是，重点主要放在母子互动上，而较少关注父子互动如何影响儿童的语言发展。对父亲的语言贡献缺乏重视的部分原因是，低收入的父亲不参与孩子的生活，或者他们的角色仅限于“打打斗斗”（Shannon, Tamis-LeMonda, London, & Cabrera, 2002）。然而，最近的研究结果表明，父亲花时间与年幼的孩子在一起，并参与照顾活动，这与儿童早期的认知发展有关（Cabrera, Shannon, & Tamis-LeMonda, 2007）。然而，除了少数值得注意的例外，父亲对孩子语言的贡献超过了母亲的贡献（Panscofar & Vernon-Feagans, 2006），关于低收入、少数民族父亲在孩子语言发展中所起作用的研究是有限的。本研究以低收入父亲与子女的沟通为研究对象，了解其频率和功能，与背景因素的关系，以及与儿童语言发展的关系。本研究采用横向和纵向设计，并使用了国家早期开端评估研究（EHS）收集的父子互动观察数据。本提案的目的是转录并应用编码方案来评估50名拉丁裔和50名非洲裔美国父亲及其子女的亲子语言互动，以更好地了解父亲沟通在儿童语言发展中的作用。数据来自国家EHS评价研究。在孩子24个月大的时候，父子二人在家里互动的录像。对学前班的儿童进行了后续评估。我们会将现有的语言编码方案转录并应用于建议的父亲录影带。更具体地说，这项试点研究将让我们了解我们使用的编码方案（主要来自白人中产阶级家庭的研究）是否适用于少数民族、单语和双语、低收入人群。此外，通过将这些记录中的语言数据与国家研究的公开数据相结合，我们将检查父亲语言的预测因素以及父亲语言在儿童语言和认知发展中的作用。接受这一挑战并关注少数族裔儿童，特别是拉丁裔儿童，是及时的，因为在未来十年左右，拉丁裔儿童预计将占美国学校儿童的最大比例。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Children from low-income families are generally at a high risk for literacy problems and school failure (Fiorentino & Howe, 2004). This is partly because they are more likely to enter school with smaller vocabularies than their higher-income peers (Duncan et al., 2007; Snow, Burns & Griffin, 1998). The socioeconomic gap in Kindergarten language skills has been partly attributed to differences in the talk parents address to their children (Hart & Risley, 1995). In particular, the focus has been primarily on mother-child interactions and less so on how father-child interactions can influence children's language development. The lack of emphasis on father's linguistic contributions has been partially attributed to the view that low-income fathers are uninvolved with their children or that their roles are limited to "rough-and-tumble play" (Shannon, Tamis-LeMonda, London, & Cabrera, 2002). Yet recent findings indicate that fathers spend time with their young children and are involved in caregiving activities, which have been linked to children's cognitive development in the early years (Cabrera, Shannon, & Tamis-LeMonda, 2007). However, with few notable exceptions showing that fathers contribute to children's language over and above mothers' contribution (Panscofar & Vernon-Feagans, 2006), research on the role that low-income, minority fathers play in their children's language development is limited. This proposed research addresses this gap by focusing on low- income fathers' communication with children to understand: 1) its frequency and function, 2) its association with background factors, and 3) its relation to child language development, controlling for maternal language measures. The proposed research is both cross-sectional and longitudinal in design and uses observational data of father-child interactions collected by the National Early Head Start Evaluation study (EHS). The purpose of this proposal is to transcribe and apply a coding scheme to assess father-child language interactions in a sample of 50 Latino and 50 African American fathers and their children to better understand the role of paternal communication in child language development. The data are drawn from the National EHS Evaluation study. Father-child dyads were videotaped interacting in the home at child age 24 months. Follow-up assessments were conducted with the children in Pre-K. We will transcribe and apply existing language coding schemes to the proposed videotapes of fathers. More specifically, this pilot study will give us a sense of whether the coding schemes we use (drawn from studies with mostly White, middle-class families) can be applied to minority, monolingual and bilingual, low-income populations. Further, by combining language data from these transcripts with the publicly available data from the national study we will examine predictors of father language and the role of father language in children's language and cognitive development. Taking on this challenge and focusing on minority children, especially Latino children, is timely given that in the next decade or so Latino children are predicted to make up the largest proportion of children in U.S. schools. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: Examining the linguistic influence that fathers have on their children's language development is relevant to public health because the findings can be used to promote children's wellbeing and success in school, especially among low-income minority children who are at risk for school failure.