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

描述（由申请人提供）：来自低收入家庭的儿童通常面临识字问题和学业失败的高风险（Fiorentino & Howe，2004）。这部分是因为他们比收入较高的同龄人更有可能以较少的词汇量进入学校（邓肯等人，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说话的差异（哈特和里斯利，1995年）。特别是，重点主要放在母亲与子女的互动上，而较少关注父亲与子女的互动如何影响儿童的语言发展。缺乏对父亲语言贡献的重视，部分原因是认为低收入父亲与孩子无关，或者他们的角色仅限于“打闹游戏”（Shannon，Tamis-LeMonda，伦敦，& 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，并参与了与儿童早期认知发展有关的活动（Cabrera，Shannon和Tamis-LeMonda，2007）。然而，除了少数显著的例外情况表明，父亲对儿童语言的贡献超过母亲的贡献（Panscofar和Vernon-Feagans，2006年），关于低收入、少数民族父亲在儿童语言发展中所起作用的研究有限。这项拟议的研究通过关注低收入父亲与子女的沟通来解决这一差距，以了解：1）其频率和功能，2）其与背景因素的关联，以及3）其与儿童语言发展的关系，控制母亲的语言措施。拟议的研究是横向和纵向的设计，并使用由国家早期开端评估研究（EHS）收集的父-子互动的观察数据。 这项建议的目的是转录和应用编码方案，以评估父亲与孩子的语言互动的样本50拉丁美洲和50非洲裔美国人的父亲和他们的孩子，以更好地了解父亲的沟通在儿童语言发展的作用。这些数据来自国家EHS评估研究。在孩子24个月大的时候，父亲和孩子在家里的互动被录像下来。对学前班的儿童进行了后续评估。我们将转录和应用现有的语言编码方案，以拟议的父亲录像带。更具体地说，这项试点研究将使我们了解我们使用的编码方案（来自主要是白色中产阶级家庭的研究）是否可以适用于少数民族，单语和双语，低收入人群。此外，通过将这些成绩单中的语言数据与国家研究中公开的数据相结合，我们将研究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民族儿童，特别是拉丁裔儿童，是及时的，因为预计在未来十年左右，拉丁裔儿童将占美国学校儿童的最大比例。 公共卫生相关性：研究父亲对其子女语言发展的语言影响与公共卫生有关，因为研究结果可用于促进儿童的福祉和学业成功，特别是在面临学业失败风险的低收入少数民族儿童中。

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.