Financial concern reduces child directed speech in a socioeconomically diverse sample

Abstract

Socioeconomic status predicts the quantity and nature of child-directed speech that parents produce. However, the mechanisms underlying this relationship remain unclear. This study investigated whether the cognitive load imposed by resource scarcity suppresses parent talk by examining time-dependent variation in child-directed speech in a socioeconomically diverse sample. We predicted that child-directed speech would be lowest at the end of the month when Americans report the greatest financial strain. 166 parents and their 2.5 to 3-year-old children (80 female) participated in a picture-book activity; the number of utterances, word tokens, and word types used by parents were calculated. All three parent language measures were negatively correlated with the date of the month the activity took place, and this relationship did not vary with parental education. These findings suggest that above and beyond individual properties of parents, contextual factors such as financial concerns exert influence on how parents interact with their children.

Figure 1

Trend across the day of the month that the visit took place for the number of parent utterances (A), word tokens (B) and word types (C). Dots represent individual participants. The shaded area is the 95% confidence interval around the trend line.

Figure 2

Number of parent utterances (A) word tokens (B) and word types (C), separately by visit week. Dots represent individual participants, diamonds indicate the mean, boxes represent the interquartile range, and the horizontal line in each box indicates the median.