Child Language Development

The material utilized by Marklund et al. consists of audio recordings of spontaneous parent-child interactions collected through the SPRINT project . There were sixty baseline recordings included, featuring a total of 15 children: seven boys and eight girls. When these recordings occurred, the children involved were aged between 5.8 and 6.2 years old. The parents/guardians involved in SPRINT recorded spontaneous interaction between themselves and their child in four different types of typical situations in their home: mealtime, playtime, reading time, and while getting dressed. These recording sessions were typically twenty to thirty minutes in duration and the parents uploaded the recordings to SPRINT's database. The sixty recordings were
The researchers decided that the communicative adjustments that are made by parents are similar across the three vocabulary groups mentioned earlier; however, the general speaking style differed between groups in terms of pause duration following a child's utterance (Marklund et al.). Parents of the children with smaller vocabularies are not as rapid in responding to their child as the parents of children with larger ones are. Marklund et al. concluded that responding rapidly to child vocalizations may be beneficial to their language development. After studying this article, the hypothesis of whether or not the parental second utterance duration and pause in child-parent turn-taking events differ according to the child's vocabulary size appears to be supported by the findings of Marklund et al.
This article focused on how the amount of child directed speech in low-income Spanish-speaking families related to the development of a child's proficiency in real-time language processing and vocabulary learning. The hypothesis developed and tested by these researchers was to see if a richer language experience (in the form of directed speech) for children strengthened the processing skills which facilitate language growth (Weisleder & Fernald,