Perry, Prince, Valtierra, Rivero-Fernandez, Ullery, Katz, Laursen, Messinger
Children
from low SES backgrounds hear, on average, fewer words at home than those
from high SES backgrounds. This word gap is associated with widening
achievement differences in children’s language abilities and school
readiness. However relatively little is known about adult and child speech in
childcare settings, in which approximately 30% of American children are
enrolled. We examined the influence of teacher and peer language input on
children’s in-class language use and language development in an intervention
classroom for low-SES, high-risk 2- to 3-year-olds. Over the course of a
year, day-long recordings of the classroom were collected weekly with LENA
recorders. Using LENA software algorithms, we found that language input from
peers was positively related to children’s in-class language use, both
in-the-moment and over the course of each day, as were the number of
conversational turns in which children and teachers engaged Both peer input
and conversational turns with teachers were also positively related to
children’s language development rates, as indexed by increases in vocabulary
size. Together these results indicate the importance of child-specific rates
of classroom language input in the language development of high-risk,
preschoolers.