Effects of feedback on parent-child language with infants and toddlers in Korea
Pae, Yoon, Seol, Gilkerson, Richards, Ma, Topping
The
objective of this study was to investigate changes in the natural language
environments of families with typically-developing infants receiving language
feedback in South Korea. Volunteer parents of 99 children aged 4–16 months
were randomly divided into experimental and control groups. During 6 months’
intervention, the experimental group recorded weekly day-long
automatically-analyzed LENA measures of language environment and viewed
feedback, while the control group recorded only baseline, mid-period and
post-test without feedback. LENA Adult Word Counts (AWC) and Conversational
Turn (CT) counts correlated reasonably well with human transcripts. At
baseline groups were not significantly different. At post-test there was no
significant overall difference between experimental and control groups, but
AWC and CT differences were significant for families below the 50th
percentile at baseline. Korean parents whose linguistic environment was below
average adapted their communicative interaction in response to linguistic
feedback. The intervention has promise for use with at-risk families in many
countries.