Study: Talking Families

What is this study about?

  • We want to know how parent-child conversation relates to children's school readiness in the preschool years.

Who was in this study?

  • Children who were 4 and 5 years of age and one parent.

What did we learn?

  • So far we have results for one study, and have begun a second study. Watch for more results from this project.

Study 1: Milburn, T. F., Auch, L., Henderson, A., Chan, A., & Cummine, J.(in preparation). Coding Parent Scaffolding with Transcription versus Direct Video Coding.

What is this study about? We want to know parent strategies for guiding, or scaffolding, their child's language and whether language samples from a parent-child conversation can be coded directly from a video.

What did you learn? We found that analyzing language directly from a video is fast and accurate, and may work best for book-related conversations where the attention is focused on the storybook. Parent strategies change depending on the context of the conversation. Stay tuned for more details!

Study 2: Role of Posturing, Gesture, Gaze, and Touch During Conversation.

What is this study about? We want to know how the aspects of interactions between parents and children which go beyond the things they say, and how this is related to child language.

What did you learn? The results of this study are pending and will be posted here after the study is complete!