How Parental Directives Elicit Child Conversational Turns in Dual-Language Play Contexts

Nicolas Zapparrata

Co-Presenters: Nicolas Zapparrata, Peri Yuksel

College: College of Liberal Arts

Department: Psychology

Abstract:

How parents communicate with their young children may influence early child attention, engagement, and responsiveness in becoming a communicative speaker. Previous research has demonstrated that child responsiveness during parent-child play has implications on overall child language development. Focusing on two bilingual language groups (i.e., enclaves), this study investigated if different parental input (e.g., commands, questions, comments) result in increased child responsiveness during parent-child play activities.A total of 12 Turkish-German parent-child pairs (N = 12, M child age = 29 months; SD = 9, range 16–46) living in an enclave (Kreuzberg) of Berlin, Germany and a total of 12 Lazuri-Turkish parent-child pairs living in Lazona, Türkiye participated in two semi-structured 10-minute floor play activities with toy sets (animal farm, tea party). Parental verbal input was labeled by communicative functions (i.e., command, comment, invitation, label, question, deictic) and analyzed for which was most likely to elicit an immediate child response.The results indicated that questions were the most common parental speech act across both the Berlin and Lazuri parents. Parental questions were the most effective in eliciting child responses across both of these bilingual language groups, and the use of commands was negatively associated with child responses in Lazona.These findings highlight that certain conversational strategies may be more likely to grab child attention and help them to engage in ongoing social activities crucial to become functioning members of society.Keywords: child responsiveness, child language, child engagement, bilingual development