Caregiver-child dynamics in early language development: The influence of children’s interests and parental input on children’s word learning

by Rajalakshmi Satarai Madhavan
Doctoral thesis
Date of Examination:2024-08-26
Date of issue:2024-10-30
Advisor:Prof. Dr. Nivedita Mani
Referee:Dr. Tanya Behne
Referee:Prof. Dr. Markus Steinbach
Persistent Address: http://dx.doi.org/10.53846/goediss-10749

 

 

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Abstract

English

Active child views of children’s development postulate that children are active participants in their own learning and development, choosing what information and from whom to learn. More recently, research has demonstrated that children’s individual interests in certain topics shape their learning of novel words from these topics. Pedagogical views of children’s learning postulate that parents carefully choose what information to provide to their child, and optimally provide this information to boost the child’s learning from a scenario. Parents also modify their verbal and non-verbal input to facilitate children’s language learning. This thesis integrates both the active child and pedagogical approaches to children’s learning, to examine how children’s selective interest and parental input shapes children’s word learning. Across four studies, we investigate whether, firstly (1) the measures used in current developmental research to index children’s individual interests have convergent validity and internal reliability, secondly (2) parental input is shaped by children’s selective interests, and finally (3) parental input and children’s interests shape early word learning. Study 1 investigated the convergent validity of several interest measures. The findings indicate that at this point, there is no convergent validity present, which may be due to the measures each measure a different construct of interest, or due to their (lack of) internal reliability. Study 2 investigated the internal reliability of some measures, and found that parent estimates of children’s interest was the most internally consistent among them. The study also investigated the relationship between children’s interests and interest-specific vocabulary size over development, and found that there indeed may be a longitudinal link present between them. Studies 3 and 4 investigated how parental input is shaped by children’s selective interests in two different naturalistic tasks, and how these factors shaped children’s immediate novel word learning. The findings indicate that parents modify their input according to children’s interests in the topic of the interaction. However, neither parent input nor children’s interests facilitated novel word learning, although learning was successful in Study 3. Overall, this thesis demonstrates the dynamics between parents’ pedagogical behaviour and children’s active participation, as well as the evolving complexities in children’s early word learning.
Keywords: parent-child interactions; word learning; language development; eye-tracking; pupillometry