親子遊戲中幼兒語言表現與其發展之關係：兩年縱貫研究

The Relationship between Children’s Early Language Skills in Parent-Child Play Interaction and Their Later Development: A Two-Year Longitudinal Study

本研究目的為探討親子遊戲中幼兒語言表現之發展變化，以及親子遊戲中幼兒語言表現與其未來認知、語言、社會情緒發展之關係。本研究對象為36名14個月大幼兒，在幼兒14、20、26個月大時收集幼兒與母親共玩玩具之語言樣本，並以兒童語料交換系統（CHILDES）進行分析。在幼兒36個月大時以嬰幼兒綜合發展測驗（CDIIT）評估幼兒認知、語言、社會情緒發展，藉此了解幼兒早期語言表現與認知、語言、社會情緒發展之關聯。本研究主要發現：（1）親子共玩玩具時，幼兒的總詞彙數、相異詞彙數、內在狀態詞彙總數、平均語句長度和平均輪替詞數皆隨年齡顯著增加，而非具體詞彙之發聲則顯著下降；（2）親子共玩玩具時，幼兒20、26個月大之表達性詞彙表現與36個月大的認知發展有顯著正相關，而幼兒20個月大的非具體詞彙之發聲和26個月大的表達性詞彙則與幼兒36個月大的語言、社會情緒發展有顯著相關；（3）幼兒20個月大的相異詞彙數為其36個月大認知發展之重要預測因子，而幼兒20個月大的非具體詞彙之發聲則為其36個月大語言與社會情緒發展之重要預測因子。幼兒26個月大的內在狀態詞彙總數則是幼兒36個月大認知、語言和社會情緒發展之重要預測因子。針對研究結果本文進行討論，並提出未來研究建議。

Play is central to children’s daily lives, providing opportunities to explore objects and their environment, engage in social interaction. Play also serves as an important window for understanding various aspects of child development. Previous studies on language development have used spontaneous language sample from play contexts to examine children’s communicative and language abilities. However, most studies using language sample analysis on Mandarin-speaking children have focused on preschool-aged populations, investigations of toddlers’language development through language sample analysis remain relatively limited. Toddlerhood is a period of rapid change in cognitive, linguistic, and social-emotional domains. However, how Mandarin-speaking toddlers’semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic abilities develop with age, and how their early language skills in play relate to later cognitive, linguistic, and social-emotional outcomes, remain insufficiently understood and warrant further examination. The present study aims to investigate the development of children’s language skills in parent-child interactions during play over time, and the relationship between children’s early language skills and their later development in the domains of cognition, language and social emotion. Three specific goals of this study are: (1) to examine the developmental changes in children’s semantic, grammatical, and pragmatic language performance at 1;2, 1;8, and 2;2; (2) to assess the association between children’s semantic, grammatical, and pragmatic language performance at 1;2, 1;8, and 2;2 and their cognitive, linguistic, and social-emotional development at 3;0; (3) to explore which children’s language performance at 1;2, 1;8, and 2;2 best predict children’s cognitive, linguistic, and social-emotional development at 3;0.
Thirty-six 14-month-old children (21 boys, 15 girls) and their parents living in northern Taiwan participated in this two-year longitudinal study. All participating children in this study spoke Mandarin Chinese as their first language, and were immersed in a Mandarin environment. All children and their parents were visited at home when the children were 1;2, 1;8, and 2;2. Parents were instructed to play with their children as they usually did at home during each visit, and a set of toys, including puppets, jigsaw puzzles, and Legos, was provided for children and parents to play. Parent-child interactions during play were videotaped, and approximately 15 minutes of videotaped sessions were included in the analyses. Language samples of parent-child interactions during play were transcribed and analyzed using the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES), and the utterances and words in the transcripts were segmented based on the Taiwan Corpus of Child Mandarin (TCCM) word segmentation rules. The measures of early language production, including frequency of vocalization, total number of words (TNW), total number of different words (NDW), total number of internal state terms (IST), mean length of utterance (MLU), and mean length of turn by words (MLT-w) were used to assess children’s semantic, grammatical, and pragmatic language performance. When the children were 3;0, their cognitive, linguistic and social-emotional abilities were evaluated using the Comprehensive Developmental Inventory for Infants and Toddlers (CDIIT). Statistical analyses were conducted using IBM SPSS 23.0 software. One-way ANOVA with repeated measures was used to analyze whether there were statistically significant differences in semantic, grammatical, and pragmatic language performance in children at 1;2, 1;8, and 2;2. Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient was used to analyze the correlation between semantic, grammatical, and pragmatic language performance at 1;2, 1;8, and 2;2 and the cognitive, linguistic, and social-emotional development of children at 3;0. Stepwise regression analysis was also used to identify important predictors of cognitive, linguistic, and social-emotional development in children at 3;0.
Three major findings were found in this study. First, we examined the developmental changes in children’s semantic, grammatical, and pragmatic language performance at 1;2, 1;8, and 2;2, and found that children’s language performance, i.e., total number of words, total number of different words, total number of internal state terms, mean length of utterance, and mean length of turn by words, improved significantly with age, but the frequency of vocalization decreased significantly over time. Second, we assess the association between children’s semantic, grammatical, and pragmatic language performance at 1;2, 1;8, and 2;2 and their cognitive, linguistic, and social-emotional development at 3;0, and found that children’s expressive vocabulary ability at 1;8 and 2;2 had significant positive correlations with their cognitive development at 3;0. The production of children’s vocalization at 1;8 and the children’s expressive vocabulary ability at 2;2 had significant correlations with their linguistic and social-emotional development at 3;0. Third, we explore which language performance of children at 1;2, 1;8, and 2;2 are important predictors of cognitive, linguistic, and social-emotional development at 3;0, and found that total number of different words at 1;8 was an important predictor of cognitive development at 3;0; the frequency of vocalization at 1;8 was an important predictor of linguistic and social-emotional development at 3;0; the total number of internal state terms at 2;2 was an important predictor of cognitive, linguistic and social-emotional development at 3;0.
This study demonstrated that children’s semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic language performance in parent-child play interactions improved significantly between 1;2 and 2;2. Moreover, the rate of semantic growth was faster between 1;8 and 2;2 than between 1;2 and 1;8. This pattern aligns with prior research on lexical development indicating that children often undergo a“vocabulary spurt”around one and a half years old, during which expressive vocabulary expands rapidly, consistent with our findings regarding trajectories of semantic development. The study further demonstrated that children’s total number of words, total number of different words, and mean length of turn by words at 1;8, as well as their total number of different words and total number of internal state terms at 2;2, were positively correlated with cognitive development at 3;0. In addition, the critical predictors of cognitive, linguistic, and social-emotional development at 3;0 varied by earlier developmental stage. Specifically, the total number of different words at 1;8 and total number of internal state terms at 2;6 predicted cognitive outcomes at 3;0, whereas frequency of vocalization at 1;8 and total number of internal state terms at 2;2 predicted linguistic and social-emotional development at 3;0. These shifts in predictive indicators likely reflect developmental changes in the salience of different aspects of early language. Consistent with Tamis-LeMonda and Bornstein (1994), who argued that not all aspects of early language development equally capture associations with other developmental domains and that age-appropriate linguistic indicators vary across developmental periods, our study also found that vocabulary diversity at 1;8, rather than vocabulary size, was the strongest predictor of later cognitive outcomes. Together, these findings underscore the developmental importance of vocabulary diversity during the toddler period.
This study provided valuable insights into the developmental trajectories of children’s language skills in parent-child play interactions over time, and the relationship between children’s early language skills and their later development in the domains of cognition, language and social emotion. Nonetheless, this study still had some limitations. First, the sample was followed only until 36 months of age and consisted primarily of families from middle to high socioeconomic backgrounds, which limits the generalizability of the findings to older children or to families from more diverse socioeconomic contexts. Second, the study examined only quantitative linguistic indicators of children’s semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic abilities and did not incorporate analyses of maternal linguistic input or parent-child interaction patterns. Therefore, we suggest that future studies could include children from a broader range of ages and socioeconomic backgrounds and investigate how parental communicative behaviors and interaction styles shape children’s developmental outcomes.