The Complexity of Language Used by Parents of Children with Down Syndrome in Shared Reading Tasks

The Complexity of Language Used by Parents of Children with Down Syndrome in Shared Reading Tasks

Natalie Bosworth

2017

Shared reading is a vital part of language development for children, and this is no less true for the development of language in children with Down Syndrome. Previous research has been concerned that parents use less complicated language when a child has Down Syndrome, and that parents should encourage their child to contribute more to the reading experience. This experiment attempted to evaluate the cognitive complexity of the language used by parents of children with Down Syndrome compared to the parents with typically developing children when reading aloud with their child, and whether including prompts inside a book could alter the complexity of the language used by parents. It was found that including prompts in a book appeared to make the experience more of a shared reading experience with turn-taking between parents and children increasing in the prompted condition. This means that prompted books should be considered as a tool to train parents to use dialogic reading techniques.

Down Syndrome
shared reading
cognitive complexity
prompts

Mothers of typically developing children and mothers of children with Down Syndrome were recorded whilst reading aloud with their child in both a business as usual condition where they would read together as they usually would at home, and a prompted condition where pre-determined questions were inserted into the book which the mothers were required to ask their child when the book indicated that they should. The recordings were then written into transcripts of speech and behaviour during the task.
Two books were used in this experiment ‘Mooncake’ and ‘Skyfire’. The prompted condition and the business as usual condition were counterbalanced so that half of the participants read the unprompted book first, and half read the prompted book first, and half of the participants received ‘Mooncake’ as the prompted book, and the other half received ‘Skyfire’ as the prompted book. This was done to eliminate the chance that more was said during read due to a preference for one book over the other. However, both of the books were written by the same author, so the chance of a participant having a preference should have been minimal, and the books were similarly matched on difficulty and length to ensure that language would not be affected due to any differences in these criteria.
The prompted book included 12 questions to scaffold the mothers into asking questions related to the book. The parent would read the text in black ink, which was the actual story, and then ask the question in blue ink inserted into the bottom of the page. These questions related to picture labelling (e.g. ‘What is that object’), vocabulary questions (e.g. ‘What does terrible mean?’), making inferences about the text (e.g. ‘Why did that character fall asleep?’), and questions which required general knowledge (e.g. ‘What else could be used in this situation?’). The language skills required to answer these questions ranged from a simpler understanding which asked a child to label objects and about simple vocabulary, both of which require a concrete, definite answer, as well as requiring a more in depth understanding of the story and a higher level of general knowledge and language skills to answer questions which require inference.
Measures
To compare the level of complexity between the prompted condition and the business as usual condition, certain aspects of a reading session were measured. These measures included the total word count of the session, the total amount of words spoken by the parent during the session, the total amount of words spoken by the child, the length of the session in seconds, the number of questions asked by the parent, the mean amount of turn-taking in each session, and the totalled score based on a coding system by Tompkins et al. (2013) which measures the syntactic complexity of the parent’s language throughout the session. A breakdown of the word count of the session, and the length of the reading session are able to demonstrate how prompting a parent with pre-determined questions influences the language of a parent compared to when the parent is reading as they usually would because using more words, and reading the book over a longer period of time is exposing a child to more language, and therefore may be an important factor to consider during shared reading. Furthermore, the number of questions asked by a parent is an important consideration because of previous research highlighting the need for children to be able to answer literal and inferential questions (van Kleeck, Vander Woude & Baue 2003). Turn-taking was measured by adding up the amount of utterances that included a back and forth conversation between a parent and their child and taking the mean of this amount.
The word counts, the questions asked, the turn-taking episodes, and the score provided by the coding system did not include when the parent spoke the prompt aloud, any non-words such as ‘ummm’ or ‘ermmm’, or when the parent read aloud from the book itself. This ensured that language during shared reading was what was being measured or coded, and not irrelevant discussions such as the language used by a parent when managing the behaviour of their child during the task. However, sign language used by parents and children in the Down Syndrome group was included as a word or a question due to the fact that sign language is a vital method of language production for those with a language impairment.
Coding System
The coding system adapted from Tompkins et al. (2013) examines the clausal structure of a sentence to highlight the syntactic complexity used by the speaker. Originally this coding system was used as a measure of children’s language when they are reading aloud with a teacher, but it has been adapted for the use of parent’s language for this experiment. Syntactic complexity of the language was measured by having each utterance spoken by a parent examined and coded as either having no verb code with no clauses or sentence structure (e.g. bear there), a simple code with one clause and verb in the utterance (e.g. the bear walked quickly), or as having a complex code with two or more verb structures in the utterance (e.g. he ate the cake and fired the rocket). An utterance with no verb code was given 0 points, a sentence with simple code was given one point, and an utterance labelled as complex code was awarded two points. The points were added up for each parent and divided by the number of utterances by the parent to provide each individual with a ‘complexity score’ for each condition based on the syntactic complexity of the language used during shared reading. The points total was divided by the number of utterances to ensure that a high complexity score was due to a genuine higher complexity of language rather than the fact that the parent had spoken more and could therefore potentially be awarded more points. The coding was completed by one person, and therefore inter-rater reliability is not a concern for this experiment.
Research Design
A 2(condition: typically developing vs. Down Syndrome) x 2(book type: business as usual vs. prompted) mixed groups ANOVA was used in this experiment with the condition being the between subjects group with half of the participants being in the typically developing group and half of the participants being in the Down Syndrome group, and the book type being the within subjects group with all participants reading one business as usual book, and one prompted book. This was used to observe the effect of group type and the effect of book type on complexity score, the number of questions asked, the total number of words spoken by parents and children and the length of session in both the typically developing group and the Down Syndrome group to examine whether these shared reading factors changed within each group between the prompted and business as usual books. This design allowed for the study of whether parents with typically children or parents of children with Down Syndrome use more complex language, and whether a prompted book or business as usual reading can influence the use of language by a parent during the experience of shared reading.

Lancaster University

data/SPSS.sav

Bosworth2017

John Towse

Open

English

Data

LA1 4YF

Kate Cain

MSc

Cognitive Psychology
Developmental Psychology

A total of 16 mothers and their children took part in this study (6 girls, 10 boys, Mage = 5.2 years, age range = 3.9 years to 6.75 years). Out of the 16 children, eight of them had Down Syndrome (4 girls, 4 boys, Mage = 5.3 years, age range = 4.58 years to 6.75 years), and eight of them were typically developing children (2 girls, 6 boys, Mage = 5.1 years, age range = 3.9 years to 6.66 years)

ANOVA