Grammatical input differences remain six-months following toy talk instruction

Abstract

Parents’ use of lexical noun phrases (NP) in the subject position of declarative sentences is rare, occurring in less than 3% of parents’ child-directed utterances, but diversity in this input variable is a significant predictor of young children’s grammatical growth (Hadley et al., 2017). Hadley and colleagues demonstrated that brief instruction (~ 3½ hours) in responsive interaction strategies and two toy talk strategies – talk about the toys and give the items its name increased parents’ frequency and diversity of lexical NP subjects (e.g., The penguin is fast.) immediately post-instruction. This study examined whether parents who received toy talk instruction (n = 19) when their children were between 21 and 24 months of age maintained use of lexical NP subjects during play-based parent-child interactions six months later compared to parents in a control group (n = 19) who did not receive the instruction. Results indicated that the frequency and diversity of lexical NP subjects decreased from 24 to 30 months for treatment parents; however treatment parents continued to use significantly more lexical NP subjects than the control parents. Production of lexical NP subjects continued to remain low for the control group over time, documenting the need for instruction to alter this input variable. Future research should consider including periodic, ongoing instruction for parents to maintain use of toy talk strategies.