Associations between parent mental health, child-directed speech, and child language outcomes in preterm and full-term children
Creators: name: Scheiber, Francesca A.
Publisher: name: University of Iowa
Year: 2023
Subjects: child language skills
child-directed speech
parent mental health
preterm children
public abstract

description: Background: Child language skills are crucial for later outcomes, and preterm-born children (PTB) demonstrate worse language skills than term-born children (TB). Although biological factors play a role in these discrepancies, the caregiving environment plays a role as well. PTB may even be more sensitive to their environments than TB, so it is crucial that we examine specific, modifiable aspects of the caregiving environment that play a role in child language outcomes. Parent mental health and child-directed speech are two aspects of the caregiving environment that have repeatedly been shown to predict child language outcomes in TB, but this relation requires further investigation in PTB. Furthermore, the relation between parent mental health, child-directed speech, and child language skills has yet to be examined in the same model and has yet to be rigorously evaluated for both PTB and TB. In the current study, we characterize the relation between parent mental health and child language skills, with a specific focus on the mechanistic role of child-directed speech. Method: Participants included 248 parent-child dyads. Children were 3-5 years of age, and they were born across the full range of gestational ages. During study visits, children completed cognitive assessments, parents completed questionnaires about their mental health, and parent-child dyads completed a 15- minute interaction together. We used structural equation modeling to examine relations between prematurity, child language outcomes, parent mental health, and child-directed speech. We used multi-group analyses to examine potential variations in the indirect effects of parent mental on child language, via child-directed speech. Results: Both early PTB and late PTB had lower verbal comprehension score than TB. Parents of early PTB talked more than parents of TB, but parents of PTB and parents of TB did not differ in the quality of their speech. Moreover, variations in the quantity of child-directed speech did not predict child language outcomes, but variations in quality, specifically parent syntactic complexity, did. Parent anxiety was negatively related to child language outcomes, but child-directed speech did not mediate this relation. Parent depression was negatively related to parent syntactic complexity, and parent syntactic was positively related to child language outcomes. However, the indirect effect of parent depression on child language, through parent syntactic complexity, did not reach statistical significance. None of the indirect effects we probed varied across preterm groups. Conclusion: Discrepancies in language between PTB and TB remain salient during preschool years. The language outcomes of both PTB and TB appeared to respond to the role of certain predictors, namely parent anxiety and parent syntactic complexity. The roles of parent anxiety, parent depression, and parent syntactic complexity in child language outcomes warrant attention in future studies.