Abstract
Abstract
Using both online and offline measures, this study investigates how maternal education and work status (stay-at-home, part-time, full-time) are jointly associated with infants’ word learning ability and vocabulary size. One hundred 24-month-old infants completed a lab-based mutual exclusivity task, which assesses infants’ novel word learning ability. Caregivers reported infants’ productive vocabulary size using the MCDIs. There was no evidence for an association between infants’ productive vocabulary size and maternal education, maternal work status, or their interaction. However, infants’ novel word learning ability was significantly related to both maternal factors and their interaction. The positive association between maternal education and word learning performance was attenuated for infants of part-time and full-time working mothers compared to infants with at home mothers. These findings suggest that using real-time measures with high task demand may better capture developmental differences in infants and expand our understanding of maternal factors contributing to early language development.
Funder
National Science Foundation
Publisher
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Subject
General Psychology,Linguistics and Language,Developmental and Educational Psychology,Experimental and Cognitive Psychology,Language and Linguistics
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