The Scale of Early Childhood Communication Signals: Evaluation of Child-Parent Interaction

Abstract

The research is aimed at developing a scale for evaluating the communication signals of an early-age child, which can help to assess the predictors of the development of behavioral, cognitive, and socio-emotional skills in a child. This system of fixing the child's communication signals is based on the periodization of the ontogeny of communication between M. Lisina and her followers (E. Smirnova, D. Godovikova, S. Meshcheryakova, etc.), which allows us to consider specific forms of communication between a child and an adult in the new social situation of modern children's development. The materials of an empirical study conducted on a sample of dyads of mothers and young children are presented. The study (N=55) involved dyads of mothers and children aged 2,4 to 3,3 years (M=2,9; SD=0,40), of which 62% were girls. The study included a video recording of a mother's playtime interaction with a child for 15 minutes. The resulting video clips were analyzed and encoded using the "Observer-XT 14" program. To evaluate video protocols, experts used the evaluation of the child-parent interaction method "Evaluation of child-parent interaction" [ECPI- 2 ed.], the scale of "Child communication signals". The method of main components was used for processing expert assessments, which allowed us to distinguish three factors of children's indicators ["Exploratory activity"; "Personal autonomy"; "Emotional alienation"]. Based on the results, we can talk about the stability of indicators-factors that characterize the child's communication signals. Based on the array of experimental data [49,500 seconds of video tape], a model has been developed for analyzing dynamic changes occurring in the process of child-parent interaction. All factors are stable over time: autocorrelation dynamic series are characterized by high values of correlation coefficients. It is noted that the formation of personal autonomy when interacting with a significant adult and the emotional alienation of a child from an adult can ambivalently influence the child's research activity.