Using Voice-Recording Technology to Investigate the Contributions of Mothers' Management Language to Children's Executive Functions.

Abstract

Extensive evidence documents that children’s school readiness and subsequent educational success depends not only on conventional literacy, math, and language skills, but also on several cognitive capacities necessary for regulating one’s behavior. In particular, investigators have highlighted the critical role of executive functions, a set of core cognitive skills that enable children to ignore distractions and inhibit inappropriate behaviors (i.e., inhibition), hold and manipulate information in mind (i.e., working memory), and flexibly switch attention focus and strategies (i.e., cognitive flexibility or switching). Parents play an important role in early executive function development, but little is known about which specific parenting practices foster these skills. A major obstacle is finding ways to study everyday parent-child interactions in the home. The current study used novel voice-recording technology to investigate mothers’ management language, the commands, questions, and suggestions that parents use to guide and control children’s behavior, and its relations with children’s executive functions. The Learning ENvironment Analysis (LENA) system, a digital recorder specially designed for use with young children was used to record conversations in the home. Forty mother-child dyads with diverse socioeconomic and racial backgrounds participated, completing recordings, child executive function assessments, and demographic and child temperament questionnaires for the study. Based on prior work, a management language coding system was created to capture the Direction (i.e., commands), Suggestions, feedback (i.e., Reprimands, Praise), and negotiation (i.e., Reasoning and Bargaining) that mothers use during everyday activities. Management language was coded at four different times: Weekday Morning, Weekday Bedtime, Weekend Morning, and Weekend Bedtime. Findings demonstrated substantial variability in mothers’ management language across activities and days of the week. Moderation analyses showed that variability across situations was positively related to executive function outcomes, but only for low-SES children. Relations between management language and child executive function were largely moderated by children’s temperament (i.e., Effortful Control and Surgency/Extraversion). Voice recording methodology provided a naturalistic window into parent-child interactions and revealed differences in parenting practices across situations. The results refute assumptions about the stability of parenting practices and show that the effects of management practices on children’s executive function vary depending on child characteristics.