2023 Early Hearing Detection & Intervention Conference
March 5-7, 2023 • Cincinnati, OH
DUKE ENERGY CONVENTION CENTER
Quantity AND Quality: Vocal Contingency and Joint Engagement in Parent-Child Interactions
Language development, whether spoken or signed, occurs in the context of interactions with parents, teachers, and other caregivers.? Parents whose children are deaf or hard of hearing (D/HH) are often coached to “talk more,” but research with both deaf and hearing populations suggests that it is conversational turns, rather than the sheer number of words/signs to which a child is exposed, that facilitates language learning.? While the extant literature suggests that, in general, parental responsiveness to their children’s conversational bids scaffolds language development, few studies have explored this vocal contingency and other qualities of naturalistic interactions between parents and their young D/HH children. This study used naturalistic daylong audio recordings to investigate differences in vocal contingency (i.e., parental responses to children’s vocalizations and children’s subsequent responses) among children with cochlear implants, those with hearing aids, and those with typical hearing.? Because these quantitative data cannot capture visual language or the quality of the interactions, we also coded video recordings of a subset of the D/HH children and their parents engaged in three play activities. The results shed light on both the quantity and quality of interactions between D/HH children and their caregivers.
- Define vocal contingency and joint engagement in the context of parent-child interactions
- Analyze differences in conversational contingency and joint engagement in naturalistic interactions between D/HH and typically hearing children and their caregivers
- Discuss implications of the study’s findings for in-service and preservice professionals who work with D/HH children and their families
Poster:
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Presenter: Elaine Smolen
Elaine Smolen, PhD, CED, LSLS Cert. AVEd, is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Special Education: Deaf and Hard of Hearing program at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her research work centers around language and literacy development for young deaf and hard of hearing children who use listening and spoken language. Smolen received her PhD in deaf and hard of hearing education from Columbia as a National Leadership Consortium in Sensory Disabilities scholar. An experienced teacher of the deaf and certified Listening and Spoken Language Specialist, Smolen has served young children with hearing loss and their families as a head classroom teacher and in an itinerant role. She holds teaching certification in the areas of deaf education, elementary education, and English.
ASHA DISCLOSURE:
Financial -
• Receives Salary for Employment from Teachers College, Columbia University.
Nonfinancial -
• Has a Personal (hard of hearing, wears hearing aids)
relationship for Other volunteer activities.
Carrie Davenport, Ph.D., is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Otolaryngology at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. Carrie is a teacher of the deaf by training with a Master's degree in Family-Centered Early Education from Gallaudet University. She earned her doctorate in special education at OSU in 2017. Prior to entering the PhD program at OSU, she was the Early Childhood Consultant for the Center for Outreach Services at the Ohio School for the Deaf. Carrie is a founding Board member of Ohio Hands & Voices. Her research interests include parental self-efficacy, parent-to-parent support, and parent-infant interaction. She is especially interested in building academic-community partnerships with families with deaf/hard-of-hearing children and other stakeholders.
ASHA DISCLOSURE:
Financial -
No relevant financial relationship exist.
Nonfinancial -
No relevant nonfinancial relationship exist.
Molly Cooke is a research coordinator in the Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences at the University of Connecticut. She earned her bachelor's degree in linguistics from Georgetown University, where she wrote her honors thesis on speech communities among adult cochlear implant users. She now works on projects studying language acquisition in deaf and hard-of-hearing infants and toddlers.
ASHA DISCLOSURE:
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Derek M. Houston, PhD, received his doctorate in cognitive psychology from Johns Hopkins University in 2000, focusing on how typically developing infants segment words from fluent speech and recognize words across different talkers. After graduating, he constructed the world's first laboratory to investigate the speech perception and language skills of deaf infants who receive cochlear implants at Indiana University. Since then, his work (supported by NIDCD) has investigated the role of early auditory experience and parent-child interactions on cognitive, linguistic, and social building blocks of language development. He also engages in community-based participatory research aimed at addressing barriers families face in obtaining high-quality early intervention services for their children.
ASHA DISCLOSURE:
Financial -
Nonfinancial -