Exploring children's everyday activities through parent and child utterances

The present study examines the activities a child experiences and the amount of speech they are using and hearing from the surrounding environment. Studying childhood activities in early development is important due to their potential to impact a child's linguistic and cognitive skills. Using one visit from a twelve-visit longitudinal study focused over the first five years of life, we were able to look at the preliminary findings of a much larger study at hand. The 61 participants at their 38-month mark, were split in to high- and low-income groups to get an understanding about what activities were done in certain households as well as parent involvement. The most frequent activities children engaged in were Pretending and Performing Knowledge/Showing Off. We found that the activities that elicited the most speech from children was Performing Knowledge/Showing Off and Pretending. The activities that elicited the most speech from parents were Playing Games with Rules and Performing Knowledge/Showing Off. The most frequent activities for high-income groups were Doing Arts and Pretending and for the low-income group they were Pretending and Eating/Preparing Food/Drink. Using these findings, we can build a landscape of time of how child and parents are interacting while spending their time together doing these activities. Future research will look at the same child before and after their 38-month visit to further understand the stability of the activities and verbal exchanges over time.