The Impact of Dynamic Fluctuations in Caregiver Stress on Children's Language Environments, LanguageDevelopment, and School Readiness

About This Grant

PROJECT SUMMARY Children’s language development and school readiness are deeply influenced by their early social interactions with caregivers. As a child’s main interaction partners, caregiver stress can also have profound influences on child development. The PI’s prior work, as well as the broader literature investigating associations between caregiver stress, caregiver–child interactions, and child development, have mainly used static, laboratory-based measures of stress and caregiver–child interactions. This foundational work fails to capture the inherently dynamic nature of variations in caregiver stress and caregiver–child interactions. Understanding how stress influences the caregiver–child relationship early in childhood is particularly important, as this is a critical window for development and preparation for entering formal schooling. The proposed work will test an innovative developmental model whereby the PI will investigate how caregiver stress and children’s language environments co-vary in real time, with cascading effects on children’s cognitive development. The use of innovative, real-world measurement tools, such as ecological momentary assessment and daylong language recordings, will allow for a nuanced investigation of the daily factors that are key for promoting child development. Results will critically advance our understanding of how time-varying measures of children’s and caregivers’ experiences influence children’s language development and school readiness, while also advancing the PI’s training and progression toward an independent research career. Aim 1 will characterize the variation in caregiver stress across time and daily contexts using ecological momentary assessment. Aim 2 will determine how time-varying fluctuations in caregiver stress relate to fluctuations in caregiver–child language interactions measured via daylong audio recordings. Aim 3 will examine how the variability of caregiver stress and associated language interactions relate to measures of children’s language development and school readiness. It is hypothesized that caregivers will display variation over time in ecological assessment of stress, and that this variation will be associated with time-locked differences in caregiver–child language interactions. Further, it is hypothesized that higher levels of caregiver–child interactions will positively predict child developmental outcomes and may serve as a “protective factor” against higher levels of dynamic stressors. The training aims will advance the PI’s skills in the use of ecological momentary assessment tools, application of intensive longitudinal design and analytic approaches, and the skills needed to independently run a productive laboratory focused on how caregiver factors influence child development. Ultimately, this work has the potential to pinpoint targets for intervention to support developmental outcomes for children and their caregivers who experience increased levels of stress. Improved understanding of the predictors and mechanisms by which children learn language may guide efforts in working with families to mitigate the long-term impacts of language learning difficulties.