Maternal and Paternal Education on Italian Monolingual Toddlers' Language Skills

• Published in: Brain sciences 2024-10, Vol.14 (11), p.1078
• Main Authors: Cattani, Allegra, Celik, Emre
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Caregivers; Child development; Children; Children & youth; Cognition & reasoning; Cognitive ability; Computational linguistics; Education; Environmental factors; Families & family life; Family; Fathers; Higher education; Italian-monolingual children; Italy; Language; Language acquisition; language development; Language processing; Language skills; Longitudinal studies; Mothers; Natural language interfaces; Parent educational background; parental education; Preschool education; Social interaction; Social interactions; Socioeconomic factors; Socioeconomic status; System theory; Toddlers; United States; vocabulary comprehension; vocabulary production
• ISSN: 2076-3425; 2076-3425
• DOI: 10.3390/brainsci14111078

Language development in toddlers can be influenced by social interactions in environments and proximal contexts with mothers and fathers. We present the literature on mothers' and fathers' education level and socioeconomic status on the child's language development; further evidence is needed in the Italian-speaking context. The study aims to confirm the role of mother and father education level on toddlers' language skills assessed with direct and indirect measures. Participants were 51 Italian-speaking children aged 33 to 41 months. Children were tested with a lexical test (PinG test) for comprehension and production of nouns and predicates and a morpho-syntactic test for grammar comprehension (PCGO). Parents of the children completed a demographic form and the Italian adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates CDI long version. Two series of one-way ANCOVAs were performed to study the role of mothers' and fathers' level of education on separate measures of their child's language. Findings suggest that in most families, mothers' level of education is higher than fathers' level of education. There was no significant difference between children of parents with low-middle level of education and children of parents with high level of education for the grammar comprehension tasks (PCGO) and indirect measure of vocabulary production (MacArthur-Bates CDI). However, both mothers' and fathers' level of education appears to be significant for the direct measurement of word production. This study provides new evidence for the role of mothers' and fathers' education on the development of word production in children aged 33 to 41 months, contributing to enriching the literature on the Italian context; it lays the groundwork for future research on the social and environmental factors that can affect language development.