In my master’s thesis, I am investigating the influence of parental communication style on the development of a child’s social conversational skills. Well-developed social conversational skills enable a child to participate successfully in a variety of social situations and open the door for them to later become a fully integrated member of society. These skills develop through interaction with different communication partners. As interaction with parents is predominant in early childhood, it is important to investigate how parental communication with the child affects the child's communication skills.
The aim of the present study was to determine whether following the child’s attention in parent-child interaction has a positive effect on the development of the child’s social conversational skills. The study was conducted on a sample of 11 parent-child pairs. The Social Conversational Rating Scale was used to assess the children’s social conversational skills. Parents’ communication styles were determined by analysing video recordings of play sessions between parent and child.
The results of our study indicate a tendency towards weaker sociopragmatic skills in children of parents who more frequently use intrusive communicative acts and towards stronger sociopragmatic skills in children of parents who more frequently use responsive-supportive communicative acts. However, the parents' communication style did not prove to be a statistically significant factor for the children's sociopragmatic skills. Similarly, no statistically significant correlation was found between the results of the children's sociopragmatic skills, as determined by the video analysis, and the results of the parental rating scale. The transcription of play sessions between parents and children led to the creation of a small language corpus of children aged between 24 and 36 months, which provides valuable data on the expressive abilities of children at this stage of development.
|
