CAREGIVER-CHILD INTERACTIONS AND LANGUAGE ABILITIES OF WOLOF-SPEAKING TODDLERS IN RURAL SENEGAL

In Western societies, both verbal and nonverbal behaviors have been shown to engage infants' attention, which then contributes to children’s language development. It is unknown whether findings are replicable in non-Western agrarian cultures where child-directed speech happens less frequently. Using longitudinal observations of 108 Wolof-speaking caregivers interacting with their young children in rural Senegal, the dissertation investigated how caregiver-child verbal and nonverbal interactions relate to children’s verbal abilities at the age of 20-30-months as well as one year later. Cross-cultural research shows that mothers in non-Western agrarian communities primarily engage in nonverbal communication involving body contact and stimulation when interacting with their children. In contrast, mothers from Western industrial societies engage more in face-to-face communication behaviors such as mutual gaze and child-directed speech. Observed differences between cultural groups are based on the questionable assumption that mothers within the same cultural group rely uniformly on a single parenting style. My dissertation explored this assumption in two studies. Study One investigated variability in the extent to which Wolof-speaking caregivers used nonverbal and face-to-face communication when interacting with their toddlers during controlled play sessions. It also examined whether variability in interactional patterns relate to concurrent child language outcomes. K-means clustering analysis yielded two groups of mothers who used similar amounts of physical touch with their children, but differed in their use of face-to-face behaviors, and in their use of nonverbal communication behaviors, including 'nonverbal pretend play,' 'nonverbal object stimulation,' and 'nonverbal cues' such as snapping fingers to get children's attention. These results show within-group variabilities in caregivers’ communication style. Multivariate analysis of the covariance showed that children of mothers who used more face-to-face behaviors such as gaze and conversation turns had higher vocabulary and language milestones than children of mothers who used less face-face-to face behaviors. Study Two examined the qualities in the Wolof-speaking caregivers' speech and how they related to child vocabulary and language milestones concurrently and one year later. Results yielded substantial variabilities in Wolof caregivers’ language input features with questions and directives being the two most frequent input types that caregivers addressed to children. Further, caregivers’ here-and-now utterances at 24 months negatively associated with child language outcomes at 36 months. However, their decontextualized talk about past and future events predicted child vocabulary and language milestone at 36 months. Unlike findings from western societies, caregivers’ directives that drew children from their attentional focus significantly associated with children’s vocabulary and language milestones at 24 months, but only when the directives were not prohibitive (i.e., don’t). Also, caregivers’ open-ended questions, particularly ‘what’ and ‘how’ questions at 24 months had longitudinal associations with children’s vocabulary and language milestones at 36 months. But their ‘why’ questions were mostly for reprimanding the children at 24 months, perhaps explaining why these types of questions negatively predicted their language milestones one year later. Finally, caregivers who were more likely to elaborate on the topics or objects of discussion at 24 months had children with better vocabulary and language milestones at 36 months. Taken together, these studies suggest that it is important to explore within-group differences in mother-child interaction among non-western families, who have been mostly studied in comparison to western families focusing on between-group differences. The dissertation focused on within-group variability in caregiver-child interactions, and its findings provide a better understanding of how Senegalese caregivers interact with their children, therefore contributing to developing language development theories that are more representative than what we have seen to date. Additionally, the results of the two studies provide insights for early interventions that target adult-child interactions and early learning in Senegal, which might pave the road for children’s future school success.