Identifying impact factors of language development in young children's natural home environment

Language development of infants and toddlers lays an important foundation for their later academic studies and even for the quality of their whole lives. Previous studies have shown the importance of natural home environment to young children’s language development. This study reviews the previous findings, including 1) the amount of parents’ talk to their children and the turn talking between them are significantly correlated to children’s vocabularies, their language assessments and their IQ scores; 2) conversational turns play even more important roles than the pure amount of talks; 3) TV exposure has negative impact. This study further examines the other environment variables, including background noise, overlapped sounds, other children’s talks, near talks versus far talks (or clear talks versus relatively faint or unclear talks) and so on. The examination is also extended to different diagnostic groups of children, i.e. the groups of typical development, autism and language delay but not related to autism. This helps to identify specific factors of different groups. Identifying environmental factors of child language development is a topic of both scientific research and engineering endeavor. We also discuss the needs to measure other environmental variables automatically using audio recordings in order to achieve quality language environment for young children.