Mothers' Work Status and 17-month-olds' Productive Vocabulary.
Abstract
Literature examining the effects of mothers' work status on infant language development
is mixed, with little focus on varying work-schedules and early vocabulary. We use
naturalistic data to analyze the productive vocabulary of 44 17-month-olds in relation
to mothers' work status (Full-time, Part-time, Stay-at-home) at 6 and 18 months. Infants
who experienced a combination of care from mothers and other caretakers had larger
productive vocabularies than infants in solely full-time maternal or solely other-caretaker
care. Our results draw from naturalistic data to suggest that this care combination
may be particularly beneficial for early lexical development.
Type
Journal articlePermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/19715Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1111/infa.12265Publication Info
Laing, Catherine E; & Bergelson, Elika (2019). Mothers' Work Status and 17-month-olds' Productive Vocabulary. Infancy : the official journal of the International Society on Infant Studies, 24(1). pp. 101-109. 10.1111/infa.12265. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/19715.This is constructed from limited available data and may be imprecise. To cite this
article, please review & use the official citation provided by the journal.
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Elika Bergelson
Crandall Family Assistant Professor
Dr. Bergelson accepts PhD applicants through the Developmental and Cog/CogNeuro areas
of P&N and the CNAP program.In my research, I try to understand the interplay of processes
during language acquisition. In particular, I am interested in how word learning relates
to other aspects of learning language (e.g. speech sound acquisition, grammar/morphology
learning), and social/cognitive development more broadly (e.g. joint attention processes)
in the first few

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