TY - JOUR
T1 - Depression and anxiety in the postnatal period
T2 - an examination of infants' home language environment, vocalizations, and expressive language abilities
AU - Brookman, Ruth
AU - Kalashnikova, Marina
AU - Conti, Janet
AU - Xu Rattanasone, Nan
AU - Grant, Kerry-Ann
AU - Demuth, Katherine
AU - Burnham, Denis
PY - 2020/11
Y1 - 2020/11
N2 - This longitudinal study investigated the effects of maternal emotional health concerns, on infants' home language environment, vocalization quantity, and expressive language skills. Mothers and their infants (at 6 and 12 months; 21 mothers with depression and or anxiety and 21 controls) provided day-long home-language recordings. Compared with controls, risk group recordings contained fewer mother-infant conversational turns and infant vocalizations, but daily number of adult word counts showed no group difference. Furthermore, conversational turns and infant vocalizations were stronger predictors of infants' 18-month vocabulary size than depression and anxiety measures. However, anxiety levels moderated the effect of conversational turns on vocabulary size. These results suggest that variability in mothers' emotional health influences infants' language environment and later language ability.
AB - This longitudinal study investigated the effects of maternal emotional health concerns, on infants' home language environment, vocalization quantity, and expressive language skills. Mothers and their infants (at 6 and 12 months; 21 mothers with depression and or anxiety and 21 controls) provided day-long home-language recordings. Compared with controls, risk group recordings contained fewer mother-infant conversational turns and infant vocalizations, but daily number of adult word counts showed no group difference. Furthermore, conversational turns and infant vocalizations were stronger predictors of infants' 18-month vocabulary size than depression and anxiety measures. However, anxiety levels moderated the effect of conversational turns on vocabulary size. These results suggest that variability in mothers' emotional health influences infants' language environment and later language ability.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85088998344&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1111/cdev.13421
DO - 10.1111/cdev.13421
M3 - Article
C2 - 32745250
SN - 0009-3920
VL - 91
SP - e1211-e1230
JO - Child Development
JF - Child Development
IS - 6
ER -