This project will investigate important aspects of children's linguistic and social development that may have an impact on how they are perceived by teachers. The research will track developmental changes in speech that preschoolers use to elicit help from others and will focus on the language parents' use with their children in dyadic problem-solving settings. A main aim is to investigate whether gender and socioeconomic status (SES) influence how children are social to use language in problem- solving situations prior to entering formal education. Three integrated studies are proposed: A study on parents' language will focus on well- known child directed speech (CDS) patterns that may be linked to the frequency and structure of children's help-eliciting speech in education settings. Recordings of parent-child problem-solving will be transcribed and coding using CHILDES (Child Language Data Exchange System) language analysis software. Multi-variate analyses will be used to compared gender and SES on the frequency of parents' routinized questions, requests and prompts that researchers believe are central to children's early in pragmatic development: CHILDES corpora will be used to create a diverse set of problem-solving language data and to allow qualitative analysis and multi-variate modeling that requires large sample sizes. In the second study, problem-solving discourse of the same children will be analyzed, along with an extended preschool sample. Multivariate analyses will compare age, gender and SES groups on the frequency and form children's help eliciting speech. Correlational analyses will be used to determine if the structure of their parents' questions, requests and prompts are reflected in the frequency and structure of their children's help-eliciting speech. Analyses will test whether the frequency of help eliciting speech, irrespective of actual ability, has an impact on teacher's subjective evaluations.
