Amount of time parents spend in conversation with children per week?

[Lynn Santelmann]

Sorry if this has gone out already - I sent it this afternoon and it didn't 
seem to go through, so I'm trying again:

Thanks to everyone who responded to my query about the amount of time in 
conversation that parents spend with their children.

  The most oft cited resource was:
  Hart, B. & Risley T. (1995). Meaningful Differences in the Everyday 
Experience of Young American Children. Baltimore, MD: Brookes.

  This is the reference that talks about the striking number of different 
words children hear, and extrapolates the amount of language experience 
children from different SES backgrounds hear.

  In addition,  I received 2 other citations:
Bogaerde, E.M. van den (2000). Input and Interaction in Deaf Families, 
2000, Utrecht: LOT (wwwlot.let.uu.nl)
Weijer, J. van de 
(2002).  <http://www.ling.lu.se/persons/Joost/Texts/gala01.pdf> How much 
does an  infant hear in a day? In: J. Costa and M. João Freitas (eds.). 
Proceedings  of the GALA2001 Conference on Language Acquisition (pp. 
279-282). Lisboa: Associação Portuguesa de Linguistíca.

Most studies address the issue of "how much input" with a tally of 
number  of words, rather than total time. (Though, I suppose one can be 
converted  into the other.)

van de Weijer (2002) recorded all input to an infant in the Netherlands 
for  several months. This infant received about 20 minutes a day of direct 
interaction with the parents and/or caregivers. However, the infant's older 
sister (age 2) spent approximately 90 minutes PER DAY (60% of the recorded 
data) either addressing (45 min) or being addressed by (45 min) an adult. 
Since the recordings were made for the infant and not the older 
sibling,  it's possible that recordings of the older sibling would be 
different.

This is a 2 year old in an academic family in the Netherlands, so we 
should  probably be hesitant to generalize this to U.S. American families, 
but it  makes me all the more suspicious of the oft cited "38.5 minutes" 
PER WEEK  of "meaningful conversation" with parents. (The author of that 
figure has clearly never driven home with my son!)

  Lynn

(Thanks specifically to:
Annick De Houwer
Beppie van den Bogaerde
Diane Pesco
Gedeon Deák
John N. Bohannon III
Laura DeThorne
Linda Cote
Lois Bloom
Shanley Allen

apologies to anyone I've missed)


****************************************************************************
Lynn Santelmann, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Department of Applied Linguistics
Portland State University
P.O. Box 751
Portland, OR 97207-0751
Phone: 503-725-4140  Fax: 503-725-4139
email: santelmannl at pdx.edu
web: www.web.pdx.edu/~dbls
*****************************************************************************