Abstract: Promoting Child Language Development through Attachment-Based Intervention: Impacts of Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-up (Society for Social Work and Research 29th Annual Conference)

Schedule:

Saturday, January 18, 2025

Seneca, Level 4 (Sheraton Grand Seattle)

* noted as presenting author

Brenda Jones Harden, PhD, Professor of Child and Family Welfare, Columbia University, New York, NY

Tiffany Martoccio, PhD, Research Associate, University of Maryland, College Park, MD

So Yeon Shin, Research Scientist, University of Maryland at College Park

Alexus Ramirez, Research Scientist, University of Maryland at College Park

Rachel Romeo, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland at College Park

Lisa Berlin, PhD, Alison L. Richman Professor and MPower Professor, University of Maryland School of Social Work, MD

Background:

The Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-up (ABC) program has been documented in multiple studies to improve parenting and child outcomes (Dozier & Bernard, 2019). Recent studies have documented ABC’s impact on maternal and child language. Children whose foster eparents participated in ABC had greater receptive vocabularies when compared to children whose foster parents did not receive ABC, with effects mediated by foster parents’ sensitivity (Raby et al., 2019). Foster parents who participated in ABC had higher quality conversations with their children when compared to those who did not (i.e., higher proportion of child-led questions), which was related to higher parental sensitivity (Gaudreau et al., 2024). The current study examined whether ABC as a supplement to Early Head Start (EHS) positively impacted maternal and child language among Latine immigrant families from low-income backgrounds, and whether parenting behaviors mediated these effects.

Methods:

Participants were 198 low-income Latine mother-infant dyads receiving home-based EHS, randomly assigned to the ABC intervention or EHS plus a light control condition, Book-of-the-Week (ABC n=95). Mean maternal age at enrollment was 31 years (SD=6.47); mean infant age was 13 months (SD=4.04); 49.5% of the infants were males. About half of the mothers (54.5%) had at least a high school education and 37.4% were employed. Data were collected in participants’ homes during two visits, in Spanish or English per maternal preference. Demographic data were obtained via a study-specific questionnaire. Parenting behaviors were coded from video recordings of 10-minute, semi-structured mother-infant play interactions. Language was also coded from these videotaped interactions. Maternal and child language was transcribed by Spanish-speaking and English-speaking researchers, using the CLAN/CHILDES procedure (MacWhinney, 2000). Maternal and child language transcripts were coded by a trained and reliable bilingual Spanish-English coder for number of utterances, types (different words), tokens (count of all words), type-token ratio, mean length of utterances in words and morphemes, verbs per utterance, and sum of Brown's morphemes in both languages.

Results:

Regressions tested ABC effects on child language, covarying child age, sex, and primary language spoken. Children who received ABC showed significantly higher total number of utterances (β = .17, p = .01), total types (β = .15, p = .01), total tokens (β = .16, p = .01), mean length of utterances in words (β = .14, p = .01), mean length of utterances in morphemes (β = .15, p = .01), and sum of Brown's morphemes in both languages (β = .21, p = .001) compared to control children. Parenting behaviors (post-intervention sensitivity and stimulation) were not significant mediators of ABC outcomes.

Conclusions & Implications:

Building on recent studies of ABC effects on maternal and child language among foster parents, the current findings document this intervention’s preventive impacts on the language of Latine parents and their biological children from high-risk backgrounds. These findings suggest that attachment-based interventions designed to improve parenting and social-emotional outcomes can improve children’s development in other domains, and that an intensive intervention integrated into EHS can help achieve this program’s mandate to enhance children’s development.