2024 Early Hearing Detection & Intervention Conference
March 17-19, 2024 • Denver, CO
| Increased Paternal Linguistic Input to Children with Hearing Aids during the COVID-19 Pandemic
Increased Paternal Linguistic Input to Children with Hearing Aids during the COVID-19 Pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic has seen an unprecedented shift of the workforce toward telework, a change which has the potential to significantly alter the early auditory environments of children whose parents work. For deaf and hard-of-hearing children, whose language acquisition and cognitive development outcomes may be more sensitive to variations in linguistic input, these changes may prove to be consequential. A recent study examining the effects of COVID-19 on gender equity (Alon, et al. 2020) posits an increase of paternal participation in childcare responsibilities in mother-father households due to men having greater access to and participation in occupational fields that would support working from home. In this project, we investigated the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on parental linguistic input to children with hearing aids.
Our team collected and analyzed 13 naturalistic recordings from 4 families of children with hearing aids using the Language Environment Analysis (LENA) system before and during the pandemic. All four families included a mother and a father and were of similar socio-economic status by parental education and income. Automated measures generated by LENA, including adult word count (AWC), female adult word count (FWC), and male adult word count (MWC) were extracted and compared. To account for variations in the durations of recordings, we normalized the measures by hour. There was an increase in average MWC/hr (156.80 pre-pandemic, 228.69 during) and in proportion MWC of AWC (17.81% pre-pandemic, 31.95% during). However, both average AWC/hr (1070.68 pre-pandemic, 773.86 during) and average FWC/hr (837.77 pre-pandemic, 545.16 during) decreased, which could help to explain part of the proportional uptick of MWC. These preliminary findings contribute to our understanding of how the COVID-19 pandemic may be affecting early linguistic environments, which can in turn inform evolving clinical practices relating to deaf and hard-of-hearing children (e.g. increased early intervention coaching for fathers).
- Participants will be able to describe the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on parental linguistic input.
- Participants will be able to describe overall preliminary findings from this study.
- Participants will be able to describe clinical implications of these findings.
Presentation:
23278_13506MollyCooke.pdf
https://youtu.be/NIj8YLwmT6w
Handouts:
Handout is not Available
Transcripts:
CART transcripts are NOT YET available, but will be posted shortly after the conference
Presenters/Authors
Molly Cooke
(POC,Primary Presenter,Author), University of Connecticut, molly.cooke@uconn.edu;
Molly Cooke is a research coordinator in the Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences at the University of Connecticut. She earned her bachelor's degree in linguistics from Georgetown University, where she wrote her honors thesis on speech communities among adult cochlear implant users. She now works on projects studying language acquisition in deaf and hard-of-hearing infants and toddlers.
ASHA DISCLOSURE:
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Nonfinancial -
AAA DISCLOSURE:
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Yuanyuan Wang
(Co-Author), The Ohio State University, yywang118@gmail.com;
Dr. Yuanyuan Wang was a Research Assistant Professor from the department Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery at The Ohio State University. She received her doctoral degree in Linguistics from Purdue University. Her research focused on the role of infant speech perception, cognition, and linguistic environment on language development in children with normal hearing and children with hearing loss. Dr. Wang has left academia and now works in the financial sector.
ASHA DISCLOSURE:
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AAA DISCLOSURE:
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Carrie Davenport
(Author,Co-Author), The Ohio State University College of Medicine, carrietdavenport@gmail.com;
Carrie Davenport, Ph.D., is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Otolaryngology at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. Carrie is a teacher of the deaf by training with a Master's degree in Family-Centered Early Education from Gallaudet University. She earned her doctorate in special education at OSU in 2017. Prior to entering the PhD program at OSU, she was the Early Childhood Consultant for the Center for Outreach Services at the Ohio School for the Deaf. Carrie is a founding Board member of Ohio Hands & Voices. Her research interests include parental self-efficacy, parent-to-parent support, and parent-infant interaction. She is especially interested in building academic-community partnerships with families with deaf/hard-of-hearing children and other stakeholders.
ASHA DISCLOSURE:
Financial -
No relevant financial relationship exists.
Nonfinancial -
No relevant nonfinancial relationship exists.
AAA DISCLOSURE:
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No relevant financial relationship exists.
Nonfinancial -
No relevant nonfinancial relationship exists.
Derek Houston
(Co-Author), University of Connecticut, derek.houston@uconn.edu;
Derek M. Houston, PhD, received his doctorate in cognitive psychology from Johns Hopkins University in 2000, focusing on how typically developing infants segment words from fluent speech and recognize words across different talkers. After graduating, he constructed the world's first laboratory to investigate the speech perception and language skills of deaf infants who receive cochlear implants at Indiana University. Since then, his work (supported by NIDCD) has investigated the role of early auditory experience and parent-child interactions on cognitive, linguistic, and social building blocks of language development. He also engages in community-based participatory research aimed at addressing barriers families face in obtaining high-quality early intervention services for their children.
ASHA DISCLOSURE:
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Nonfinancial -
AAA DISCLOSURE:
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Nonfinancial -