Date of Award

Spring 2025

Project Type

Thesis

Program or Major

Communication Sciences and Disorders

Degree Name

Master of Science

First Advisor

Jill Thorson

Second Advisor

Kathryn Greenslade

Third Advisor

Laura Gonnerman

Abstract

Child-directed speech (CDS) engages infants and young children using simplified language and exaggerated prosody. Recent work shows that caregivers adjust speech/language features with older children. Children’s museums offer a valuable resource in communities to encourage families to engage and learn together and are natural, ecologically valid settings for data collection. Prosody and linguistic complexity have been studied individually; however, there is less evidence exploring their relationship. This study examines (1) the relationship between caregiver prosody and caregiver linguistic complexity, hypothesizing that more prosodic variation will correlate with less complex language, and (2) whether adult prosodic patterns and linguistic complexity are reflected in child speech and language during museum exploration, hypothesizing that children whose caregivers use high linguistic complexity and low prosodic variation will have stronger language skills. Twenty-minute audio recordings of exhibit exploration at the Children’s Museum of New Hampshire (CMNH) were analyzed for 20 caregiver-child dyads (3-6 years old). Files are transcribed following SALT conventions and acoustically analyzed using Praat. Linguistic complexity measures including mean length utterance, subordination index, and type-token ratio are reported. Prosodic measures of wiggliness and spaciousness are extracted to provide data on prosodic variation over time. Spearman rank correlations examined relationships between linguistic complexity and prosodic variation in caregivers and children. Results demonstrated that with children aged 3- to 6-years-old, adult language is richer when there is more pitch variation, rather than the simpler language typical of CDS. This study highlights the relationship between prosody and language in child-caregiver interactions, showing that caregiver prosody and lexical diversity support child language. With data collected during a museum exploration, this study contributes naturalistic data to the literature of speech and language in 3-6-year-olds. Clinically, these findings help identify key strategies, including rich linguistic input and increased prosodic variation, to scaffold the development of children with language delays/disorders.

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