Using both online and offline measures, this study investigates how maternal education and work status (stay-at-home, part-time, full-time) are jointly associated with infants’ word learning ability and vocabulary size. One hundred 24-month-old infants completed a lab-based mutual exclusivity task, which assesses infants’ novel word learning ability. Caregivers reported infants’ productive vocabulary size using the MCDIs. There was no evidence for an association between infants’ productive vocabulary size and maternal education, maternal work status, or their interaction. However, infants’ novel word learning ability was significantly related to both maternal factors and their interaction. The positive association between maternal education and word learning performance was attenuated for infants of part-time and full-time working mothers compared to infants with at home mothers. These findings suggest that using real-time measures with high task demand may better capture developmental differences in infants and expand our understanding of maternal factors contributing to early language development.

中文翻译：

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24个月婴儿新词学习能力：母亲工作状况与受教育程度的交互作用


本研究利用线上和线下测量手段，调查母亲教育和工作状态（全职、兼职、全职）如何与婴儿的单词学习能力和词汇量相关。一百名 24 个月大的婴儿完成了一项基于实验室的相互排斥任务，该任务评估婴儿的新词学习能力。护理人员使用 MCDI 报告婴儿的有效词汇量。没有证据表明婴儿的有效词汇量与母亲教育、母亲工作状况或其互动之间存在关联。然而，婴儿的新词学习能力与母亲因素及其相互作用显着相关。与家庭母亲的婴儿相比，兼职和全职工作母亲的婴儿的母亲教育与单词学习表现之间的正相关性减弱。这些发现表明，使用高任务要求的实时测量可以更好地捕捉婴儿的发育差异，并扩大我们对促进早期语言发展的母亲因素的理解。