CHILDES English Early Head Start Corpus


Catherine Snow
Graduate School of Education
Harvard University

Catherine Ayoub
Graduate School of Education
Harvard University

Barbara Pan
Graduate School of Education
Harvard University
Participants: 108
Type of Study: longitudinal, naturalistic
Location: rural New England
Media type: video
DOI: doi:10.21415/ESE3-M119

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Citation information

Articles using these data should cite:

Pan, B. A., Rowe, M. L., Singer, J. D., & Snow, C. E. (2005). Maternal correlates of growth in toddler vocabulary production in low‐income families. Child development, 76(4), 763-782.

Additional publications based on this dataset include:

In accordance with TalkBank rules, any use of data from this corpus must be accompanied by at least one of the above references.

Project Description

The full title of the EHS corpus is "National Evaluation of Early Head Start (Harvard-Brattleboro VT site) Corpus". This study is part of the national longitudinal evaluation of the Early Head Start (EHS) program, a federally funded initiative led by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families (2001). The current corpus draws on data collected at the Brattleboro, Vermont site—one of 17 programs included in the national evaluation. The research at this site was led by Principal Investigator Catherine E. Snow from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Other research consortium members included Barbara Alexander Pan (1951–2011) and Catherine Ayoub.

Participants and Demographics

Participants were drawn from a larger sample of 146 mother-child dyads participating in a national longitudinal study on the effectiveness of Early Head Start (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, ACF, 2001). At entry to the study, families were living in southern Vermont and qualified for EHS. Families enrolled during the mother’s pregnancy or before the target child’s first birthday. The number of children in the family was not a selection criterion. Families were not allowed to participate if they had any child enrolled in one of several other intervention programs in the previous 5 years, or if they had been enrolled in any federal, state, or local program with similar services in the previous 12 months. Recruitment procedures included posting flyers, going door to door, and contacting other service providers in the area. Families were continuously recruited during the 27-month recruitment period, resulting in a sample of increasing size over time. The EHS program being studied in Vermont exhausted recruitment capabilities and was confident that the 146 families found were all the eligible families in the county during the allowed period of recruitment. Parents were predominantly European American (91%) and used English as their home language (99%). Families were randomly assigned on entry to the study to either the program or comparison group.

119 families agreed to be videotaped on at least one of three occasions. One was excluded because English was not the primary language in the home, and therefore the target child was not a native English speaker. Three additional families were excluded because the custody of the child changed from one time point to the next. Data from one family at 36 months only, but not at the earlier ages, was excluded because the filming conditions did not meet project standards, and 7 additional families were excluded due to incomplete data collection on necessary measures other than the videotaped interaction. Therefore, the final sample size of video recordings and transcripts is 108 families.

Of these 108 families, 57 dyads had data for all three waves (14, 24, 36), 27 had data for only two waves, and 24 had data for only one wave. In this sample, the average yearly family income (as reported by the mother at baseline) was $11,237 (SD = $7,778) with a median of $9,240 and a range from $0 to $40,664. Seventy-five percent of the families reported incomes of $14,000 or less, and 10% of the families reported incomes of $24,000 or more. The average maternal age at baseline was 25.5 years (SD = 6.5 years). Forty-eight percent of the children were firstborn, and 50% were male. Fifty-one percent of the sample had been randomly assigned to the EHS program group. Thus, overall, this is a lower-income, rural, sample.

Procedure

Parent-child interaction was observed during several different activities at each age as part of the National Evaluation of EHS protocol. We prioritized transcribing the “three-bags activities” at all ages for mothers and fathers. However, some (but not all) of the files include transcripts of other activities as well (see below).

Three bags activities: The transcripts presented here are based on videotaped mother-child and separate father-child interactions collected at up to four time points. At each home visit, dyads were provided with three bags; one contained a book, one had varied toys, and one had paper and colored markers. At 14 months, the book provided was a wordless book, Good Dog Carl by Alexandra Day (1996); at 24 and 36 months it was The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle (1983). At all time points the toys were age-appropriate toys intended to facilitate talk and pretend play (e.g., a toy cooking set, an ark with animals). Mothers were asked to begin with the bag containing the book, then move on to each of the other two bags in turn. Dyads were not required to play with contents of all three bags. Pace and transition from one bag to the next during the 10-min observation period were determined by the mother and child.

Below is a list of the tasks that were observed and are represented in the different transcripts at different ages:

MOT-CHI Transcripts:

FAT-CHI Transcripts:

MOT-CHI and FAT-CHI Narrative Task 36-months only