CHILDES English Rowe Corpus

Meredith Rowe Graduate School of Education Harvard University meredith_rowe@gse.harvard.edu

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Citation information

Articles using these data should cite:

Rowe, M. L., & Leech, K. A. (2019). A parent intervention with a growth mindset approach improves children’s early gesture and vocabulary development. Developmental Science, 22(4), e12792. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.12792

Additional publications based on this dataset include:

• Choi, B., & Rowe, M. L. (2021). A parent gesture intervention as a means to increase parent declarative pointing and child vocabulary. Infancy, 26(5), 735–744. https://doi.org/10.1111/infa.12418
• Choi, B., Wei, R., & Rowe, M. L. (2021). Show, give, and point gestures across infancy differentially predict language development. Developmental Psychology, 57(6), 851–862. https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0001195
• Leech, K. A., Herbert, K., Yang, Q. T., & Rowe, M. L. (2022). Exploring opportunities for math learning within parent–infant interactions. Infant and Child Development, 31(2), e2271. https://doi.org/10.1002/icd.2271
• Muhinyi, A., & Rowe, M. L. (2019). Shared reading with preverbal infants and later language development. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 64, 101053. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appdev.2019.101053
  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

  This corpus was collected as part of a randomized controlled intervention study, titled Pointing to Success, examining whether a brief, parent-focused gesture intervention incorporating a growth mindset message could increase parents’ use of pointing gestures with their infants, and in turn promote infants’ own gesture use and vocabulary development. The study was funded by grant R21HD078771 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) to Meredith L. Rowe.

  Participants and Demographics

  Fifty parent–infant dyads were recruited via direct mailings and community/social media advertisements in a large metropolitan area in the Northeastern US. Recruitment targeted zip codes selected using census data to yield a socioeconomically diverse sample. The final analytic sample was 47 dyads (46 mothers and 1 grandmother who was the child’s primary caregiver); two dyads were excluded because the parent could not be reached after baseline, and one family was excluded because the target caregiver changed during the study.

  Eligible children were full-term (minimum 37 weeks gestational age), had no known developmental or language delays, and heard English at least 75% of the time at home. Children averaged 10 months and 7 days old at the start of the study (range 9;7–11;6). The sample included 22 boys and 25 girls; 26 were firstborn and 21 later-born.

  Race/ethnicity of children: 34 White, 4 Black or African American, 8 more than one race, 1 Other.

  The sample was recruited such that half of the participants had a college degree and half did not (47% had less than a 4-year college degree; 53% had at least a 4-year degree).

  Procedure

  This was a longitudinal, randomized controlled intervention study. A trained researcher visited each family at home five times, every two months, from child age 10 to 18 months (10, 12, 14, 16, and 18 months). Families were told the study was about the benefits of play for child development. Parents were compensated $20 per visit.

  Baseline visit (10 months). Prior to randomization, parents completed questionnaires on family demographics, child vocabulary (MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory short form, MB-CDI; Fenson et al., 1994), and parents’ own intelligence mindsets (Theories of Intelligence questionnaire; Dweck, 1999). The researcher then videotaped a 15-minute semi-structured play session in which the parent–child dyad played with the contents of three bags containing a developmentally appropriate book and two toys (e.g., a picture book, a shape sorter, a farm set; the book "Good Dog Carl" was used across visits). After the play session, families were randomly assigned to the intervention or control group.

  Intervention. Parents in the intervention group watched a 5-minute video, Pointing to Success, which explained the importance of pointing gestures for child development, showed dyads playing and pointing together, and delivered repeated growth-mindset messaging (i.e., that children’s language development is malleable and that parents play an important role in shaping it). Following the video, the researcher briefly discussed it with the parent as a comprehension check, then gave the parent a set of developmentally appropriate toys and encouraged 15 minutes/day of play with as much pointing as possible. Researchers sent intervention parents weekly text reminders between child age 10 and 12 months reinforcing the importance of pointing. Control-group parents received an identical set of toys but no video, discussion, or text reminders.

  Follow-up visits (12, 14, 16, 18 months). Procedures were identical across conditions at each visit: parents completed the MB-CDI, and the dyad was videotaped in another 15-minute play session with three bags of toys, following the same format as baseline. At the final visit (18 months), the researcher also administered the Expressive Language subscale of the Mullen Scales of Early Learning (Mullen, 1995).

  Of 235 possible video recordings across all visits, 17 were missing (15 due to inability to schedule within 2 weeks of the target date, 2 due to infant fussiness).

  Transcription/Coding/Data. Videotapes were transcribed using the CHAT conventions for speech and gestures. Gestures were described on the %gpx tier and then coded further on the %gcd tier. The gesture coding scheme is included here.

  Treatment/Control groups and parent education (college vs no college degree) are available here/