Children who experience less language at home may be at a disadvantage when starting school.For the past 12 months, my colleagues at the Hungry Mind Lab and I have been listening back to stories mothers told about their children 25 years ago. Their compelling tales of, excitement, exhaustion, and pride were recorded on crackly cassette tapes, complete with the muffled sounds of their children causing chaos whilst their backs were turned.
Thanks to funding from the Nuffield Foundation, we are analysing the characteristics of the mothers’ language. Each mother was asked, “What has it been like having twins?” We had the recordings transcribed and used a language analysis software to determine how many different words mothers used, how sophisticated these words are, and how the mothers structured their speech.