Identifier

etd-0417102-170452

Degree

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Communication Sciences and Disorders

Document Type

Thesis

Abstract

The purpose of the current study was to evaluate the effectiveness of the “Tips About Talk” parent-training classes for increasing adolescent mothers’ knowledge about their children’s speech and language development and the quality of mothers’ interactions with their children. Seven mother-child dyads served as participants. All of the participating mothers were single, African American, and enrolled in a GED program. The mean age of the mothers was 20.57 years, and their mean educational level was 9.29 years. Their children were between the ages of 24 and 67 months. The experimental treatment involved four “Tips About Talk” parent-training workshops. The control treatment was four nutrition parent-training workshops. Both treatments were administered in a group setting. The dependent measures, a questionnaire and a mother-child language sample, were collected prior to the first workshop and following the final workshop. The 30-item questionnaire asked the mothers to rank their knowledge of child speech and language and their use of positive talking strategies on a six-point Likert scale. At post-test but not at pre, the mothers in the experimental group provided significantly higher ratings for the speech and language questions than those in the control group. At post-test, the experimental group also produced fewer word tokens and a reduced rate of prohibitions than did the control group. In addition, a trend of decreased MLU was noted at post-testing for the experimental group. No significant differences were found at post-test between the experimental and control groups for the use of behaviors that are known to facilitate children’s preliteracy skills. The results of the current study suggest that group-based parent-training can influence the knowledge and behaviors of teen mothers in a positive way.

Date

2002

Document Availability at the Time of Submission

Release the entire work immediately for access worldwide.

Committee Chair

Janna Oetting

DOI

10.31390/gradschool_theses.4043

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