Brenda Salley
University of Kansas, KS·Psychology
How much and how well parents talk and play with babies and toddlers shapes the child's language. Early language in turn affects reading, school success, health, and later economic outcomes.
- Fields
Psychology
Public Health & Epidemiology
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
early language development
home language environment
caregiver-child interaction
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Apr 2029
What they work on
- Test whether Talk With Me Baby, language coaching delivered during well-child visits, improves the home language environment and child language by age 2, using a 16-clinic randomized trial with 400 families, LENA recordings, home videos, and standardized tests.
- Identify family characteristics that change the effectiveness of Talk With Me Baby, and test whether amount of home language and parents' knowledge explain gains in child language.
- Assess feasibility, acceptability, and appropriateness of Talk With Me Baby for pediatric care teams, using provider surveys and semi-structured interviews guided by the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research.
- Develop a Spanish version of the Caregiver Report of Early Language Interactions (CRELI) and refine the English version, through focus groups and cognitive interviews with caregivers and providers.
- Evaluate the factor structure and psychometric properties of both CRELI versions, and examine how demographic factors affect caregivers' scores.
More about the research
Strategies that improve this talk are well documented, but they have not closed population-wide gaps, and good ways to measure the home language environment lag behind, especially for Spanish-speaking families. The two projects tackle both problems. One builds a cheap, culturally responsive way to measure caregiver–child language interactions. The other tests whether pediatric checkups can deliver language coaching to nearly every family.
Why it matters
Infants and toddlers in under-resourced and Spanish-English bilingual families could benefit if pediatric clinics routinely coach parents on language-building talk. Gains in early language may lead to better academic, health, and economic outcomes and could narrow disparities. A free, validated English and Spanish survey would give clinicians and researchers an inexpensive way to judge whether such programs work and to track families' progress.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Jaime Peterson
Oregon Health & Science University, OR·Medicine & Clinical Research
Test whether Kinder Coaching, a parent coaching program delivered by community health workers, improves preschoolers' school readiness on the Brigance III screen compared with a provider-reviewed checklist, in a randomized trial of 240 Medicaid families in Oregon.
Matthew Haemer
University of Colorado Denver/Anschutz Medical Campus, CO·Public Health & Epidemiology
Compare BMI reduction between the family-inclusive Healthy Living Program and a recommended primary care counseling control in low-income Hispanic children with obesity across three age groups, 2-6, 7-12 and 13-16 years, in a randomized controlled trial.
Michelle Schlandant
University of Miami, FL·Education Research
Explore how Spanish- and Haitian Creole-speaking caregivers and early care and education teachers recognize typical versus delayed language development in dual language learners, and what shapes their decisions to seek help, through native-language interviews.
The school
University of Kansas: 26 labs on PI Pages, $546M a year on research, 351 research doctorates a year.
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