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Biomedical subjects

Melissa M Burch

Publications and source records attributed to Melissa M Burch.

3 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2005

A longitudinal study of gendered vocabulary and communicative action in young children.

Development of children's vocabularies for gender-typed words and communicative actions was investigated longitudinally from 13 to 36 months and in a group of 9.5-month-olds. Vocabularies of gendered words were assessed using lists of adult-rated gender-typed words from the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDI; L. Fenson et al., 1994). At 24 to 36 months, girls' and boys' productive vocabularies contained more same-gender-typed words than other-gender-typed words. Receptive vocabulary gender-differential effects were apparent among boys at 18 months. At 13 and 18 months, gender-typed differences were apparent in communicative actions. The research reveals the utility of unobtrusive, nonexperimental measures for assessing gender-related knowledge and behavior in young children.

Child, Preschool↗
PubMed2004

Understanding the emotional past: relations between parent and child contributions in emotionally negative and nonnegative events.

The past event conversations of 33 mothers with their 3-year-old children (18 girls and 15 boys) were selected from a larger sample based on their discussion of negative events. Negative events included both those that were negative in topic and those that contained negative incidents but were otherwise positively themed. Within-subjects comparisons were made between the negative events and a neutral or positive event. There were few differences in how mothers and their children talked about negative and nonnegative events. Children did include more interpretations (internal state and causal references) in their negative event conversations. For both event types, mothers who talked more about the past events had children who reported more. When maternal talkativeness was controlled, involving children in the negative event conversations through deflecting the conversational turn predicted children's total contributions and number of interpretations. Repeating information and requests for information while constraining the topic was negatively related to the number of details children reported for nonnegative past events. Conversations about minor negative experiences demonstrate that mothers can influence children's involvement in discussions and understanding of the past.

Child Language↗