exposed to very quickly. Environmental factors, parental influences and many other outside
factors can possibly affect children not only in their early childhood, but also at later ages.
Parents especially are the most influential factor for acquiring language and social skills when
children are very young (Pancsofar & VernonFeagans, 2006) because of the large amount of
time children spend with them. Thus, it is important to examine the possible factors and
acknowledge how they would influence children.
Language development of children has been studied by many researchers. Barnett,
Gustafsson, Deng, MillsKoonce and Cox (2012) have studied the bidirectional …show more content…
The result of academic experience score did not support my hypothesis either.
Surprisingly, the students of the parents with a sensitive parenting style mostly belonged to the
groups with middle to low academic experience scores, suggesting that sensitive parenting may
PARENTING AND PARENTAL LANGUAGE INPUT 11
not improve college students’ academic experiences. The result of the present study opposes the
argument of the previous study that sensitive parenting impacts children’s social competence
skills and language skills that will further contribute to their later development (Barnett et al.,
2012). Also, students who were exposed to frequent language input by their parents in their
childhood belonged to the groups with middle to low academic experience scores, indicating that
there is an indistinct correlation between parental language input and students’ overall academic
experiences. The result of the present study also conflicts with the argument of Lee and Kim
(2012) that sensitive parenting improves children’s vocabulary skills, and having a good
vocabulary skill is related to future learning …show more content…
It may have resulted from a lack of sufficient number of participants. Using a
wider and larger sample population is strongly suggested for further improvements of the
research to gather more various results to correlate variables.
Another limitation is that parenting style and language input assessment were
selfassessed by participants which could have provided biased data because data is relied on
only their perceptions. Like how many researchers do for their studies, further improvements can
be made by surveying both participants and their parents, or through a longitudinal study that
observes participants’ childhood and measure their academic experiences in college to get more
unbiased and accurate data. In their studies, Barnett et al. (2012), Lee and Kim (2012), McNally
and Quigley (2014), Pancsofar and VernonFeagans (2006), and Pungello et al. (2009) measured
both children’s development, and parental behaviors and familial characteristics