ABSTRACT
Background
Nurturing environments have a critical influence on children’s language development. It is unclear to what extent nurturing environments in institutions influence children’s language development.
Methods
The present study investigated the early lexical development in Japanese children raised in institutional care (IC) (N = 86; 10–33 months; 37 boys) and compared their lexical skills to a large sample of age peers being raised in biological family care (BFC) (N = 1897; 937 boys) using vocabulary checklists.
Results
Our results present three main findings: (1) Japanese IC children did not exhibit a delay in productive vocabulary compared with BFC children, although their comprehensive vocabulary was delayed; (2) IC children who experienced maltreatment showed poorer vocabulary scores than non-maltreated IC children; (3) both the duration at the institution and the number of books read to them significantly predicted children’s vocabulary scores.
Conclusion
Our study suggests that the Japanese institutions included in the present study did not show a negative impact, at least on productive vocabulary, and may competently foster children’s language development. We discussed the relationship between institutional environments and children’s language development.