Does ‘seeing’ a child influence teacher talk? Studying the linguistic complexity of teacher interactions in linguistically heterogeneous groups

Teacher–child interactions are central to quality early childhood education (ECE) and play a decisive role in children's language development. Yet the distribution and linguistic complexity of teacher talk in multilingual ECE classrooms remains underexplored. This study examined both the quantity and quality of teacher talk directed at individual children in linguistically heterogeneous groups in Flemish (i.e., Dutch speaking part of Belgium) ECE. Mobile eye tracking was used as a fine-grained, objective method to determine the recipient of each teacher utterance. General complexity analyses (RQ1) revealed that teacher talk is characterised by short utterances, simple sentence structures, and high-frequency vocabulary. Contrary to expectations, home language did not significantly predict the quantity or quality of teacher talk received. Instead, with respect to quantity (RQ2), children perceived by teachers as having greater speaking confidence, and boys, received significantly more teacher utterances. With respect to quality (RQ3), children with higher perceived language development received utterances containing longer words, indicating some degree of linguistic attunement. Strikingly, boys received utterances with longer and less frequent words compared to girls, suggesting that boys are exposed to richer vocabulary input. These results point to a complex, intersectional pattern of inequality in language stimulation.