Couple relationship quality and the infant home language environment: Gender-specific findings.

Couple relationship quality is known to drop significantly across the transition to parenthood (Ahlborg & Strandmark, 2001; Doss, Rhoades, Stanley, & Markman, 2009), yet individual differences in the amount of parent-to-infant talk have rarely been studied in relation to variation in couple relationship quality. Addressing this gap, the current study of 93 first-time parents with 4-month-old infants included multimeasure reports of couple relationship quality from both mothers and fathers and examined associations between couple relationship quality and the home language environment, assessed via the Language Environment Analysis (LENA), when infants were approximately 7 months old. LENA consists of a wearable talk pedometer that records a full day of naturalistic parent-infant talk and is coupled to software that provides automated analysis.