This study examined change in early language comprehension from 15 to 54 months for fifth-grade typical readers (n = 35), poor decoders (n = 11), or poor comprehenders (n = 16) from a nationally ...representative study of early child-care experiences. Changing measures of language comprehension were captured across early childhood for the 62 children. Multiple-group quasi-simplex and latent growth models were used on rank-transformed outcomes to examine children's relative rank change. Results showed that future poor comprehenders significantly declined in language comprehension over time relative to others who gradually improved. Efforts to improve language skills as a means to improve reading comprehension hinge upon the perspective that language weaknesses are a causal contributor to reading difficulties.
Several researchers have shown that children’s ability to make inferences is related to their reading comprehension. The majority of research on this topic has been conducted on older children. ...However, given the recent focus on the importance of narrative comprehension in prereaders, the current study examined the relationship between inference making and story comprehension in 4- to 5-year-olds. We examined children’s online inferences while narrating a wordless book as well as children’s story comprehension of a different storybook. We found that children’s total number of inferences was significantly related to their story comprehension. Three types of inferences were significantly related to story comprehension—characters goals, actions that achieved those goals, and character states. In a hierarchical regression controlling for children’s age and expressive vocabulary, a composite of these three inference types significantly predicted children’s story comprehension.
The linguistic environment of the classroom is influential to young children's language development. To date, however, literature on the linguistic environment of child-care centers has largely ...examined teacher practices or children's aggregate environment, overlooking the child's first-person experiences and differentiated experiences within the classroom. In this study we used a new method in the educational setting that captures the learner's perspective: head-mounted cameras. Thirteen children in one preschool classroom wore a head-mounted camera to capture their first-person experiences in one morning session, including interactions with others and the features of the child-directed speech (CDS) addressed to them. Results revealed that, from children's personal view, the linguistic environment of the classroom is more dynamic from what previous studies have reported. Children interacted for longer with their teachers than their peers and heard more CDS from them, but for some children peers served as an additional source of language. Further, our analysis highlighted within-classroom variability in language experiences in terms of the properties of the CDS addressed to target children and how they were exposed to this input over time. Results are discussed with respect to peer influence on children's learning, heterogeneity in learning opportunities in classrooms, and the variability of the linguistic environment over time.
With an increasing number of young children participating in preschool education, this study determined whether peer effects are present in this earliest sector of schooling. Specifically, this work ...examined whether peer effects were influential to preschoolers' growth in language skills over an academic year and whether peer effects manifest differently based on children's status in reference to their peers. Peer effects were assessed for 338 children in 49 classrooms. A significant interaction between the language skills of children's classmates and children's fall language skills indicated that peer effects were strongest for children with low language skills who were in classrooms that served children with relatively low skill levels, on average. Findings further showed that reference status, or children's relative standing to their peers, has the greater consequence for children with very low language skills in relation to their peers.
Objectives
The study examined the relations between parent–child interaction in the first year of life to toddlers’ language skills at age 2 years for a sample of children reared in poverty; of ...specific interest was testing the Family Stress Model, which proposes that the conditions of poverty influence children’s language skills through caregiver well-being (e.g., distress, depression) and interaction dysregulation.
Methods
Participants were from the Kids in Columbus Study, a birth-cohort study of children born to urban families experiencing material hardship. Caregiver questionnaires were collected when the child was 4–7 months to document poverty conditions (maternal hardship, institutional resources), caregiver well-being (depression, distress), and dysregulation in parent–child interactions. The Bayley-III assessed receptive and expressive language skills when the children were 2 years.
Results
On average, receptive language skills were nearly
1 SD
below the normative mean. Path models showed a significant effect of caregiver-child dysregulated interactions on toddlers’ language skills, and an indirect effect of maternal distress on parent–child interactions and, in turn, toddlers’ language skills.
Conclusions for Practice
This study confirmed the theoretical Family Stress Model as a viable representation of the effects of poverty on the language skills of toddlers reared in homes experiencing socioeconomic disadvantage.
The present study explored whether a tool for automatic detection and recognition of interactions and child-directed speech (CDS) in preschool classrooms could be developed, validated, and applied to ...non-coded video recordings representing children's classroom experiences. Using first-person video recordings collected by 13 preschool children during a morning in their classrooms, we extracted high-level audiovisual features from recordings using automatic speech recognition and computer vision services from a cloud computing provider. Using manual coding for interactions and transcriptions of CDS as reference, we trained and tested supervised classifiers and linear mappings to measure five variables of interest. We show that the supervised classifiers trained with speech activity, proximity, and high-level facial features achieve adequate accuracy in detecting interactions. Furthermore, in combination with an automatic speech recognition service, the supervised classifier achieved error rates for CDS measures that are in line with other open-source automatic decoding tools in early childhood settings. Finally, we demonstrate our tool's applicability by using it to automatically code and transcribe children's interactions and CDS exposure vertically within a classroom day (morning to afternoon) and horizontally over time (fall to winter). Developing and scaling tools for automatized capture of children's interactions with others in the preschool classroom, as well as exposure to CDS, may revolutionize scientific efforts to identify precise mechanisms that foster young children's language development.
Purpose: This study examines the accuracy of Interaction Detection in Early Childhood Settings (IDEAS), a program that automatically transcribes audio files and estimates linguistic units relevant to ...speech-language therapy, including part-of-speech units that represent features of language complexity, such as adjectives and coordinating conjunctions. Method: Forty-five video-recorded speech-language therapy sessions involving 27 speech-language pathologists (SLPs) and 56 children were used. The F measure determines the accuracy of IDEAS diarization (i.e., speech segmentation and speaker classification). Two additional evaluation metrics, namely, median absolute relative error and correlation, indicate the accuracy of IDEAS for the estimation of linguistic units as compared with two conditions, namely, Oracle (manual diarization) and Voice Type Classifier (existing diarizer with acceptable accuracy). Results: The high F measure for SLP talk data suggests high accuracy of IDEAS diarization for SLP talk but less so for child talk. These differences are reflected in the accuracy of IDEAS linguistic unit estimates. IDEAS median absolute relative error and correlation values for nine of the 10 SLP linguistic unit estimates meet the accuracy criteria, but none of the child linguistic unit estimates meet these criteria. The type of linguistic units also affects IDEAS accuracy. Conclusions: IDEAS was tailored to educational settings to automatically convert audio recordings into text and to provide linguistic unit estimates in speech-language therapy sessions and classroom settings. Although not perfect, IDEAS is reliable in automatically capturing and returning linguistic units, especially in SLP talk, that are relevant in research and practice. The tool offers a way to automatically measure SLP talk in clinical settings, which will support research seeking to understand how SLP talk influences children's language growth.
The COVID-19 pandemic and associated government-mandated shutdowns disrupted schooling, socialization, and family life for school-aged children during spring 2020. These disruptions may have ...contributed to increased child behavior problems. Thus, we examined behavior problems in 247 children aged 7 to 9 years during Ohio's shutdown period. We investigated whether differences in parent-reported child behavior problems were associated with concurrent parent distress during spring 2020 and/or children's social-emotional skills measured via teacher-reports from the previous year (spring 2019). Parent distress significantly predicted behavior problems, such that more distressed parents also reported more child behavior problems. Child pre-pandemic peer social skills also significantly predicted behavior problems, such that more skilled children exhibited fewer behavior problems. There were no interaction effects between parent distress and children's social-emotional skills on child behavior problems. Further research is needed to understand how children's social-emotional skills impact their ability to cope during times of epidemiological crisis.
•The COVID-19 pandemic led to school closures and stay-at-home orders in spring 2020.•Families with young school-aged children faced drastic changes to daily routines.•Pandemic-related disruptions may have led to changes in child behavior problems.•Acting out behaviors occurred more than anxious withdrawal or fearfulness behaviors.•Child behavior problems varied by parent distress and children's peer social skills.
Objectives
Young children living in low-income households experience disparities in language development compared to their advantaged peers, with large differences in language skill by kindergarten ...entry. In this study, we sought to determine whether there were disparities in early language trajectories within a low-income sample of children from 9 to 36 months as a function of maternal education. We hypothesized that children with more highly educated mothers would show accelerated language trajectories compared to children with less educated mothers.
Methods
Using observational data collected from a longitudinal birth-cohort sample of 192 low-income mother–infant dyads in Ohio from 2014 to 2018, children’s language skills were assessed at three time-points (ages 9–13 months, 20–24 months, and 32–36 months). Multi-level growth curve models were used to examine early language trajectories through three years of age as a function of maternal education.
Results
Multilevel growth curve models showed distinct language trajectories: young low-income children have significantly better language skills at 15 months if their mother had a college education compared to not, and this gap remained significant to almost 3 years of age.
Conclusions for Practice
Among young low-income children, disparities emerge in early language trajectories that differentiate children with less- versus more-educated mothers. Given that these disparities are apparent near the child’s first birthday, it is necessary that pediatric care providers monitor children’s early language trajectories and guide families to resources when lags are apparent.
Purpose: This study presents an application of the theoretical domains framework (TDF; Michie et al., 2005), an integrative framework drawing on behavior-change theories, to speech-language ...pathology. Methods: A multistep procedure was used to identify barriers affecting caregivers' implementation of shared-reading interventions with their children with language impairment (LI). The authors examined caregiver-level data corresponding to implementation issues from two randomized controlled trials and mapped these to domains in the TDF as well as empirically validated behavior-change techniques. Results: Four barriers to implementation were identified as potentially affecting caregivers' implementation: time pressures, reading difficulties, discomfort with reading, and lack of awareness of benefits. These were mapped to 3 TDF domains: intentions, beliefs about capabilities, and skills. In turn, 4 behavior-change techniques were identified as potential vehicles for affecting these domains: reward, feedback, model, and encourage. An ongoing study is described that is determining the effects of these techniques for improving caregivers' implementation of a shared-reading intervention. Conclusions: A description of the steps to identifying barriers to implementation, in conjunction with an ongoing experiment that will explicitly determine whether behavior-change techniques affect these barriers, provides a model for how implementation science can be used to identify and overcome implementation barriers in the treatment of communication disorders.
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