Vocabulary is important for some, but not all reading skills

Although there is evidence for a close link between the development of oral vocabulary and reading comprehension, less clear is whether oral vocabulary skills relate to the development of word-level reading skills. This study investigated vocabulary and literacy in 81 children of 8-10 years. In regression analyses, vocabulary accounted for unique variance in exception word reading and reading comprehension, but not text reading accuracy, decoding and regular word reading. Consistent with these data, children with poor reading comprehension exhibited oral vocabulary weaknesses and read fewer exception words correctly. These findings demonstrate that oral vocabulary is associated with some, but not all reading skills. Results are discussed in terms of current models of reading development

Input effects on the acquisition of a novel phrasal construction in five year olds

The present experiments demonstrate that children as young as five years old (M = 5;2) generalize beyond their input on the basis of minimal exposure to a novel argument structure construction. The novel construction that was used involved a non-English phrasal pattern: VN1N2, paired with a novel abstract meaning: N2 approaches N1. At the same time, we find that children are keenly sensitive to the input: they show knowledge of the construction after a single day of exposure but this grows stronger after three days; also, children generalize more readily to new verbs when the input contains more than one verb

A Computational Model of Children's Semantic Memory

A computational model of children's semantic memory is built from the Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) of a multisource child corpus. Three tests of the model are described, simulating a vocabulary test, an association test and a recall task. For each one, results from experiments with children are presented and compared to the model data. Adequacy is correct, which means that this simulation of children's semantic memory can be used to simulate a variety of children's cognitive processes

Differential effects of internal and external factors on the development of vocabulary, tense morphology and morpho-syntax in successive bilingual children

The present study investigates the effects of child internal (age/time) and child external/environmental factors on the development of a wide range of language domains in successive bilingual (L2) Turkish-English children of homogeneously low SES. Forty-three L2 children were tested on standardized assessments examining the acquisition of vocabulary and morpho-syntax. The L2 children exhibited a differential acquisition of the various domains: they were better on the general comprehension of grammar and tense morphology and less accurate on the acquisition of vocabulary and (complex) morpho-syntax. Profile effects were confirmed by the differential effects of internal and external factors on the language domains. The development of vocabulary and complex syntax were affected by internal and external factors, whereas external factors had no contribution to the development of tense morphology. These results are discussed in light of previous studies on the impact of internal and external factors in child L2 acquisition

Acquiring and processing verb argument structure : distributional learning in a miniature language

Adult knowledge of a language involves correctly balancing lexically-based and more language-general patterns. For example, verb argument structures may sometimes readily generalize to new verbs, yet with particular verbs may resist generalization. From the perspective of acquisition, this creates significant learnability problems, with some researchers claiming a crucial role for verb semantics in the determination of when generalization may and may not occur. Similarly, there has been debate regarding how verb-specific and more generalized constraints interact in sentence processing and on the role of semantics in this process. The current work explores these issues using artificial language learning. In three experiments using languages without semantic cues to verb distribution, we demonstrate that learners can acquire both verb-specific and verb-general patterns, based on distributional information in the linguistic input regarding each of the verbs as well as across the language as a whole. As with natural languages, these factors are shown to affect production, judgments and real-time processing. We demonstrate that learners apply a rational procedure in determining their usage of these different input statistics and conclude by suggesting that a Bayesian perspective on statistical learning may be an appropriate framework for capturing our findings

Emergent Literacy and Early Reading Skills in Chinese-Mandarin: Evidence from Kindergarten and First-Grade Children

The development of emergent literacy, a precursor to formal reading, has been linked to subsequent conventional literacy skills in Chinese children. The factors important for acquiring Chinese reading skills, such as phonological and morphological awareness, have primarily been studied in primary school children rather than preschoolers. The complete picture of factors contributing to early reading skills in Mandarin-speaking Chinese preschool children remains unclear. Objectives: The aim of this study was to explore emergent literacy and early reading skills in preschool and early school-aged children and investigate the connections between them to address gaps in existing literature. Methodology: A cross-sectional design was used to collect data from a sample of 66 children, including 35 in their second year of kindergarten and 31 first-grade children. Assessments were conducted on phonological awareness (syllable deletion), morphological awareness (lexical compounding, homophone judgment, and homophone generation), orthographic awareness (character judgment), vocabulary, and rapid automatized naming (RAN) of numbers. Reading outcomes were measured by character naming and word recognition. Results: The MANOVA findings showed a significant grade group effect on all measures, except for RAN accuracy. Specifically,first-grade children outperformed second-year kindergarten children in syllable deletion, lexical compounding, homophone generation, homophone judgment, character judgment, and vocabulary. Additionally, first-grade children named numbers faster than kindergarten children in RAN. The correlation and regression analyses suggest that advanced emergent literacy skills in children improve word reading, but the associations between emergent literacy and reading vary by grade level. Syllable deletion and lexical compounding are particularly important for kindergarten children at the initial stage of learning to read, while character judgment plays a prominent role in the reading development of primary school children. Homophone judgment develops early and expands progressively as children gain reading experience during their primary school years. The significance of homophone generation is minimal at preschool and early school ages. RAN response time may provide more informative insights than RAN accuracy, and the link between RAN and reading skills appears to weaken once children begin schooling. Additionally, maternal education level was a significant co-variate associated with character naming in preschool children. Implications: Findings carry implications for Chinese educators and parents. Incorporating metalinguistic awareness into classroom instruction can support children’s early reading development. Moreover, parents are encouraged to foster a literacy-rich home environment through experiences like interactive reading and character recognition, especially for preschool children without formal literacy instructions. Further longitudinal research is recommended to predict early reading skills in a larger sample of Mandarin-speaking preschoolers and establish age-specific educational goals

From present to future : beyond becoming a nation of readers

Includes bibliographical references (p. 13-19)The work upon which this publication was based was supported in part by the Office of Educational Research and Improvement under Cooperative Agreement No. OEG 0087-C100

Language Profile and Performances on Math Assessments for Children with Mild Intellectual Disabilities

It has been assumed that mathematics testing indicates the development of mathematics concepts, but the linguistic demands of assessment have not been evaluated, especially for children with mild intellectual disabilities. 244 children (grades 2 – 5) were recruited from a larger reading intervention study. Using a multilevel longitudinal SEM model, baseline and post-intervention time points were examined for the contribution of item linguistic complexity, child language skills, and their potential interaction in predicting item level mathematics assessment performance. Item linguistic complexity was an important, stable, and negative predictor of mathematics achievement with children’s language skills significantly and positively predicting mathematics achievement. The interaction between item linguistic complexity and language skills was significant though not stable across time. Following intervention, children with higher language skills performed better on linguistically complex mathematics items. Mathematics achievement may be related to an interaction between children’s language skills and the linguistic demands of the tests themselves

Language ability and concurrent predictors of pragmatic communication in children with williams syndrome or 7q11.23 duplication syndrome.

The present project examined the language abilities of children with two reciprocal neurogenetic disorders: Williams syndrome (WS), which is caused by a hemideletion of 26 - 28 genes on chromosome 7q11.23, and 7q11.23 duplication syndrome (Dup7), which results from an extra copy of the same 26 - 28 genes. Appraising the language of children with WS and Dup7 helps in understanding the communication difficulties they encounter. There were three research goals. The first was to determine the overall level of language and communication ability as measured by the Children’s Communication Checklist-2 (CCC-2; Bishop, 2006) for each syndrome, relative to chronological age expectations. The second was to determine the pattern of relative strengths and weaknesses in language form and content, pragmatic communication, and autism-related behaviors for each syndrome. The final goal was to determine the concurrent predictors of pragmatic communication ability for each syndrome. The sample consisted of 247 children with WS (126 females, 121 males) aged 6.01 – 15.50 years (M = 10.57 years, SD = 2.96) and 56 children (28 females, 28 males) with Dup7 aged 6.08 – 15.29 years (M = 10.33 years, SD = 2.82). Findings indicated that although there was considerable variability in overall language and communication ability, more than 60% of the children in each group met the CCC-2 criterion for language impairment. For most children, performance on the Language Form and Content scales was similar to performance on the Pragmatic Communication scales, a pattern characteristic of children in the general population. Each syndrome demonstrated a pattern of relative strengths and weaknesses on the CCC-2 scales. For the Language Form and Content scales, children with WS evidenced a significant relative weakness on the Coherence scale in comparison to their performance on the Speech, Syntax, and Semantics scales. In contrast, children with Dup7 evidenced a significant relative weakness on the Speech scale. Furthermore, children with Dup7 earned a significantly lower scaled score than children with WS on the Speech scale. For the Pragmatic Communication scales, children with WS demonstrated relative weaknesses on the Initiation and Use of Context scales in comparison to the Scripted Language and Nonverbal Communication scales. Children with Dup7 demonstrated a partially overlapping pattern, with relative weaknesses on the Initiation and Nonverbal Communication scales. On the Autism-related scales, children with WS demonstrated a relative strength on the Social Relations scale compared to the Interests scale. Children with Dup7 demonstrated the opposite pattern. For both syndromes, Pragmatic Communication ability was predicted by concurrent Language Form and Content ability, behavior and emotion regulation ability, and chronological age. For the WS group, sex also was a significant predictor. The effects of gene dosage on language and communication ability and implications of the findings for interventions designed to improve pragmatic communication abilities are discussed

Speech and language difficulties in children with and without a family history of dyslexia

Comorbidity between SLI and dyslexia is well documented. Researchers have variously argued that dyslexia is a separate disorder from SLI, or that children with dyslexia show a subset of the difficulties shown in SLI. This study examines these hypotheses by assessing whether family history of dyslexia and speech and language difficulties are separable risk factors for literacy difficulties. Forty-six children with a family risk of dyslexia (FRD) and 36 children receiving speech therapy (SLT) were compared to 128 typically developing children. A substantial number (41.3%) of the children with FRD had received SLT. The nature of their difficulties did not differ in severity or form from those shown by the other children in SLT. However, both SLT and FRD were independent risk factors in predicting reading difficulties both concurrently and 6 months later. It is argued that the results are best explained in terms of Pennington's (2006) multiple deficits model