Attention in Children with Hearing Loss during Telepractice and In-person Speech Language Therapy

How does the use of telepractice during speech-language therapy affect the attention of children with hearing loss who received cochlear implants (CI) in comparison to in-person intervention? The study examined the production and comprehension of clinician’s speech in children with CIs (n = 5, mean age = 61.6 months, range = 34 months) during one 30 minute in-person session and one sequential tele-session, order counterbalanced. Child verbal, tactile, and visual actions were coded as correct, incorrect, off-task, and silence responses to the clinician’s and maternal speech. In production, correct responses were defined as the correct reproduction of the clinician’s/maternal target utterances; incorrect child response was defined as any other utterance following the clinician’s/maternal target utterances within 3 seconds; off-task child response was defined as being distracted; silence response was defined as child being silent. In comprehension, the same codes were used but including a child’s gestures and looking at the target object. Child’s production and comprehension responses (correct, incorrect, off-task, and silence) in tele- vs. in-person sessions were analyzed using the Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test. During clinician-child interaction, there were more correct responses in in-person than tele-sessions in comprehension. During mother-child interaction, there were more correct responses in tele- than in-person sessions in both production and comprehension. These results suggest that the child’s attention in comprehension and production, as demonstrated by the occurrence of correct responses, is dependent on the type of therapy.https://ir.library.louisville.edu/uars/1037/thumbnail.jp

Parent Encouragement & Infant\u27s Visual Attention

Attention to objects appears to be linked to the development of early motor skills and experience with objects. Looking is an important aspect of object exploration, especially sustained looking to objects (Rochat, 1989)

The Role of Parents’ Negative Emotional Symptoms, Time Homebound, and Parent-Infant Interactions during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Parent-child interaction plays a vital role in child development. Previous research has shown that parents’ negative emotional symptoms are related to the quality of parent-child interactions. Parents with depression have been found to be less engaged and spend less time playing with their babies at 3 months of age compared to parents without depression. While depression has been researched extensively, there is a scarcity in the literature on other negative emotions, such as anxiety and general stress and their relation to parent-child interaction. The COVID-19 pandemic has led to significant changes in the daily lives of caregivers and their infants (e.g., changes in childcare, employment, time spent at home, finances, etc.). The purpose of this study is to investigate whether parents’ emotional well-being is related to the amount of time parents interact with their infants and young children during the COVID-19 pandemic. I anticipate that greater number of negative symptoms reported by parents will be associated with less time spent engaging with their infants. I also predict that as the length of time parents have been homebound (e.g., 3 months) increases, the frequency of parent-child interaction will decrease

Parental Well-being, Technoference, and Parent-Child Interactions During the 2nd Year of the COVID-19 Pandemic

- Parent-child interactions during the first five years of life have been associated with the child’s social and cognitive development (Edwards, Sheridan, & Knoche, 2008). - The amount and quality of parent-child interactions may be associated with a parent’s mental health (Milkie et al., 2020). - Mothers with depression tend to show increased withdrawal and intrusion from their infants during interactions than non-depressed mothers (Field, 1995). - Increased distractions from technology during parentchild interactions may be associated with differences in infants’ social and cognitive development (Reed, Hirsch- Pasek, and Golinkoff, 2017). - Technoference refers to the, sometimes invasive and persuasive, interference of technology that may influence the way one interacts with others (McDaniel & Coyne, 2016). - Maternal depression has been associated with increased technoference in some studies, but it has not influenced technoference scores in others (Newsham, Drouin, & McDaniel, 2020), (McDaniel & Radesky, 2020). - Greater technology usage has been associated with parental anxiety (McDaniel & Radesky, 2020). - Increased parental stress has been associated with greater technoference (McDaniel & Radesky, 2020)

The Role of Socioeconomic Status on Infant\u27s Expression

Most language inequality for infants begins very early in their development. For most, this disparity develops prior to 36 months (Farkus & Baron, 2000). • Significant disparities in vocabulary size between socioeconomic status (SES) were evident by 18 months. By 24 months, there was a 6 month age gap (Fernald et al, 2011). • 65% of low SES preschoolers in head start programs had clinically significant language delays (Ramey and Ramey, 2004) • Maternal education is a known indicator of SES and is correlated with language input for infants (Dollaghan et al. 1999). • At 18 months, most infants experience “word spurts” and an increase in expressive vocabulary (Reznick & Goldfield, 1992). Research Question: Are SES (maternal education) and expressive vocabulary related in Kentucky families during the COVID pandemic

Quantifying sources of variability in infancy research using the infant-directed-speech preference

Psychological scientists have become increasingly concerned with issues related to methodology and replicability, and infancy researchers in particular face specific challenges related to replicability: For example, high-powered studies are difficult to conduct, testing conditions vary across labs, and different labs have access to different infant populations. Addressing these concerns, we report on a large-scale, multisite study aimed at (a) assessing the overall replicability of a single theoretically important phenomenon and (b) examining methodological, cultural, and developmental moderators. We focus on infants’ preference for infant-directed speech (IDS) over adult-directed speech (ADS). Stimuli of mothers speaking to their infants and to an adult in North American English were created using seminaturalistic laboratory-based audio recordings. Infants’ relative preference for IDS and ADS was assessed across 67 laboratories in North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia using the three common methods for measuring infants’ discrimination (head-turn preference, central fixation, and eye tracking). The overall meta-analytic effect size (Cohen’s d) was 0.35, 95% confidence interval = [0.29, 0.42], which was reliably above zero but smaller than the meta-analytic mean computed from previous literature (0.67). The IDS preference was significantly stronger in older children, in those children for whom the stimuli matched their native language and dialect, and in data from labs using the head-turn preference procedure. Together, these findings replicate the IDS preference but suggest that its magnitude is modulated by development, native-language experience, and testing procedure. (This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 798658.

Testing the relationship between preferences for infant-directed speech and vocabulary development: A multi-lab study.

From early on, infants show a preference for infant-directed speech (IDS) over adult-directed speech (ADS), and exposure to IDS has been correlated with language outcome measures such as vocabulary. The present multi-laboratory study explores this issue by investigating whether there is a link between early preference for IDS and later vocabulary size. Infants' preference for IDS was tested as part of the ManyBabies 1 project, and follow-up CDI data were collected from a subsample of this dataset at 18 and 24 months. A total of 341 (18 months) and 327 (24 months) infants were tested across 21 laboratories. In neither preregistered analyses with North American and UK English, nor exploratory analyses with a larger sample did we find evidence for a relation between IDS preference and later vocabulary. We discuss implications of this finding in light of recent work suggesting that IDS preference measured in the laboratory has low test-retest reliability

COVID-19 first lockdown as a window into language acquisition : associations between caregiver-child activities and vocabulary gains

The COVID-19 pandemic, and the resulting closure of daycare centers worldwide, led to unprecedented changes in children’s learning environments. This period of increased time at home with caregivers, with limited access to external sources (e.g., daycares) provides a unique opportunity to examine the associations between the caregiver-child activities and children’s language development. The vocabularies of 1742 children aged8-36 months across 13 countries and 12 languages were evaluated at the beginning and end of the first lockdown period in their respective countries(from March to September 2020). Children who had less passive screen exposure and whose caregivers read more to them showed larger gains in vocabulary development during lockdown, after controlling for SES and other caregiver-child activities. Children also gained more words than expected (based on normative data) during lockdown; either caregivers were more aware of their child’s development or vocabulary development benefited from intense caregiver-child interaction during lockdown

COVID-19 first lockdown as a window into language acquisition: Associations between caregiver-child activities and vocabulary gains

The COVID-19 pandemic, and the resulting closure of daycare centers worldwide, led to unprecedented changes in children’s learning environments. This period of increased time at home with caregivers, with limited access to external sources (e.g., daycares) provides a unique opportunity to examine the associations between the caregiver-child activities and children’s language development. The vocabularies of 1742 children aged 8-36 months across 13 countries and 12 languages were evaluated at the beginning and end of the first lockdown period in their respective countries (from March to September 2020). Children who had less passive screen exposure and whose caregivers read more to them showed larger gains in vocabulary development during lockdown, after controlling for SES and other caregiver-child activities. Children also gained more words than expected (based on normative data) during lockdown; either caregivers were more aware of their child’s development or vocabulary development benefited from intense caregiver-child interaction during lockdown

Development of adaptive constraints in infants' perception of form-function correlations

textThe course of infants’ cognitive development does not always follow a nonmonotonic, steadily increasing trajectory whereby improvement is defined by infants’ expanding repertoire of abilities. In some cases, for example, their range of abilities narrows with development and is seen as an adaptive process. The purpose of the present study was to gain a better understanding of infants’ developing “adaptive constraints” on their processing of correlations between the appearance and function of features on an object. Fourteen-, 16- and 18-month-old infants were tested in a habituation experiment to investigate the developmental differences in infants’ sensitivity to three correlations: (1) within-feature form-function correlation (the appearance of a particular feature on an object and its function), (2) betweenfeature form-function correlation (the appearance of a feature and the function of a different feature on the same object), and (3) form-form correlation (the appearance of the two features on the same object). Using a between-subjects design, previous research has shown that 14-month-olds are sensitive to both within- and betweenfeature correlations whereas 18-month-olds are constrained and sensitive only to the within-feature form-function correlation (Madole & Cohen, 1995). The present study included three important changes to this previous research: (1) infants were tested on a form-form correlation in addition to the two form-function correlations, (2) infants were tested using a within-subjects design rather than between-subjects, and (3) in addition to testing 14- and 18-month-olds, 16-month-olds were also studied. It was found that 18-month-olds showed sensitivity only to the withinfeature form-function correlation; whereas the 14- and 16-month-olds showed sensitivity to none of the correlations. These results are interpreted as evidence that because they are without constraints, the younger two groups of infants struggled with attending to all the information presented at once; whereas that the oldest group of infants benefited from their adaptive constraint to process only the within-feature form-function correlation. These findings have implications for our understanding of the development of constraints on infants’ processing of information as well as the methods used to study infants’ sensitivity to correlations.Psycholog