Exploring the influence of the home literacy environment on early literacy and vocabulary skills in Korean–English bilingual children

Studies have emphasized the significance of maintaining a heritage language for various reasons such as the establishment of linguistic and cultural identity, as well as socio-emotional development. Despite the crucial role that literacy development in a heritage language plays in language preservation, there is a scant research that explores the impact of home literacy environment and literacy development in children with a heritage language. This study aimed to examine the home literacy environment and literacy-related skills in 4-to 5-year-old Korean–English bilingual children living in an English-speaking country, Australia, whose heritage language is Korean, and to investigate the relationships among the home literacy environment factors and the child-internal literacy-related skills. The study employed parental questionnaires and video analyses of parent–child shared book reading sessions to assess the Korean and English home literacy environment. Children’s early literacy skills in Korean and English, along with their Korean, English, and conceptual vocabulary skills, were measured as literacy-related skills. The findings indicated that parents utilized an indirect approach for Korean literacy practices, in contrast to a more direct and explicit method for English literacy practices. However, active and direct literacy practices were found to be essential for Korean early literacy development, while indirect methods are sufficient for English early literacy skills. Moreover, the availability of abundant Korean literacy resources at home had a positive impact on the development of Korean and English, as well as conceptual vocabulary skills. In conclusion, this study underscores the importance of providing a robust literacy environment in a heritage language in bilingual families to promote language proficiency in both the heritage language and the dominant social language, while also supporting the development of conceptual language skills

Towards Interpersonal Assistants: Next-Generation Conversational Agents Opportunities With Always-on Microstructural Conversation Intervention Assistants

We propose novel interpersonal assistants, a next-generation conversational agent which is always-on, unobtrusively serving natural human-to-human conversations. We deepen the motivation and design insights with real practices in language delays and parent-child conflicts. We then present a common platform initiative to effectively support rapid development of interpersonal assistant applications, with a highlight on the key functional element of turn isolations and technical insights on microstructural dynamics.N

Towards Interpersonal Assistants: Next-Generation Conversational Agents Opportunities With Always-on Microstructural Conversation Intervention Assistants

We propose novel interpersonal assistants, a next-generation conversational agent which is always-on, unobtrusively serving natural human-to-human conversations. We deepen the motivation and design insights with real practices in language delays and parent–child conflicts. We then present a common platform initiative to effectively support rapid development of interpersonal assistant applications, with a highlight on the key functional element of turn isolations and technical insights on microstructural dynamics.11Nsciescopu

TalkBetter: family-driven mobile intervention care for children with language delay

Language delay is a developmental problem of children who do not acquire language as expected for their chronological ages. Without timely intervention, language delay can act as a lifelong risk factor. Speech-language pathologists highlight that effective parent participation in everyday parent-child conversation is important to treat children's language delay. For effective roles, however, parents need to alter their own lifelong-established conversation habits, requiring extensive period of conscious effort and staying alert. In this paper, we present new opportunities for mobile and social computing to reinforce everyday parent-child conversation with therapeutic implications for children with language delays. Specifically, we propose TalkBetter, a mobile in-situ intervention service to help parents in daily parent-child conversation through real-time meta-linguistic analysis of ongoing conversations. Through extensive field studies with speech-language pathologists and parents, we report the multilateral motivations and implications of TalkBetter. We present our development of TalkBetter prototype and report its performance evaluation.1